Doing the Impossible

I finished a book late last week that had been on my reading list for a really long time. It was a book that kept showing up in podcasts and YouTube videos I would watch. The book is The Psychology of Money by Morgan Housel. Reading this book was supposed to do two things for me. First, I would find out why everyone loved the book. Two, one of my goals this year is to educate myself more on finances, so that’s a book about money. Overall, the book was pretty good. But something strange happened as I read the book. The examples he was using to show his point were more intriguing to me than the point he was trying to make. How many times have you heard someone ask out loud “How did we get into this mess”? Everyone right now wants to know why the economy is so bad. The author points out this chain of events.

9/11 prompts the Federal Reserve to cut interest rates.

That helped drive the housing bubble.

The housing bubble led to a financial crisis.

The financial crisis led to a poor job market.

The poor job market led people to put an emphasis on a college degree.

Everyone going to get a college degree led to 1.6 trillion in student debt.

I have a job, a house and I have no student loan debt, but I never would have guessed how all of that was connected. Who would have guessed right after 9/11 that it would lead to the United States having over a trillion dollars in student loan debt? That shows me that in life and even at work we can make decisions that we have no clue the impact down the road. We can make a few decisions that seem a hundred percent like the right move at the time, but in the end, it can lead us to a hole we can’t dig ourselves out of.

But let’s get to the impossible! On January 5th, 1889, the Detroit Free Press published an article stating that the long-held dream everyone had that one-day man would be able to fly like a bird appear impossible. Their main reason was the amount of weight. Six months later, Orville Wright dropped out of high school to help his brother. Here is the crazy part to me, it wasn’t until May of 1908 that people realized they had been able to fly. That was almost four and a half years after their first flight. What was the reason it took over four years for people to realize? Everyone thought it was impossible, so no one paid attention! Someone with a voice said it was impossible, so everyone listened. They decided to work on something that everyone said was impossible. They decided to keep working on it even though everyone was ignoring them. In my mind, the same people who said it was impossible are the same people who are making the decisions that lead to trillions of dollars in debt. We all started out wanting to do the impossible, but someone with a voice convinced us that it was impossible, and everyone ignored us. So we just stopped everything.

The book also talks about a documentary called “How to live forever”. They asked the question to someone, “What was the happiest day of your life”? They responded, Armistice Day. That was the day of the 1918 agreement to end World War 1. When the producer asked them why that day, they responded with this quote, “ Because we knew there would be no more wars ever again”. World War II began 21 years later, killing 75 million people. The thought of something tragic happening again seemed impossible. We have events in our lives that happen once, and we think they can never happen again. How can the impossible happen more than once? We now know that wars can keep happening, but why do we think that doing the impossible in our lives and jobs can only happen once? Why can’t we keep doing the impossible every quarter or every year? Why do we think that flying is impossible? What if we wrote down 3-5 things for our life and for work that we think are impossible. Maybe it’s getting out of debt or getting healthy? Maybe it’s accomplishing a goal at work of hitting a certain target? What is one thing in our life right now that someone with a voice is telling us is impossible? The definition of impossible is not able to occur, exist or be done. Make it occur, make it exist and get it done!