The world is full of zanies and fools… who break the rules and usually break the bank!

(What I learned from Cinderella, bumble bees and taking risks!)

Our local high school is currently presenting Cinderella, so one night this week my daughter and I decided to go see the play.  Now… I can’t get that dang song about “impossible things” out of my head!

It’s haunting me… driving me crazy… I keep thinking about crazy impossible things.

It’s crazy people, you know, who defy logic every day and do things, no one thinks can be done.  Crazy people are the ones who break the rules, break the records and break the bank most of the time.

“The world is full of zanies and fools… who don’t believe in sensible rules… and won’t believe what sensible people say.. and because these daft and dewey eyed dopes…  keep building up impossible hopes… impossible things are happening every day!”
– Cinderella

I can’t stop thinking about craziness… and impossible things.

I have been thinking about how impossible it was that my little essay stood out from a field of 15,000 other people and got me on national TV with Good Morning America.  What are the odds that would happen?

Well… 20 in 15000!

I would have bet everything I had against that.

But it happened.

Impossible things are happening every day!

Today I read a clip from Alice in Wonderland. It was an exchange between Alice and the White Queen from Through the Looking-Glass by Lewis Carroll:

Alice says, “One can’t believe impossible things.”

“I daresay you haven’t had much practice,” said the Queen. “When I was your age, I always did it for half-an-hour a day. Why, sometimes I’ve believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast.”

This famous conversation has prompted millions of creative people from around the world to name six impossible things, each day before breakfast.  This idea has ignited all kinds of “out of the box” ideas and inventions.  People are stretching their minds and looking for solutions that break the rules.

I liked the idea!

It has prompted me do some crazy things myself this week.  (I don’t want to jinx them by telling you about them just yet – but if something impossible happens… you will be the first to know!)

I am charged up with enthusiasm from my GMA experience and I am determined to reach for the stars with more confidence.  I am not going to let limits, lines or logic get in my way.  I am going to be bold.

I also remembered something I heard, when I was a child, about bumble bees.  Have you heard that Bumble bees, according to aerodynamic studies in wind tunnels and scientists who computed the wing span  and the weight of the bees, cannot fly?

Mathematically it is impossible for these creatures to fly… but the bees don’t know anything about this limit… so they go ahead and fly anyway.

Impossible things are happening every day!

So what’s up with the experts and scientist and naysayers who like to pop our enthusiastic bubbles when we try crazy things?

I recently read about Arthur C. Clarke, author of 2001: A Space Odyssey, who is a believer of impossible things. He had “Three Laws” regarding science and discovery.  I found these fascinating, full of truth and well worth sharing.  Here they are:

Clarke’s Law #1

When a distinguished but elderly scientist states that something is possible, he is almost certainly right. Corollary: When he states that something is impossible, he is very probably wrong.

Clarke’s Law # 2

The only way to discover the limits of the possible is to venture beyond them into the impossible.

Clarke’s Law # 3

Any significantly advanced technology is at first indistinguishable from magic.

If you had shown my grandmother a cell phone when she was a girl, she would have believed it some kind of sorcery for sure.  “You can’t talk to people on the other side of the world with a little hand held cordless device – that’s crazy!”

There are always unexplainable things in this world… that later on become explainable and even commonplace.

While looking up information about bumble bees, to remind me of the story I heard as a child, I was amazed to discover that in the last 40 years scientists had taken another look at the bees.

It turns out that after some new advances in high speed photography new calculations were able to be made. Scientists were able to see that the wings of the bumble bee… fill up like a parachute on the down stroke—greatly increasing the surface area of the wing.  They were able to plug the new surface area into the calculations… and they have now declared that the bumble bee can indeed fly…

… much to the relief of bumble bees all around the planet.

Whew!

So, just because something doesn’t make sense or you can’t understand or believe it… doesn’t mean it’s not so. Impossible things are happening every day!

One of the most famous stories regarding the impossible is the story of Roger Bannister.  He was a talented runner who proclaimed that he was going to run a mile in under 4 minutes.

In all of history no man had ever achieved this. Doctors declared it was impossible. The heart would not be able to handle the strain, the lungs would not have enough strength and they said one might actually die in the foolish attempt.

People believed it was impossible…

Roger Bannister believed otherwise. He believed it was possible as he saw himself improving and getting faster every year. He refused to listen to what people said.

Day in day out he trained and so sharpened his mind and body. He was convinced that slow and steady training would get him to break the 4 minute mile record.

On May 6, 1954 Roger Bannister broke the 4 minute mile. 3:59.4.

The remarkable thing is however, that one month later the impossible was made possible by yet another runner. And in the following year more and more people started to break the 4 minute mile.

Did the runners all of a sudden become better runners? Or was it that they now believed it was possible to break the 4 minute mile when they hadn’t before?

What is possible and what is not…  is all in the mind.  Most of life’s limitations come from within. But once you break these limitations and get out of your mental prison you realize that your biggest limitations are your beliefs.

The most common problem in our thinking is… “I can’t do that.  It’s too hard.  I’d never make it.”

Try this exercise:  Take a piece of paper and write down some goals in your life. Under one header, list down things ‘you know you can do’. Under another header, write the things ‘you might be able to do.’ And under one more, list the things that that are ‘impossible for you to do.’

What new grounds will you blaze?

After all, everything seems impossible… until the first time someone does it.

(“It’s kind of fun doing the impossible.” – said Walt Disney)

All I know is that we have nothing to lose by stretching, going for it, breaking down our limiting beliefs and shooting a little higher!

Don’t listen to the people who hold you back.  Believe in yourself and follow your heart.  It can’t hurt to try… remember those who never try – never win.

“It is not the critic who counts, not the man who points out how the strong man stumbled, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena…who, at the best, knows in the end the triumph of high achievement; and who, at worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who know neither victory nor defeat.” —Theodore Roosevelt

Impossible things are happening every day!

What are you going to do?