If someone you admire or care for puts a cap on your potential, the risk isn’t that they’ll keep you from growing.

What another person thinks (externally) doesn’t necessarily bind what you’re capable of becoming.

The danger is that you’ll adopt their idea as fact and start working within those constraints as if they were your own.

That’s what I call the inherited limit. An arbitrary boundary on your future created through someone else’s imagination and then transferred to yours via the strength of their connection to you. It was never your limit; it never should’ve been.

However, the longer you hold onto it without questioning its origin, the more it will resemble one of your own.

This will shape your choices, limit your focus and slowly shrink the scope of your dreams so that they fit into what the person who cares for you most, believes would be suitable for you.

The inherited limit is particularly insidious because of the level of love associated with it. A stranger’s scepticism can easily be dismissed. You don’t owe a stranger anything. On the other hand, parents, mentors, teachers, close friends – these are people whose opinions have influenced you significantly.

So when they express reservations, their doubts can weigh heavily on you due to all of the positive things they have previously expressed about you.

Their reservations are not about whether you have ability. They are about whether the version of you they know is capable of producing what you are describing.