Are You Fixating On Failure?

Before I learned how to swim, I used to have this fixation with the bottom of the pool–more specifically, it was a fixation with wanting to know exactly how far away the bottom of the pool was from the surface.

If there were no numbers explicitly stating how deep the water was, I wasn’t getting anywhere near it.

I needed to see in big bold black font exactly how far I had to sink so I could give myself the psychological comfort of correlating that number with an estimation of how easy or difficult it would be for someone to come and save me.

This pretty much relegated me to the shallow end in pools, and pretty much automatically counted me out of anything related to the ocean.

I limited myself based on what I could see and what I could wrap my head around.

And in fixating on the bottom, I was also fixating on failure.

I was more focused on what could go wrong (drowning) rather than making things go right (swimming).

I spent more energy calculating and trying to wrap my head around failure than ensuring my success.

But the irony is that knowing how deep the water is doesn’t actually matter.

The depth of the water has nothing to do with swimming because swimming happens on the surface, not on the bottom.

If I’m swimming correctly, I’m on the surface of the water, so that’s all I need to worry about.

Whether the water beneath me is 11 feet 7 inches deep or 11 feet 9 inches deep or 111 feet deep, or 111 miles deep does not matter at all when my business is just on the surface.

When you drive, you simply drive the car and focus on the road that you’re on directly ahead of you.

You don’t drive while staring into the abyss at the bottom of the cliff on the other side of the guard rail.

And you don’t choose to get on the road or not get on the road based on how far down you can plummet if you drive off the road.

You don’t require signs on the side of the road that say exactly how far down the drop is on the other side of the guard rail as a prerequisite for you to feel comfortable getting on the road in the first place.

When you drive, you know and trust that you have the skill required to drive the car, and you focus on executing that skill on the path you are on.

So why, with swimming, would it be any different?

The same way that driving happens on the road and not off the cliff on the other side of the rail, swimming happens on the surface and not on the bottom.

No matter how far away the bottom of the water is below you, swimming still happens on the surface.

In obsessing over the depth of the water, I didn’t just create more reasons for me to be afraid, I also created more reasons for me to feel inept.

This fixation with needing to know how deep water was also meant that I created circumstances in my mind that were more or less comfortable for me based on the meaning I assigned to them–meaning that I assigned based on arbitrary criteria.

Thus was born the differentiation between the “shallow end” and the “deep end.”

In my mind, in creating a distinction between the two, I unknowingly created a psychological comfort zone for myself with the shallow end and a psychological hurdle for myself with the deep end.

The differentiations we have in our heads between what’s “easier” or “harder” are often arbitrary or irrelevant.

Whether you’re in the shallow end or the deep end, you’re ultimately doing the same thing–swimming on the surface.

So you might as well go for it.

Push yourself to break patterns of perception and challenge your stories.

Have you created a shallow end and a deep end in your life?

Does that matter when either way, all you have to do is swim?

It doesn’t matter what is beneath you or behind you.

All that matters is where you are now and where you are headed.

Forget about the erroneous details around what can go wrong and exactly how wrong you think it can go, and instead focus on the most important parts of execution.

Don’t limit where you go and what you pursue based on how far you think you have to fall.

Don’t only choose to go after things that you think have a shorter drop to the bottom.

If you want something, go after it.

Go ahead, get out there in the “deep end” and just focus on swimming on the surface.