How Do You Know If Something Is Impossible?

Theoretically, one could try to find out whether or not something is impossible by applying scientific principles and mathematical formulas to the problem at hand.  If, after being able to rule out all possible scenarios, you discover something is either physically, biologically, or mentally impossible, you have your answer.

But it doesn’t work that way in real life.  It’s nearly impossible to actually prove something is impossible (ironically enough).  Just because you can’t figure out how to do something doesn’t mean it’s not possible, it just means you don’t know how to do it yet.  It’s very easy, on the other hand, to prove something is possible:  just do it!

Impossible Is Easy

People have a tendency to believe something is impossible merely because they don’t know how to do it.  They’ve never actually tried, of course; they just can’t figure out how to do it.  So it must not be possible, naturally.

For example, many people would say it’s impossible to earn a significant income on the internet, but I’ve managed to do it and so have many others.  Still more would say it’s impossible to become wealthy without winning the lottery (a very common belief among low-income workers), but thousands manage it every year.  As it turns out, impossible is pretty easy, namely because most things people consider “impossible” are merely things they never bothered to try themselves.

So the next time somebody advises you not to do something because it’s “too hard” and “you’ll never succeed,” ask them how they know.  Have they tried it?  If not, it’s probably fine to ignore their advice.

“But, wouldn’t owning your own micro-brewery make you the happiest man alive,” you might reply?  (I mean seriously, what man wouldn’t want their own brewery?)  Why wait?  If you know you want to do something eventually, why wouldn’t you just go ahead and do it?  Tomorrow has a nasty habit of never coming.

But I Can’t Do That Right Now!

How do you know?  Have you tried?  What’s the worst that could happen?  It may not be as bad as you think.  What exactly are you afraid of?  Poverty?  Billions of people around the globe survive and thrive on less than your worst-case-scenario even if everything blows up in your face.  Starting over isn’t all that bad because using what you’ve (just) learned, you can climb back towards the top pretty quickly.  Every failure gets you closer to success.

When it comes right down to it, you have far less to lose than you think you do.  A job you probably don’t like, a car you bought for the good gas mileage, and a house that probably isn’t your dream home is the most you stand to lose, if you’re like most Americans.  Big deal?  You could get those back in matter of years (if not sooner) if you had to.  You lose very little by failing.  Oh, but those “what if I’d done…” questions will bug the crap out of you for the rest of your life.  Count on it.

Mitigating The Risk Of Failure

Fortunately, living your dream needn’t be an all-or-nothing endeavor.  Some, like Tim Ferriss of Four Hour Work Week fame, are perfectly content with the constant threat of financial collapse (they may deny it, but deep down they are).  I applaud that quality in a human being, but  me being me, I’m a bit more conservative than that.  If I fail, I only want to fall halfway down the ladder.  Call it a cheap insurance policy (much cheaper than auto insurance, at least).

Ferriss calls them muses, Frugal Dad calls them side hustles, and I say call them whatever the hell you want to call them, so long as they pay the bills.  The 40-hour-per-week, 40 year career is dead as a doornail, or at least it should be.  My generation (35 and younger) are bound to live a volatile life as far as work goes.  Where many decry the loss of the 30-year company man (those people tend to lack imagination), I applaud it.  Why not work for a year or two on a project you enjoy and then, 2 years later and just when you’re beginning to lose interest, take a 6 month mini-retirement?  Or maybe just spend a month or two at home working on more sources of alternative income between contract jobs?  These income streams will pay your bills when you aren’t working regularly, and maybe even fund construction and see you through the early lean months of that new brew-pub you’ve been dreaming of.  It’s easier than you think.

Alternative Income Resources

I’ve opted to go the online income route, but there are many roads to Jerusalem, including investment income (if you have sufficient capital, this is by far the lowest-maintenance way to go), speaking gigs, freelance writing gigs you can do from anywhere with an internet connection, freelance web design, and virtually limitless other ways to make a buck without holding down a traditional job.  Here are some resources to get you started.

• Problogger – If your goal is to make money blogging, this is your first stop.  It’s where I started.
• 10 Ways To Earn Extra Income by Dough Roller
• 50 Resources To Raise Your Income by My Super-Charged Life.  Everything from boosting your investments, to negotiating a higher salary at your job, to home business ideas.
• 40+ Alternative Income Ideas And Resources by Moolanomy

Why The Four Hour Work Week Is A Pipe Dream For Most

It sounds great, doesn’t it?  Earning vast sums of money, traveling the world, and living life to its fullest, all working a modest 4 hours per week remotely.  Indeed, that would be a sweet life.  And it’s entirely possible, for some.  But I think most people would find such a life both a.) impossible to achieve and b.) undesirable in any event.

