Nobody achieves the impossible without thinking they can. - Benjamin P. Hardy

You can’t overcome an addiction through willpower. You can’t change your life on your own. You need other people. You need to learn to trust others. Transformation can only occur through collaboration, which requires two or more people. The whole becomes more than the sum of its parts. Rather than trying to “author” yourself, you give yourself wholly to another person and dedicate yourself to a cause you believe in. Said psychologist Viktor E. Frankl:

We go into the GAP about ourselves, undervaluing and underappreciating ourselves. We go into the GAP about other people, turning them into a problem or an enemy. We go into the GAP about far too many things, and perhaps it’s a good time to stop complaining.

If you’re close with some people, you could do brilliant and world-changing work. Among other people, you may be uninspired and dull, never fulfilling your deepest dreams (and, worse yet, never realizing what is missing in your life). Relating these ideas to the game of chess, former chess prodigy Josh Waitzkin explains in his book The Art of Learning (emphasis mine):