Water can turn into wine… humans can walk through steel reinforced walls… and world hunger can be eradicated. These things will happen because, simply, nature dictates that they must happen. And because there are people that believe that can make them happen.
Are you one of these people?
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When Charles Darwin wrote The Origin of Species, which proposed his idea of evolution by natural selection, it stirred worldwide debate. Supporters included scientists, naturalists, and others whose professions and world views required that they analyze new ideas, and adopt those that seemed to make sense. Critics included theologians, clergymen, and others convinced that their answers were the only answers. The people who didn’t reject evolution… the people who instead questioned it and sought to apply it to their own lives, were able to, quite literally, change the world by making important advances in almost every field of study from medicine to sociology. The others, the ones who believed they already had the answers (“Humans came from apes… impossible!”), alienated themselves from others, and arguably did no good for the world.
When I was a high school junior, a 330-pound freshman walked into the wrestling room. His name was Ruben and he was only there because his football coach said that his health depended on it. But upon learning that the maximum weight in the heaviest weight class was 275 pounds, he bolted (wriggled) for the door. Mr. Black, our coach, saw him… and stepped in front of the door. “I’m not losing 55 pounds,” Ruben declared. “It’s impossible!” Mr. Black agreed, and promised Ruben that his body type wasn’t suited for the 275 pound weight class. It was suited for the 215 pound weight class! Ruben shuddered. “I’ve tried to lose weight,” he pleaded. “It doesn’t work.” Ruben wrestled in the heavyweight division by the end of his freshman year. He wrestled in the 215 pound division the next two years. And his senior year, he wrestled in the 189 pound division.
When Sergey Brin and Larry Page created Google, they had no intention of building the mega consumer brand that we know today. The Internet was already saturated with over ten thousand search engines, and succeeding in such a competitive environment seemed impossible. So they shopped their technology to Lycos, Yahoo, Infoseek, and other major search engines. And although Google (with its PageRank algorithm and ability to efficiently scale its technology) was clearly better than anything out there, none of the big search engines chose to license it. So, as a last resort, Sergey and Larry decided to make their company a consumer brand.
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If we can see the world for what it is – flexible, dynamic, and filled with potential – and if we can accept that life is changing more rapidly than ever before, then we can join in on the fun, and help create a world where the impossible is a thing of the past! Here’s how:
1. Recognize that impossible is a state of mind.
Impossibility exists when we don’t have knowledge or experience to understand how something can be possible. Nineteenth-century theologians laughed at Darwin’s theories because they didn’t come from the Bible (their source of knowledge and truth). Ruben thought losing weight was impossible because in his experience, it had never worked (and he knew no different). Google’s competitors couldn’t recognize the next big thing when it was staring them in the face because it was too difficult to bother with a technology they didn’t fully understand (a technology whose later success they likely at that time considered impossible). When people say something is impossible, what they really mean is they can’t imagine how it could be possible. But with more knowledge and experience, they’d know that anything is possible… and that their primary limitation is their state of mind.
2. Systems are improving (evolving) faster than ever.
It took billions of years for cosmic gases to produce the right mixtures to form the elements necessary for life on earth. It took hundreds of millions of years for those mixtures to produce the first single-cell organisms. It took millions of year for those single-cell organisms to evolve into humans. It took tens of thousands of years for humans to organize into civilizations. It took thousands of years for civilizations to figure out how to turn on the lights. It took just another hundred years to bring the Internet mainstream. And it takes just eighteen months for the processing power of computers to double in speed. As systems become more organized and complex, they create new systems… and do it at faster and faster rates. This is nature. This is the history of universe. What was impossible yesterday can, with a better system, be possible today.
3. If we accept evolution, then we can participate in it.
We have two choices: We can accept that evolution – making the impossible possible – will continue to happen at faster and faster speeds, which is an almost unanimously agreed upon principle in the scientific community. Or we can choose to believe something else. If we accept that the world is rapidly changing… then we can participate in this change… and we can work together to improve our lives and the world. We can create beauty, and goodness, and happiness… and all kinds of other crazy shit. If we deny that the impossible is quickly becoming possible, as so many people I know prefer to do, then we’ll help nobody, including ourselves.
Conclusion
Impossible is what we get when we haven’t trained our eyes and our hearts to see past the systems that currently exist to ones that don’t yet exist. So let’s start the training… and make impossible a thing of the past!
