The story goes that in 1873 a German zoologist, Karl Möbius, ran an experiment with a pike, a freshwater predator fish.
He put it in a tank split down the middle by a clear glass panel. On the other side, small fish.
The pike went for them. It hit the glass. It went for them again, over and over, always against the same wall it couldn't see. Until it gave up.
Then they took the glass out. The small fish swam right past its mouth and it didn't move. There are reports of pike that starved to death with food right there.
In the sixties, two researchers, Martin Seligman and Steven Maier, put dogs in a situation where they couldn't escape small electric shocks. Whatever they did, nothing changed. After a while they stopped trying.
Then they put them in a box where all they had to do was jump over a low barrier to escape. Most of them didn't even try. They lay down and waited.
They called it learned helplessness. And when they studied the same thing in people, they found the same pattern.
We try once, twice, three times. It goes wrong. And our head files it away as a truth for life. From then on we live inside that limit without ever checking whether it is still there.
"I'm not good at public speaking."
"I'm too old to change my life."
"Diets never work for me."
"Relationships never work out for me."
Many of these sentences were born from one time it went wrong, ten, fifteen, twenty years ago. Since then you've changed, you've learned, you've picked up tools you didn't have. But you keep respecting the glass.
And we're even worse than the pike. We come up with good arguments to defend it. To the point where we convince ourselves it's just the way we are.
The first sign is in the way you talk about yourself. Sentences that start with "I'm not", "I never" or "it doesn't work for me" deserve a second look.
Then, a simple question: when was the last time you tried? If the answer is many years ago, you're deciding with old information.
The pike had no way of knowing the glass was gone. You do. Pick one of those sentences and test again what you thought was impossible, with who you are today. Start small and see what happens.
And keep the question: in which part of your life are you still hitting a glass that is no longer there?
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