To Inspire More Success, You Should “Leave the Cap Off”
Here’s a different take on increasing your opportunity to be successful. Let’s start by asking this question — how much water do you drink every day?
I’ve recently been working on drinking more water. I read somewhere that the average human is meant to consume up to half of their body weight in ounces of water each day. If you drink less significantly than that, you’re likely dehydrated.
In order to do this, I’ve put in a few small habits that have helped both keep me aware and accountable of my need to drink more water. Of the different methods I’ve tried, one has been more helpful than the rest.
Leaving the cap off the bottle of water I’m drinking from.
Something about the closed cap makes me stop thinking about the need to drink the water that’s in front of me.
Even though small, the closed cap is a subtle barrier I have to overcome each time I go to take a drink. And though it shames me to say, more often than not, I won’t overcome that barrier.
However, when the cap is off the water bottle in front of me, there is nothing blocking me from picking up the bottle and finishing off whatever water remains.
The more I thought about this, the more I began to realize that this concept of “leaving the cap off” is actually a helpful strategy to inspire success in other areas of life, not just in drinking more water.
Take writing for example. Ernest Hemingway is famous for saying:
“I had learned already never to empty the well of my writing, but always to stop when there was still something there in the deep part of the well, and let it refill at night from the springs that fed it.”
In his concept of not emptying the well, Hemingway wanted to eliminate the barrier of having to start writing something new each morning. He just picked back up and started writing where he left off.
For me, this practically means that when I have an idea for an article that I feel inspired to write about, I often open a new tab and make a new article. I put my idea as the title, potentially throw in an outline, then I let it sit for a day or so. I leave the cap off.
Right now, I’ve got five articles open that I am working on. Some are half-written. Some are complete but not finished.
I may even go about writing the first 200 words or so in an article and then switch over to another activity. When I come back to that article, I know I’ve got a good head start but the content there helps propel me into the next segment of my writing.
The concept of leaving the cap off can also be seen in your exercise. Most people who have studied habits or willpower have heard of the classic example of leaving your running shoes by your bed or sleeping in your workout clothes.
These are small hacks that are really instances of leaving the cap off. They reduce the barrier to entry for your desired activity and these actions, however small they are, help tip you towards the outcome you are aiming for.
In a fast-paced and integrated world, success is found in the margins. It’s rare to see huge gaps between the person in first place and the person in second place. More often than not, success is driven by the slight modifications that give one person a small advantage over the competition.
When I think about slight modifications, I like to think about rocketry. When launching a missile, the angle of launch is important. If you vary the trajectory of the rocket by 5 degrees, that may not feel like a big adjustment before launch. In fact, it may not even feel noticeable.
But once the rocket is launched, the further it travels, the wider the difference becomes. You may not realize it in the short-term, but a 5-degree modification can result in a rocket being hundreds of miles off-target when it reaches its end destination.
Whether we admit it or not, we are all creatures of momentum. We are all driven to exert the least amount of energy possible. It doesn’t make sense biologically for us to look for the harder way to do something.
That means that anything that we perceive to be a barrier to our achieving our desire is actually a bigger roadblock then we think. We may think that leaving the cap on our water bottle isn’t really a big deal, but the mind subconsciously sees that cap as a hurdle, and therefore, works to find a way around it. In this case, that means not drinking any water.
Keeping the cap on will actually stop most of your desires before they come to fruition. Steven Pressfield called it resistance, but it’s really just us leaving the cap on our potential.
When we keep the cap on, we have to somehow convince our subconscious to overcome the pushback every time we want to partake in that desired activity. We have to go against our biological drive and re-route our innate processing. And that is exhausting. Keep the cap on long enough and you’ll find yourself not pursuing your desires and ultimately, not achieving greater levels of success.
When you leave the cap off, you may not see instant results of success. That’s okay, because every time you leave the cap off, you are helping build roads in your subconscious that will inspire you towards success in the future.
Remember, leaving the cap off means you are eliminating pesky barriers to success. If the barriers are eliminated, achieving your desires becomes easier. If accomplishing that becomes easier, you start to see more small examples of success.
And small examples of success are the most inspiring elements for future success.
Pile enough small wins on top of each other and suddenly, you have momentum. Momentum leads to a movement and movement leads to an avalanche.
When you’re sitting in your corner office overlooking the downtown metropolis, standing near your oak desk in your fresh, tailored suit, just remember that it was that water bottle cap that started it all.
Leave the cap off.