3 ways “limit situations” can help you prepare for the worst

Sometimes in life, no matter how hard you try or how well you prepare, you will lose. You will fail. You will run up against your own human frailty and realize the limits of your strength. A young child pushing with all their might against a locked door. A wife trying to save a broken marriage. A sick man trying to stay alive. A life is punctuated — ended, even — by these moments of traumatic failure. Our lives are defined by them.

This is what the philosopher Karl Jaspers calls a “limit situation,” and it’s important to recognize when limit situations appear. It might not be popular these days to humbly accept failure and throw in the towel, but we can still learn a lot from Jaspers’ advice.

A bounded universe

A limit situation is one where you reach the boundaries of human existence. It’s when you realize that there will be some things you will never know, and when you realize there will be some things you can never do. It’s when you stretch your legs and jump as far as you can, but you still fall short.

For Jaspers, a limit situation is defined by three things.

First, they are inevitable. They might be few and very rare, but all humans will have these moments. Even if you have waltzed through life up to reading this article, there are existential failures waiting down the line. If nothing else, there are the three sufferings the Buddha observed: illness, old age, and death. They will get us all, eventually.

Second, limit situations will transform us. We are all different when we are humbled. We change when we realize our limits. This is not necessarily the growth mindset kind of transformation. This is not a “I’ve learned how to do better” transformation. Limit situations transform us in the sense that they define our limits.

Finally, limit situations will change how we see the world, because suddenly the world is not boundless. It’s not infinite, but it’s limited. There are only a few paths that we will ever be able to walk and the great, gaping precipice is far nearer than we ever would have thought.

Limit situations test us. They force us to look on the terrible and unpredictable power of a universe beyond our control. But limit situations also define us. You can find out more about somebody in a single moment of earth-shattering failure than a decade of glorious successes.

Everyday limits

When Jaspers wrote about his limit situations, he was talking about rare, existential moments of facing your own mortality. But there are also a hundred smaller limit situations we all face every week. They will transform us. Here are three examples:

You just lose. In Star Trek: The Next Generation, Captain Jean-Luc Picard once said, “It is possible to commit no mistakes and still lose. That is not a weakness; that is life.” And a few decades later, The Office’s Dwight Schrute said, “Not everything’s a lesson, sometimes you just lose.” The Jasperian wisdom lurking inside both is to forgive yourself and stop beating yourself up if things fail. Yes, try your best. Yes, learn, practice, and get better. But if you fail, despite all you can give, then move on. That’s life. You don’t get the promotion. You lose the client. Your company goes under.

Premeditatio malorum. Several millennia before Jaspers, the Stoics were saying something similar. The Stoics argued that life will, eventually, throw up hardships. Our strength will fail. Our friends will leave. All will die. So, rather than wait haplessly for these limit situations to appear, we can prepare for them. Premeditatio malorum is where we prepare for the worst. We catastrophize and stress-test life in our heads to prepare how we are going to deal with things. Needless to say, this is hugely important in a workplace setting. Every company with more than a few people should run cyber security checks and rainy-day contingencies. If you want a great primer on how to recognize potential risks, then over on Big Think+, there’s a great interview with the Chairman and CEO of The Orogen Group Vikram Pandit about just that.

The “Pareto principle.“ Not every limit situation in business is existential, but it will demand clarity of focus. When resources are finite (and they always are), understanding your limits means prioritizing what matters. The “Pareto principle” — aka the “80/20 rule” states that 20% of your efforts will produce 80% of your results. In business, it’s crucial to recognize when pursuing an impossible goal or stubbornly fighting a losing battle is draining energy that could be better spent elsewhere. For leaders, this means knowing when to pivot, cut losses, or focus resources on winnable battles. It’s not about accepting mediocrity; it’s about strategically acknowledging limits to achieve excellence where it counts most.