DON'T SAY IT'S IMPOSSIBLE

If you think something is impossible, it will become impossible. It’s time to think differently.

- JASON FEIFER

This is impossible.”

We’ve all said those words recently. I sure have—about managing my increasingly needy children, or fitting deep work into fragmented days, or just finding a moment of peace in a constantly noisy house.

In fact, no joke: I’m three sentences into writing this column and I have already been interrupted twice, moved locations three times, and am now blasting white noise next to my head so I can concentrate. Productivity just feels… impossible.

But stop right there. Do not use that word again, no matter how tempting it is. Because when we say something is impossible, we do ourselves real harm. Impossible should be banned from our vocabulary.

To appreciate what I mean, consider life in the early 1800s.

Back then, scientists were experimenting with a radical idea: surgery without pain. What if patients could somehow be numbed, or made to fall asleep, so that they didn’t experience the agony of being sliced open and repaired? It would be a triumph of humanity, and it would revolutionize medicine.