If you can believe it...

You can do it.  In 1954 an Englishman, named Roger Bannister did something that had never been recorded before. He ran a mile in just under four minutes. The interesting thing about this is before that, in the 1940's, scientists and doctors had reams of statistics showing that due to the physics of motion and the general make-up of the human body running the mile in under four minutes was a physical impossibility. Many people believed this with absolute certainty. And those people were right. Until they weren't.

For a great many years the four minute mile was an unobtainable goal. What changed? For the longest time the athletes themselves believed it could not be done. After all nobody they had ever heard of had been able to do it. Their trainers could not do it and did not know anybody that had. Medical science said it could not be done. But all successful athletes are constantly working to improve themselves, striving to be stronger, smarter and faster. They train with other athletes and learn new techniques for pacing and breathing. Their minds are always looking for what is next. They never get to the finish line and say okay that's it, that's the best I will ever be able to do, now i'm gonna take up fishing. Each time they meet a goal they are looking forward to the next one. And each time they prove to themselves that it is possible to be just a little better than the last time.

Regardless of what other people told them, it was only a matter of time before the athletes running the mile had enough focus and strength of purpose to start believing that a four minute mile was possible.  All that had to happen for that belief to become a reality is that the person accomplishing the goal had to have a stronger belief than the people telling him it could not be done.

Ultimately, the belief of someone that is actually in the process of accomplishing something is much stronger than the belief of someone sitting on the sidelines. A runner has more knowledge of what their body can do in a race than a doctor or scientist. What the runner has is practical knowledge, gained by doing. Everyone else just has statistical data based on what has been observed. In most cases what science tells us is possible or not is based on a generalization surrounding the "facts" about what has and has not been done.

We used to live in a world where the four minute mile was an impossibility. So was wireless communication. We used to know for a fact that such a thing as an airplane could not ever possibly exist. We used to know beyond a shadow of a doubt that the world was flat and were prone to murdering or locking away people that had PROOF to the contrary.

Take a minute and imagine if you will telling someone a thousand years ago about how one day they would be able to get into their car and drive to the movie theater. And you could go on to tell them that one of their friends would be able to pull out their wireless phone and buy tickets for the movie, while another friend bought a ticket for a flight to Memphis that they were taking the next day.  It would probably take you twenty minutes to describe all the concepts contained in those two sentences. By the time you finished explaining all the simply ridiculous things that you were talking about, the person you were talking to would certainly be looking at you like you were a madman, an idiot or both.  You would be hitting them with thing after thing after thing that they know to be impossible. And in their world with their limitations, they would be right.

Until they weren't.