I analyzed how someone like Bruce Wayne, like Batman, goes about breaking through his limits day after day to achieve his best self. One of the most influential things in my childhood was watching guys like Bruce Lee or characters like Batman go about training, learning to achieve a new level of skill or understanding of things, 'cause whatever inadequacies I had, I saw early on that they could not only be overcome but crushed into becoming just a memorable part of my past. Bruce Wayne is certainly a man who found it necessary to physically work himself to a point where he had nothing left on the table to give, but also to educate himself, to learn everything he could get his hands on, showing a man who rarely, if ever, gives in to his doubts and fears despite the fact that he still has them, just like everyone else. And it's here that Bruce learned a few incredibly key lessons to how to both physically and mentally break through whatever limitations he had. Limits can be defined as a point or level which something does not extend or pass a known boundary for

the capabilities of something or someone. And no matter how hard we try in the current moment, we often find that we just can't seem to be able to break through these supposed limits, which for a lot of people can lead to frustrations, feelings of despair, sadness, depression. All of these things can easily descend down upon you, where you ultimately feel stuck, trapped, and not able to be as capable as others that you might see. And it's at this point that a lot of us can really learn the wrong lesson. You see, just like Batman traveling around the world to learn the things that he does not know, like boxing, extreme meditation practices like Tumo, where monks have wet blankets thrown over them in these snow-covered Himalayas, and they learn to meditate, literally drying out the blankets, or gain a keen understanding of hard sciences like chemistry and biology that we see him used to become the world's greatest detective. Many of the skills we prize in life are not simple skills like pushing a button. In fact, the more prized they are, the more complex

they are the more bruises, or your mind gets to grow as you go about learning them. Complexity can take some time, and we see Batman often when resigning himself to studying math or working out. He tends to measure his progress in terms of months rather than days, or like in an experienced child in freaking minutes. Batman came to understand not to mistake your current limits with your total limits. Throughout Bruce's history, like when he was taught how to take a punch from boxing champions like Wildcat, or went to Korea to undergo some brutal physical training, picking up fighting stealth techniques, even swordsmanship, waiting outside the dojo for 3 weeks, where he was then given permission to sweep the floor for a month and wash the dishes for another, then add on boiling rice to the mix for the next two. Bruce was finally given permission to begin some pretty relentless training for the next 6 months, and as every teacher eventually saw, Bruce was shown to be just as a relentless, uncomplaining student who tried out what he was being

given to the best of his ability every time. Sometimes he trained alone under the guidance of a teacher, and other times he was surrounded by students, some who openly mocked and attempted to scold him for being a rich boy. During this time, Bruce used nothing but discipline and faith that he was someone who could learn, despite his feelings to keep going, especially on those days where he felt that he wasn't progressing fast enough, was physically tired, exhausted, and again found other students or even himself doubting himself when it comes to pushing himself past his limits. Batman is specifically great at a skill known as metacognition, a psychological term where one becomes aware of their own thoughts, how they tend to think, coming to view those thoughts as separate from themselves, thus being able to make judgments on them, to hear them, and still choose to do the exact opposite, exactly like not wanting to study or work out and then still doing it. He even uses his cognitive awareness of his thoughts, his feelings, to eventually control his thoughts and feelings, gaining the control necessary.

to choose to redirect them to something productive whenever he finds himself wandering. The better you get at it happens less and less until eventually even guys like Martian Manhunter try to read his thoughts and Bruce mentally is able to create images of puppies while verbally thinking about sensitive information to himself. I mean over the span of his training Bruce often holds himself to a much higher standard than his peers given that individuals like Lady Shiva certainly have high standards as well yet we all know that Bruce is said to have trained himself to both a mental and physical peak during this time. Many times Bruce is shown to smash his way through a college course on the wonders of accounting before studying physics and goes on to weight train like there's no tomorrow lifting at the most convenient part of his day 4 to 5 days a week much like a professional athlete. I mean even after donning the cape and cowl Bruce has encountered one obstacle after another that has caused himself to always have to stretch himself to a new

