There is one great barrier to progress, one which dwarfs all others and to many or most becomes insurmountable. It is insurmountable for one and only one reason, you build it yourself and always make it an inch higher than you can climb. This is the attitude that “not only must I improve but I must do it the right way”.
It is enough of a thing to try and improve yourself at anything, it becomes much nearer impossible when you restrict yourself to “one right way”. This makes you like the people who think that no matter how badly something fails, you must continue doing it because somewhere in your head you are sure this is “right”. Once you go down this path you wind up in the same poor condition as the college professor who thinks the entirety of history revolves around the price of tin, or the Police officer who always reaches for the pepper spray first or the weightlifter who “knows” that the only way to get strong is to do 3 sets of 3 for everything. You have made the world so small there is nowhere to move.
There are two tools humans use, they are even greater than the opposable thumb and the Makita portable drill. They are feedback and simple imagination. We humans, when we are at our best are problem solvers, when we are at our worst we blindly follow formulas and orders. Suppose your deadlift has not gone up in a year, you follow all the advice of your pet program, doing one set of 12 to failure, and you are not only not progressing but you are going backwards. You followed the advice of doing workouts further apart, now you have worked yourself into doing only one of these sets every three weeks, you are out of patience and your pet program is out of advice and possibilities.
Now reading this you would think “why doesn’t this guy just try something else”. Through feedback he has seen that this is going nowhere and that a correction in course needs to be made, but he cannot imagine that his pet ideology is failing him or imagine anything else to do. Squealing the tires and laying rubber in reverse would be better than this! However more than occasionally this happens, our poor fellow is so sure he is doing it “right” that he assumes the fault must lie in him. The problem must be him. He is so sure of his ideology that he has commited what amounts to a form of philosophical suicide and often will stay there dead in the water. He starts to blame his equipment, his parents, his genes and starts assuming everyone in the world is on steroids and the barbell gods have it in for him.
The two greatest tools we have, feedback and imagination are killed quickly by stubborn ideology, when we are so sure we are “right” that we become blind, effectively stupid and stop even trying to imagine other possibilities. It never occurs to anyone in this condition that if there were only one stimulus humans adapt to, the whole human enterprise would have ended the day it started. We also change what stimulus we best adapt to from week to week, from month to month and often from day to day. If your eyes and mind are closed, you are missing the entire show. The train will pass you by and you won’t even hear the whistle.
It is good to start with a plan but to stick to it past its point of usefulness is silly for one person or an entire society. If you want to get somewhere, start walking, but pay attention to what is around you, look ahead, learn about your body and how you change as you amble along, make changes to your path or occasionally jump off the path, get lost and find your way back. What gets you from A to B one day will only make you walk in circles another, but if you learn the entire territory bit by bit then you have some space to work in. Insanity at its most destructive point is when you do the same thing over and over and expect a different result “this time”.
It occurs to me also that the best mechanics, machinists and builders I know are “tool freaks”. They have something for everything and are proud to show you all the crazy stuff they have accumulated that helps do things general and particular. With the right tools, the right materials, a sharp eye and some imagination, they can do anything. The one other thing these people have is a healthy disregard for convention and a mistrust of the man who is sure that this and this only is the “right” way in every case even if it obviously isn’t working in this one.
Know yourself, know your enemy, know the land and you will never lose—Bad paraphrase of Sun Tzu.