Whether you believe you can do a thing or not, you are right.

— Henry Ford

You probably haven’t heard of tricking, but it’s an incredible discipline. It’s basically a combination of martial arts tricks, freestyle acrobatics, and breakdancing battles, where people string together as many of the most impressive tricks they can do.

Watch this video to get an idea. Go ahead, I’ll wait.

It’s easy to watch something like that and think to yourself: “wow, I’d never be capable of any of that”. Some people do have impairments or disabilities that would make some of these feats out reach, but having taught breakdancing to a wide range of people in a distant past life, I can tell you from personal experience that if you have a somewhat-functional body you can teach yourself how to make it do all kinds of incredible things.

Coordination, strength, agility, bravery. All this can be learned.

What you probably don’t realise, when you think to yourself that you’d never be capable of doing a backflip, is that many of the guys and gals who are into tricking started off not being able to do a cartwheel or a handstand or anything, let alone something as complicated as a swing-through double corkscrew boxcutter.

The trick (pardon the pun) to learning tricking is to start by presume you’re capable, and start down the path of learning the next most difficult thing. That isn’t just true of tricking either, it’s how you learn anything.

Everybody has a day zero. The day you show up as a complete beginner, with no idea what you’re doing. The sooner you get your day zero out of the way, the sooner you can move on to day one, and then day seven, and then day two-hundred-and-four.

As human beings, we’re capable of incredible things, and the proof is all around us. When was the last time you showed up for a day zero at something?