limit either making some serious changes to his lifting regimen, so he can remove enough rubble to save people from drowning, or having to push his cardio to such an extreme limit where once a teacher tried to force Bruce to kill by throwing him into a death match against one man after another, telling Bruce that the fight wouldn't end until he finally broke and killed his opponent before they killed him. Yet, despite his extreme physical exhaustion, Bruce was able to somehow push his way through, fighting for a 28-hour marathon, beating one man after another senseless until no one else would step into the ring with him. And in his spare time, we even see him pick up the art of lip reading, surprising the heck out of Deathstroke as Bruce said, Batman really has no limits to what he can learn, choosing to outright ignore the notion that he actually has any limits while he sees others abide by them. And maybe there is a problem to all of this. This is the Batman, a man who has personified human potential, earning more degrees worth of

knowledge than he has. Robins has more money than anyone. Annie Butler to maintain his giant mansion, and we do not whatever excuses we have for not working hard for choosing to study tomorrow rather than today are completely valid. Being human is tough, and everyone has their own unique problems, but as philosophies like stoicism may point out, so what? Why not do the things anyways? Many scientific studies have been conducted on the difference between those with fixed or limiting beliefs and those with a learning mindset of driving forward. To sum up a mountain of scientific literature, a fixed mindset believes that intelligence and abilities are static. You were born, and you just are. You can either juggle, or you cannot. You can lift lots of weight, do cool parkour tricks, be good at math, biology, or utterly suck at them. You do not get to choose. Talent is all that matters, whatever that means. Individuals with this type of belief typically avoid challenges, give up on tasks very easily, see effort and high fives as fruitless, and feel threatened by the success of

others, on the other hand, a learning mindset believes that intelligence and abilities can be developed through effort, learning, and persistence. Individuals with a growth mindset embrace challenges, persist in the face of setbacks, see effort as a path to mastery, and learn from criticism. They also tend to obtain a good amount of self-efficacy, or the ability for them to spot their own deficiencies and then drive far beyond them. Beyond this, individuals who begin down this path of learning actually get to a place where something interesting happens, as researchers found. Not only do these individuals attribute their learning to internal factors, seeing the choices that they made for both successes and failures as being up to them rather than external factors that they can't control, but researchers found that people's academic performance, intelligence, even their psychological well-being, all improve, and not just by a little. As their grades, their intelligence, and the density of the matter inside their brain increase tremendously. And why? Well, firstly because a person's beliefs have a serious impact on their behavior, on whether or not they actually do the

things that their body and brain need to experience to stimulate themselves to grow, whether it be the tissue in your muscles or brain. For people who take their learning seriously, they also tend to get way better at learning itself. So when they spend an hour doing something, they tend to get way more out of it versus someone else. And this is where we get to the how. How does someone like Bruce even go about breaking through their limitations? What exactly are they doing for their brain and body? Perhaps one of the biggest keys to the kingdom we see Batman partake in, whether he's out in the field or the kids are watching him being glued to his computer screen for hours on end, is intense focus. As simple as it sounds, focus is what dictates whether or not your brain decides to grow or not, especially if you're over the age of 25. Focusing your eyes, or more so your mind, on doing something for a period of time without distractions is the stimulus that is needed for your brain to wire that

information into itself to add that knowledge into it and to wire itself so it can also tell your muscles how to go about doing any movements you may have happened to do. As well as my University professor said during a neurobiology course, muscles are dumb. Your brain, your nervous system, is the part of you that learns new skills, and it can get really good at it. This is what is meant by neuroplasticity, your brain's ability to constantly change or grow itself in response to new information, to you stimulating it. And the wonderful thing for breaking through your limits to new levels is the brain doesn't just absorb new information or skills, but the true trophy is that it grows. It grows itself to get better and faster at learning any new future skills. You see, when you decide to start learning something, for your brain to be in a state of learning means that it's actually in a state of high stress, spending precious chemical resources all to absorb whatever is being thrown at it. And the longer the

more focused. You can actually stay on task. The more stimulated your brain becomes, and the more it will respond in kind as it goes about increasing the thickness, the density of brain regions like your prefrontal cortex. And you will see that what was once really hard now seems pretty easy. And hey, if we think about it, Focus remains a key part of nearly everything you could do: meditation, learning a new skill, or just maintaining a focus on something you just need to get done. Whereas if you're constantly distracted, allowing your brain to jump from one random thing to another, just like the time I saw an instructor have kids lift up a tiny noodle thinking that that was going to increase their muscle mass, it won't. When it comes to matching Batman's sheer learning capacity, he does represent someone who can stuff far more information into his brain and for far longer periods of time because he's forced it, he's stimulated it to do that so many times. Then when he finally decides to go to sleep, this is the time.

