There’s an old anecdote1 about how circus trainers used to keep elephants from escaping, and the first time I heard it, I felt like it cracked my entire worldview wide open. I’ve been hesitant to share it with you because it reeks of self-help hokiness, but it’s something I think about constantly in my own life. It’s helped me make decisions, push through doubt, and recognize when I’m staying stuck out of habit rather than necessity. So I figured, who cares if it’s hokey if it’s genuinely useful.

When an elephant is young and small, they’d tie it to a stake with a heavy rope. The baby elephant would pull and strain against the rope, testing its strength over and over, but the rope held. Eventually, the elephant stopped trying. Years later, when the elephant was fully grown and strong enough to uproot trees, the trainers could tie it with a thin piece of twine and the elephant wouldn’t even attempt to break free. The rope in its mind was still unbreakable, even though the rope in reality was nothing.

I think about this story more than I probably should. Not just because it’s sad—though it is—but because I see it everywhere. In myself. In the people around me. In the careful, constrained way most of us move through the world, never testing whether the ropes that held us when we were small still hold us now that we’re not.

There’s this mantra in tech circles, usually delivered with an annoying amount of confidence by someone who just raised their Series A. “You can just do things.” It sounds like typical Silicon Valley bullshit at first, the kind of thing that makes you want to roll your eyes and mutter something about privilege and access and how easy it is to “just do things” when you have money and connections. But strip away the delivery and there’s something uncomfortable hiding underneath. Most of us don’t even try to do the things we could actually just do. We assume the rope still holds without ever pulling on it to check.

The ropes we don’t test.

Most of your limitations aren't real and you…

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