#know no limits

This man…

The conversation began innocently enough. We were talking about a kid at school who was enviably athletic and it seemingly came very easily to him. The attention was then turned to a different kid at school who was, effectively, the reciprocal of the athlete. He was a straight A student, lanky, tall, and clumsy. I listened passively, much more interested in my food, to the conversation that was now centered around the belief that it is easier to take an athlete and make them a good student than to take a good student and make them a good athlete. Attempting to contribute something to the exchange, I simply said that it may be difficult but it certainly is not impossible. One of my family members then very boldly declared that is would be impossible to take the aforementioned scholar and make him fast. Impossible. I was a little more than interested at this point. 

The argument being made was that it would be IMPOSSIBLE for this kid to become an athlete. Then I heard my dad and brother agree with him, both of whom I had previously thought to be two of the most optimistic and open-minded people I knew. It was rapidly made clear to me that i was the only one at the table who disagreed. I realized just how different my thought process was. For the rest of the night, I questioned whether or not I was the crazy one. Is it ridiculous of me to think that these things are absolutely possible? Do I really know anything about this topic anyway? But no matter how inquisitive I became, I never got any closer to taking on the belief that this was impossible.

Fast forward to last night. My brother is in the middle of deciding which school he's committing to in the fall and where he wants to play baseball. And then it comes up again. My dad says: Blake will just never run that fast. People his size just don't. It's physically impossible. He then goes on to say that, yeah, Bo Jackson did it, but he was a freak of nature. As if that excuses everyone else in the world from being able to be that good.

It has the same affect on me when people say that Steve Jobs was a genius and that's why he was successful. That's supposed to mean that I'm not a genius and I can't do it. He succeeded because he simply believed in something that no one else did. Everyone thought he was absolutely crazy.