If you’ve spent much time in the worlds of entrepreneurship and personal development, you’ve probably heard your fair share about the value of finding and pushing the edges of your limits.

The idea is that the further we push our limits, the greater our capabilities, and the more we’re capable of doing. This is the whole idea behind Marathon Projects, which I’ve written about before.

There’s a lot of value to this approach when it comes to finding the limits of our skills, stamina, patience, and comfort in order to expand on them and increase our level of competence.

But there are some boundaries where the value of finding them lies not in our ability to then push outward, but in our ability to avoid or stop short of them.

Our Personal Achilles’ Heels

Much as we each have a distinct set of personal superpowers that we can identify and lean into in order to create our most effective work, we also each have a unique set of personal weaknesses.

These weaknesses, left unidentified and unchecked are the things that get (and keep) us stuck.

The challenge is that they’re rarely spectacular, obvious or dramatic.

Instead, our Achilles’ Heels are often small and subtle traits and habits that slowly but surely undermine our ability to create and ship meaningful work from the inside if we put ourselves in situations that allow them to.

Steven Pressfield’s idea of Resistance is certainly one of these Achilles’ Heels we must learn to identify and dance with.

But it’s not the only one.

Other Achilles’ Heels might include temptations we find ourselves unable to resist, situations in which things never seem to work out, types of people we don’t work well with, projects that are a bad fit for our skills or disposition, and many more.

Being aware of our Achilles’ Heels and knowing where the boundaries lie allows us to avoid situations in which we’re likely to fail.

If you know that you have a highly addictive personality, for example, it’s probably best to avoid alcohol, drugs, sugar, and other potentially addictive substances.

I discovered one of my Achilles’ Heel’s last year when I started–and subsequently ended–my Build A Better Wellness Biz podcast.

For Me, The Type of Motivation Matters

In the end, the root of the problem for me was the fact that the podcast was all strategy and no heart.

While I enjoyed connecting with my guests and the modest audience I built, a show about building a better wellness business wasn’t the show I was dying to make. It was a means to an end. It was a way to double down on the accidental niche of wellness practitioners that I’d grown into through referrals, and better serve them while attracting more like-minded people.

Given enough time, I’m certain the strategy would have worked.

What I learned, however, is that for me to be able to stick with a project like this long enough for it to be successful (ie. multiple years) I need to deeply care about every aspect of it, from the audience to the content, to the creation itself.

When I was thinking about ending the show, I found myself comparing my experience creating the podcast with my experience creating this newsletter.

It was immediately clear that one ticked all the boxes, and the other didn’t.

Now, when considering new projects, I’m very cognizant of this personal Achilles’ Heel when evaluating whether the project is a good fit for me and has a chance of being successful. This knowledge helps me steer clear of ideas that might be good ideas, but which I don’t have the necessary drive to follow through on.

It’s worth noting that in many cases it’s entirely possible to expand the boundaries of our Achilles’ Heels and improve our resistance to them. If you find yourself with one that you simply can’t avoid and will otherwise lead to a lifetime of difficulty and defeat, this is probably a good idea.

Typically, however, our energy is better spent improving and expanding on our existing strengths.

Identifying Your Absolute Limits

The second type of boundaries worth knowing–so that we can avoid them–are Absolute Limits.

These limits are rooted in the limited availability of time, energy and attention, and are the most rigid of our boundaries. Attempting to push past them frequently leads to shoddy work, taking unethical shortcuts, burnout, and any number of other negative outcomes.

The limits of the time, energy, and attention each of us has will vary, as will our responses to pushing past them.

For me, I know that one of my Absolute limits relates to the relative importance of the projects I take on related to each other, and the hierarchy they exist within.

As it turns out, it was again the Build A Better Wellness Biz podcast that made me aware of this limit.

Maintaining a Project Hierarchy

Running a podcast production company, I naturally wanted to make sure the podcast to be a showcase of our team’s (and my own) capabilities. As such, I opted for an ambitious format with music queues and interstitial narration breaking up the interviews.

The show sounded great, and I was really proud of what I had created.

But the format also meant that each episode took ~20 hours to produce from start to finish.

This might have been manageable if I was producing a monthly show, but I had opted to release the show weekly. In addition, I was publishing this weekly newsletter, which took another 10 hours a week to create.

For a few months, I tried to find a way to do both projects well, batching segments of the production and finding clever ways to automate or streamline the process.

Before long, however, I could feel myself veering toward burnout.

I realized that the problem stemmed from trying to produce two “flagship” content platforms. These are platforms that take significant time, energy, and attention from you as a creator and can’t easily be outsourced. With a large enough team and budget, this is certainly possible, but as a solo creator, doing more than one flagship content platform well is difficult, if not impossible.

To me, my newsletter is my most sacred thing I work on and I realized that I needed to protect the time and energy that goes into creating it.

At the time, that meant shutting the podcast down.

But it also means that going forward, I’m aware that any additional content I create needs to be limited in scope, and play a secondary role to the newsletter.

In practice, this means limiting additional shows or newsletters to short-run seasonal endeavours without strict publishing commitments. Perhaps a 10-episode season here, a 20 issue evergreen newsletter there. It also means eliminating as much friction as possible from the production of these projects.

Backing Away from Your Limits

We spend a lot of time and energy working to level ourselves up.

We’re constantly improving our skills, gaining knowledge, growing our networks, and expanding our boundaries in order to become more successful creators.

Much of what holds us back as creators, however, is an unawareness of which boundaries are best to simply avoid. So much of our wasted time is due to putting ourselves in situations and taking on projects that simply aren’t a good fit for us.

An awareness of our Achilles’ Heels and Absolute limits allows us to avoid these projects that are doomed to fail. In their place, we can then pick projects that fit into our core competencies, and approach them in a way that gives them the focus they need to be successful.

Continual growth and improvement are still an essential part of building a successful creative career.

But I can’t help but think that the fastest way to improve our results is by putting ourselves in situations we’re already likely to succeed in and avoiding those where we’re not.

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This article originally appeared in my weekly Creative Wayfinding Newsletter. Each issue is the product of a week of work, and contains something not available for sale.

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