As a teenager in Poland, I picked up whatever work I could find. One summer, a friend with an entrepreneurial streak got us a job collecting wild flower petals and delivering them by weight to a herbal company. Another job involved unloading freight trains of supply boxes and reloading them onto smaller transport vehicles.
Neither job was glamorous. But something was happening underneath the surface that I didn't have words for at the time.
I was learning to see patterns.
When you deliver flower petals, fresh ones pay less per kilogram than dried ones. Drying them requires almost no extra effort — you spread them out and wait. The same work, with one additional variable, produces a materially different result. When you unload boxes on a piecework rate instead of an hourly wage, the equation shifts. Now your pace is the variable. Speed up and you earn more. The wage stops being a fixed ceiling and becomes a function of your choices.
These are not things taught in school. They are things you learn by doing the work and paying attention to what the work is actually paying for. Most people do the work without noticing. I learned, eventually, to notice.
Zig Ziglar and the jar with a lid
Years later, when I started studying the work of Zig Ziglar, I found the clearest image I have ever encountered for why most people stay stuck below their own potential:
"You can train fleas by putting them in a jar with a lid on it. Fleas jump, so they will jump and hit the top over and over and over again. As you watch them jump and hit the top, you will notice something interesting. The fleas continue to jump, but they no longer jump high enough to hit the lid. Then, and this is the point — you can take the lid off and the fleas will continue to jump, but they won't jump out of the jar."
That is the whole problem in one paragraph.
Most people are trained fleas. The lid was installed early — in the first years of life, reinforced in school, reinforced by the first bad boss, reinforced by the first real failure, reinforced by the country or community or family system they were born into. By the time a person reaches adulthood, they are no longer jumping against the lid. They are jumping to a height they have calculated is safe. The lid is gone. The ceiling they are bumping against exists only in their nervous system.
I was a trained flea
I grew up behind the Iron Curtain. The communist system was the jar, and it was a very well-designed jar. Its lid was made of censorship, propaganda, fear, and the systematic crushing of individual ambition. You were taught — in school, on television, through every cultural institution — to stay small, to not stand out, to distrust your own wants, to believe that the ceiling was load-bearing.
I believed it. For years I believed it. Even when I stopped believing it consciously, I carried the programming in my body. The hesitation before a decision. The guilt around wanting more. The instinct to ask for permission. These patterns do not disappear the moment you cross a border. They travel with you. They are not in your passport. They are in your nervous system.
The difference — and this is the part the flea story doesn't tell you, because Ziglar was being generous — is that some fleas keep jumping. Not because they are smarter than the other fleas. Because they cannot stop noticing the pattern of the jar.
Pattern recognition as a survival skill
I have taught mathematics to Canadian students for over thirty years. Mathematics, at its core, is the study of patterns: the ways numbers, shapes, and relationships repeat, transform, and connect across different contexts.
The students who struggled most were rarely the ones who lacked ability. They were the ones who had learned to execute steps without understanding the structure underneath. They had learned the surface, not the pattern. And when the surface changed — when the problem appeared in a new form — they were lost.
Life works the same way. Music is pattern. Mathematics is pattern. A good joke is pattern. A good business is pattern. A stuck life is pattern. A life that keeps moving forward is pattern. If you can see the structure underneath your circumstances, you can begin to work with it instead of against it.
The patterns that held me back — and the ones that lifted me
Before I got out of the jar, the patterns that held me back looked like everybody else's patterns: starting strong and quitting early; postponing decisions until the moment passed; chasing approval; choosing comfort over discomfort; fearing the wrong move more than the cost of no move at all.
Each of those is a trained-flea pattern. Each of those is a lid that is no longer physically there.
Every major shift in my life began with a single change in a pattern: choosing action over hesitation. Choosing responsibility over excuses. Choosing to notice the structure of a situation rather than react to its surface.
You cannot build a new life with old patterns. The outcomes you have are a direct report of the patterns you are running. Not your intelligence. Not your luck. Not your circumstances. Your patterns.
The question worth sitting with
Where in your life are you jumping to a height you have already decided is the limit — and the lid left years ago?
It is not an easy question. The honest answer usually surfaces something uncomfortable. But it is the most useful question I know, because it is the one that puts the structure back in view. Once you can see the pattern, you can interrupt it. Once you interrupt it, you can replace it. Once you replace it and repeat the new pattern long enough, it becomes your new baseline.
The jar is open. The question is whether you know it.