that his brain recovers and grows, only for him to then use his new beefed-up brain again, repeating the cycle. Because do this workout and rest cycle enough, and you can grow your brain leagues above where you once were. This is also why no one can immediately get all the results they want during the study session or workout. Your body needs time to pour over the new data and make the appropriate changes, whether it's building up your muscle or the gray matter that is a lot of your brain. And this is why it's important to make a dedicated learning, lifting, or meditation workout during the day, maybe even all of the above, 3 to 5 times a week, to give you enough of that sweet stimulation each week. That being said, this isn't the only pocket ace that Bruce has to break through his limitations, as there is still one major limitation that Bruce comes up against that makes him drive as hard as he does to overcome it. Whenever he gets to work, as I grew up like many of us, I saw films where suddenly someone

would show up to call the hero out to an adventure. The hero goes on said adventure, and by the time they hit the ripe old age of 20, they have it all figured out, get the girl, and by God, have bulked up into freaking Hercules by this point, oftentimes just having magically learned off-screen or being granted whatever amazing skills or powers they needed to finish in record time. That is clearly not an advantage we or the cape crusader himself have been given. Bruce took years of study, a decade or more of kicking his own butt every day before returning to Gotham, where he then just kept going, having to learn more or else he might just die on the streets. It's okay that you don't wake up the next day as Superman, and instead, it's far more important that you have the courage to just give things another try, especially on the days that you don't feel like working as hard. The courage to just try as a human being is insanely important. CU really interestingly, while scientists

have attempted to quantify just how much storage capacity a human brain has. They really don't know just how much information a person can learn over their lifetime. The brain is complex, both creating, merging, and deleting unnecessary synapses, constantly making itself more efficient. From birth, there is no definable upper limit to what and how much you can learn, which is what makes Batman so interesting. As far as we know, a human could actually learn everything he has. Our one true limit is actually something else. The truth is that life and skills take time. Instant skill acquisition does not exist, as much as we would love it to. It's a myth. And also, while the supposed 10,000 hour rule is a step in the right direction, it completely overlooks something crucial. It is not about the hours spent doing something. It's about repetition. How many can you handle before calling it a day? The internet name for what scientists know as actual learning has been dubbed the Super Mario effect. Basically, the more repetitions you can do, getting to simply try again.

and again, as much as you like, free of charge. The faster you can learn, and thus Batman having to learn forensics, criminology, chemistry, biology, detective and tracking skills, along with cramming a multitude of martial arts styles and meditation into the mix, truly found himself in a race against time. Bruce had no choice but to go flat out, putting all his focus into everything he did, never choosing to slouch or become distracted for a second while racking up all the repetitions he possibly could before a good night's rest. The notion of even having limits, being worried about hitting any sort of impassible barrier, actually became quite the silly notion to him, and not to mention a complete waste of his precious time to see what he's truly made of, how far he could go. It's not like he was going to sneeze and suddenly wake up with all the muscle he could ever hope for and understand chemistry to its fullest. Things take focus and lots of reps, and that's okay. So why even be bothered by the notion of

limits. But if none of this was very interesting, then I saved one fact for last. As important as getting as many focused repetitions on whatever you choose to learn, the other side of the coin that matters just as much is how you recover. Because this is what allows you to actually grow, with deep sleep sitting as the most important thing you can do by a lot. With us going over the science behind how individuals like Bruce would have to master this skill, remember it's all just a trick. See you in the next one.

The Science Of: How Batman Overcomes His Limits

The Science Of: How Batman Overcomes His Limits

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