Breaking Through Your Limits

Writing blog entries is an example where failure is cheap
and winning can be huge. I'd gladly take a dozen or two
dozen failures for a big hit. A post that doesn't get
attention is a good failure.
2. Breaking Through Your Limits
The only way you can know your limits are to go past
them. Occasionally I've committed myself to more work
than I can handle. The result is stress and, in extreme
cases, complete burnout. Doing more than you can handle
on a regular basis is a recipe for a nervous breakdown.

all this--the mysterious

But all this--the mysterious, far-reaching hair-line trail. the absence of sun from the sky, the tremendous cold, and the strangeness and weirdness of it all--made no impression on the man. It was not because he was long used to it. He was a newcomer! in the land, a chechaquo, and this was his first winter. The trouble with him was that he was without imagination. He was quick and alert in the things of life, but only in the things, and not in the significances. Fifty degrees below zero meant eighty-odd degrees of frost. Such fact impressed him as being cold and uncomfortable, and that was all. It did not lead him to meditate upon his frailty as a creature of temperature, and upon man's frailty in general, able only to live within certain narrow limits of heat and cold; and from there on it did not lead him to the conjectural field of immortality and man's place in the universe. Fifty degrees below zero stood forte bite of frost that hurt and that must be guarded against by the use of mittens, ear-flaps, warm moccasins, and thick socks. Fifty degrees below zero was to him just precisely fifty degrees below zero. That there should be anything more to it than that was a thought that never entered his head.