How often do you hear the word impossible tossed around, especially in schools? It sometimes masquerades as “That’ll never happen!’
I have been thinking a lot about the word ‘impossible.” The word is a trickster. When people say something is impossible, it sounds as if they are predicting the future, but in fact, they are describing only the past. When someone declares something impossible, what they are really saying is, “That seems unlikely based on my past experiences,” or “I have never yet seen that happen,” or “I don’t expect that will occur.”
Careful thinking reveals that impossible things happen every day, but, once they happen, they instantly fall out of the impossible category and are transformed into the ordinary. In past centuries, self-powered vehicles, flying machines, moon landings, electric lights–these were the stuff of fantasies, but now they are completely ordinary and unremarkable. What we currently think of as impossible is usually whatever hasn’t happened yet.
The same applies to people. We mistakenly believe the unusual is impossible. If I describe a homely, painfully shy girl and whose mother neglected her and then died when she was eight and whose alcoholic father died two years later, we might pity her. If I said, this girl will become a world leader, listeners might snort, “Impossible!” Yet, I have just described Eleanor Roosevelt. She became First Lady of the World and is almost single-handedly responsible for the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, adopted by the United Nations in 1948.
Similarly, Nelson Mandela was in prison in South Africa for 27 years—more than 10,000 days. On any one of those 10,000 days, if anyone had declared, “Someday, Nelson Mandela will be president of South Africa,” people would surely have hooted, “That’s impossible.” Yet we all know that the impossible happened.
I am sure that the school principal who called Thomas Edison “addle-pated” would have thought it impossible that Edison would ever amount to anything, let alone become the greatest inventor in our nation’s history. When Dave Thomas, founder of Wendy’s was in high school, the likelihood of his becoming the head of a huge corporation seemed small. When he dropped out of high school, most people would have deemed it completely impossible, yet it happened.
Why are we are so eager to be bearers of bad news? “You aren’t that talented,” You don’t have the skills/persistence/connections/scores/grades/aptitude for that,” or even “The world doesn’t work that way, buster.” Except, sometimes it does. One of my students, an artist, was colorblind. It seems self-evident that artists cannot be color-blind, but that isn’t true. He is making his living today in southern California as a graphic designer. So it turns out, the impossible isn’t.
If I pointed to a young mixed-race adolescent male being raised by his grandparents, a young man who didn’t look all that ambitious and was thought to be an occasional drug user, would a good future seem impossible? Would observers identify him as a future president of the United States? In Barack Obama’s case, no one saw it coming, but it came anyway.
He and the others above illustrate an important point. Within each human is a seed that can grow, even grow to greatness—as long as we don’t starve it, stomp it or stunt it. When we say, or think, “Impossible!” we are starving hope, stomping dreams and stunting growth. We need to stretch our beliefs and learn to see that each person’s dreams and ideas are actually future realities, no matter how unusual, unpredictable or “impossible” they may seem when we first hear about them.
