mrpink essays

The Map Is Not the Territory

A mistake at the gym and an audacious goal at Pulpo Media reminded me that our biggest limits are rarely out there — they’re inside.

My personal record for barbell lunges had been 55kg, and the plan was to progress carefully: 50, 55, 60kg.After the first set, I felt frustrated — it had been too hard, and I was convinced I wouldn’t be able to add more weight.

Then I looked closely at the bar.I had misloaded it. It wasn’t 55kg. It was 65kg. Much heavier than planned — and I had done it on my very first set.

In 2011, I partnered with Justin as cofounder of Pulpo Media. The previous year the company had made about $700k in revenue — a modest number for the U.S. digital advertising market. I didn’t know much about the industry, but I believed in the power of setting bold goals. I proposed that we aim for $5 million.

We didn’t hit it.

But we closed the year at $3.7 million — more than 5x growth.

And I’m convinced that if we had set a smaller target, we would have never reached that far.

That mistake reminded me of another moment.

The Stoics used to say that our emotions depend less on external events and more on how we interpret them.

If I had experienced that 65kg set as a new personal record, the emotion would have been pure joy. But because I thought it was just a warm-up, what I felt instead was frustration.

The same thing happens on the street: if someone honks at us, we can get angry thinking they’re disrespectful — or remain calm if we assume they might be rushing to an emergency. The fact is the same; what changes is the story we tell ourselves.

And those stories are built upon our underlying beliefs.

Sometimes we consciously frame them as hypotheses — statements we know are unproven — and that allows us to learn, adjust, and improve.

But other times, they go unnoticed: we mistake our beliefs for reality, as if the map were the territory. That’s the real danger — when we confuse the map with the terrain, we stop learning.

The bar doesn’t weigh what we think it weighs.

The market doesn’t grow only as far as we imagine.

And our emotional experience depends far more on those underlying beliefs than on what’s actually happening out there.

Breaking that illusion can be uncomfortable, even painful — sometimes it happens by accident. But when it does, we realize not only that we were capable of more all along, but also that reality was always bigger than the map we drew of it.