Remember back in high school when your guidance counselor asked what you wanted to be when you grew up?  The exercise, a la Office Space, was to imagine what it was you would do with your life if money was no issue.  Your answer was supposedly what you were supposed to do for a living.  For some people, it’s “help sick animals.”  Ferriss’ methodology won’t help you with that, since being  a veterinarian requires you to work long hours.  There’s simply no way around it.  Sure, you could donate money to PETA, but would that really fulfill your dream?  Probably not.  But as Tim would say, that’s your choice.

What if your goal is to become a powerful businessman?  You can certainly do very well for yourself using Tim’s methods online (I can personally vouch for that), but you’ll never become anything approaching a powerful businessman working 4 hours per week.  Nor will you ever be president, a respected senator, or even mayor of a small rural town.

What about family?  Tim would argue you can take your kids with you around the world, and he’s right.  There are people who do just that, quite successfully.  Good for them.  There are others, however, who would argue a child needs stable surroundings.  Who’s right?  I have absolutely no idea.  I suspect there is no right answer.  But one could certainly be forgiven for believing a stable suburban upbringing with the accompanying stable 9-5 job is an ideal environment for a job.  Who am I to tell them their life could be better?  Perhaps a quiet suburban life is exactly what their hearts desire.

That’s not to say the 9-5′ers don’t occasionally dream of what it would be like to live a vagabond’s life.  Everybody does, it’s just that, all else being equal, they prefer the life they have.  Maybe it’s just that the conventional life is comfortable, but so what?  Comfort is a great thing.  For some, it’s worth giving up on other dreams for.  For people like Tim (and me), on the other hand, it’s not.  I yearn to see the world (even more than I already have) and fill my day-to-day life with the kinds of dramatically different experiences that just wouldn’t be possible living conventionally.  Thus, I’m actively planning to semi-retire as young as possible (possibly as young as 30).  To that end, I am aggressively working to build defensible streams of passive online income in the hopes of supporting myself for months at a time while on the road.  To don’t expect to become or even want to be a full-time traveler, but I would like the freedom to do so if I so desire.

People like Tim and I are rare.  Not everybody wants what I want, and still fewer people are willing to sacrifice what’s required to obtain it.  The semi-retired life isn’t for everyone.

Buy The 4-Hour Workweek from Amazon.com and see what all the fuss is about.

Social Proof

In his classic book Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion, Cialdini refers to this as a byproduct of a well-known concept called social proof.  Simply put, in the presence of uncertainty (that is, the absence of concrete proof to the contrary), people will tend to choose to believe what other people seem to believe.  A popular film going gangbusters at the box office is more attractive than a less visible film that, while it may be critically-acclaimed, doesn’t have the advantage of everybody at work talking about it.  If all those other people like it, the logic goes, it must be good.

Worse, social proof a shockingly-strong ability to suppress dissent.  A person will be much less likely to speak out against a movie everybody else seems to like for fear of appearing to “not get it.”  In this way, objectively “bad” works of art that anybody in isolation would dismiss out of hand become insanely popular.  You may or may not like Radiohead, but you’re far less likely to declare their music sucks in light of their critical success.  Radiohead is generally considered a “sophisticated” band.  By not liking them, you are really saying to the world “I am not sophisticated enough to appreciate this music.”  Or at least that’s how we feel, even if only on a subconscious level.  This is also why best-seller lists tend to increase sales significantly.

The Crowd Lacks A Brain

The fact is, any given group is probably full of crap.  It’s full of members who believe what they believe mostly because everybody else does.  It’s likely nobody in the group actually stopped to consider the issue critically or attempt to either prove or disprove the group’s position via empirical experimentation.  In short, members of groups tend to be neither skeptical nor empiricists, at least within their subject matter of choice.  The software Agile community is one example of such an unthinking group.  It’s not that Agile lacks merit;  it doesn’t, it’s that the vast majority of Agile thought has devolved into the realm of “it’s right because everybody else in my group agrees it’s right.”  Unfortunately, nobody in the group bothered to actually verify that paired programming increases code quality.  They just assume somebody else did and consider it a fact.

So remember, just because an idea is accepted by pretty much everybody as truth doesn’t give it any merit.  You’re a smart person.  You’re more than capable of thinking for yourself.  Self-doubt should not be the first thing you feel if your conclusion happens to run contrary to conventional wisdom.  That’s the only way we ever make any progress.