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The Assumption of Impossible

Published 5/20/2016

In today's short inspiration episode, we discuss the "assumption of impossibility."

Transcript (Generated by OpenAI Whisper)
Hey everyone and welcome to Developer Tea. My name is Jonathan Cutrell and today's episode I'm going to be talking about the assumption of the impossible. Today's episode is an inspiration episode. It's going to be a little bit shorter than the average episode and we don't have a sponsor for today. But if you are looking to reach developers and designers like the people who are listening to Developer Tea. Go to spec.fm slash sponsors. We have some spots for Developer Tea and the other shows on spec.fm that are still open for the upcoming months. So make sure you go and check it out because those will fill up. So we're talking about the assumption of the impossible today, the assumption of the impossible. What do I mean by the assumption of the impossible? Well, a lot of the time we believe before we even try to investigate, before we even take a few minutes to think about it, we believe that our ideas, our thoughts and maybe even our dreams, we believe that these things are not possible. Just by default, we have the assumption of impossibility. We believe that the difficult big ideas that we have just simply are not going to happen. Now, not everybody thinks this way but a lot of developers specifically think this way because what we do is so unconventional and most of the things that we're building have never been built before. So a software developer in many ways is constantly inventing new things. Of course, there are exceptions to the rule. Sometimes we are recreating functionality that we've created in the past. Maybe we're porting something over. But those things are not necessarily what I'm talking about here. I'm talking about creating new things, creating things that have never been created before. And the assumption of impossible stems from the simple fact that the way that we view what is possible is by looking at what is currently true. We talked about this in Wednesday's episode. We talked about the yes if, right? We have a tendency of saying no. Saying that something is not possible. When we look at the current situation and determine is it already happening? And those are two different things. Is it possible for it to happen in the future versus is it possible for it to happen right now with the current situation with the current circumstances? So in today's episode, I want to encourage those of you who do have this particular perspective, the assumption of impossibility. I want you to try something for me. I want you to try asking yourself why something isn't possible. I don't even necessarily need for all of you to start immediately believing that everything is possible because that's unrealistic. And I don't want you to walk away from this episode thinking that, you know, I believe that everything is possible because that's crazy. Not everything is possible, right? Many things are. A lot of the things that we want to be able to do are possible. Now, on the show, I try to stay away from regurgitating quotes that you've heard over and over and over. But I have one quote that I want to read to you today. And it is by Steve Jobs. And once again, in the past, a long time ago, I said that I was going to avoid using Steve Jobs quotes all the time. So I believe this is only the second Steve Jobs quote that I've used. But this is what he said. He said, when you grow up, you tend to get told the world is the way it is. And your life is just to live your life inside the world. Try not to bash into the walls too much. Try to have a nice family. Have fun. Save a little money. That's a very limited life. Life can be much broader once you discover one simple fact. Everything around you that you call life was made up by people that were no smarter than you and you can change it. You can influence it. You can build your own things that other people can use. Once you learn that, you'll never be the same again. And this quote is powerful to me, not because it's Steve Jobs, but because the substance of the quote, this one insight that he's sharing with us here, which is that everything around us is built by other humans. And not only that, those other humans are not necessarily much smarter than you or me. Right? Other humans around us that are doing amazing things, they're pretty much just like us. Now the big difference between the humans who accomplish things and the humans who don't, one of the main differences at least, the ones who accomplish things at some point, they have to believe that it was possible for them to accomplish it. So I want you, once again, I want you to take the time to start asking yourself, why is something impossible? When you may find that when you ask that question, you answer with the road to possibility. In other words, if you ask yourself why something is impossible, you may actually uncover that it is possible given the right scenario, just like what we talked about on Wednesday. It is possible if you have the right things in place, if you line things up in this particular way. I hope you've enjoyed today's episode of Developer Tea, a special inspiration episode about the assumption of impossibility. Thank you so much for listening. If you are enjoying Developer Tea, make sure you subscribe in whatever podcasting app you use, maybe use your computer, maybe use your phone. You can subscribe in pretty much every podcasting app, even if you use an RSS feed, you can obviously subscribe to RSS feeds as well, so make sure you go and subscribe. In fact, do that right now before he move on to whatever your next podcast episode is. Thank you so much for listening to Developer Tea, and until next time, enjoy your tea.