If No One Told You It Was Impossible You'd Be Capable of Anything
On discoveries, broken limits, and the pioneers of a fair AI future
The extraordinary lurks just behind surface reality, waiting for those adventurous.
— Dylan O’Sullivan
I. Not everything that looks impossible is
There are possible and impossible things. It isn’t always clear which is which but no one denies it is one or the other—a forced dichotomy. What almost no one realizes, except perhaps Leo Tolstoi, is that all possible things are alike but each impossible thing is impossible in its own way. If you reached into the impossible bag to perform a closer examination, you’d find three levels of impossibility.
Level 1: Things that are impossible universally.
Level 2: Things that are impossible for humans.
Level 3: Things that are impossible in your mind.
The first contains what our universe forbids. The speed of light is unreachable. The second law of thermodynamics governs the cosmos’ fate. Human stupidity is infinite. Breaking truths you can’t even bend or overcome belongs to the impossible.
The impossible also inhabits the mundane. That’s the second level: Humanly-impossible things. Birds fly but, without external means, you can’t. Particle accelerators do gold transmutation but there’s no King Midas. You can’t lift a car with your bare hands unlike Superman or the crane down the street. Those are possible; not for a human.
This essay’s focus, the third level, is about the things we believe to be impossible but the belief itself makes them so. Things that, if we tapped into the latent power of our minds and bodies, we’d move from one bag to the other. Things you’d try anyway if no one told you they were impossible. This level reflects how we let the world impose illusory limitations on our psyche.
Learning to differentiate the third category from the others is a critical life skill. I’ll use three examples to illustrate how to break the invisible barrier and why it matters.