I have a stubbornly "anti" disposition. I don't react well to impossibilities. It goes way back - and I'm assuming it has its roots in my DIY and punk rock obsession that I developed as an early teenager. I know - how very unique.

But I've been thinking about possibilities more.

Partly because things are scary in the world, and fixing them seems impossible. Partly because being a writer / blogger in 2025 (the world of TikTok, etc) is a daunting semi-career, and getting anywhere with it feels impossible.

Here's my take on possible vs. impossible.

When someone tells you something is impossible, they usually mean, “I can’t see how to do it.” The first person, specifically. 

And yes, this might seem like a pedantic distinction, but it goes to something foundational about how we think through difficult problems.

Remember the classic “proof” that bumblebees can’t fly? In the 1930s, French entomologist Antoine Magnan used the aerodynamic equations of the time to demonstrate that bumblebee flight was impossible. The equations were correct. The conclusion was wrong. The problem wasn’t with the bees — it was with our understanding of how they flew.

This pattern repeats, as patterns are want to do. 

“Heavier than air flight is impossible” (1900s). “We will never break the sound barrier” (1940s). “No one will ever need more than 637KB of memory” (1980s). Each of these statements was made by experts, using the best available knowledge of their time. 

Each was eventually wrong.

The Psychology of Impossible Things

The human brain has evolved to be remarkably good at pattern recognition and exceptionally fucking bad at evaluating “unprecedented” scenarios. When we say something is impossible, we’re usually pattern-matching against past experiences rather than analyzing the problem at hand.

This hands us a cognitive bias: we tend to evaluate the difficulty of a complex task by imagining it as a single, monolithic challenge rather than breaking it down into constituent parts. Writing a novel seems impossible until you break it down into “write 500 words daily for 200 days.”

The first step is the most and least important part of any journey. This isn’t groundbreaking. It’s an axiom.

But it’s worth re-iterating because it’s still where most people fail.

Contrary to the popular assumption that “The first step is going to define all the steps that follow,” *initial decisions often have surprisingly little impact on outcomes*.

Consider Amazon. Their first step was selling books online. If Jeff Bezos had religiously stuck to that first step in defining their path, Amazon would never have become the everything store, never launched AWS, etc. We can argue back and forth about whether or not that would have been a good thing. But the point stands.

The real value of the first step isn’t in its specific direction — it’s in breaking the paralysis of possibility.

The Mathematics of Starting

You’re at the origin point of a coordinate plane. Your goal is somewhere in the positive quadrant. If you don’t move, the distance to your goal remains constant. But if you move in any direction (even the wrong one), you gain information that helps you correct your course.

This is mathematically similar to gradient descent in machine learning. The algorithm doesn’t need to know the exact path to the global minimum — it just needs to be able to measure whether each step makes things better or worse.

Movement creates information.

Standing still creates nothing.

The False Dichotomy of Right and Wrong Steps

The wrong/right dichotomy is misleading. In complex systems (business, writing, any creative endeavor), the outcome of any action depends not just on the action itself but on:

  1. The timing of the action
  2. The context in which it’s taken
  3. The sequence of actions that follow
  4. The learning derived from the action

This means evaluating steps as “right” or “wrong” in isolation is meaningless. What matters is the system of action and learning you create.

The Value of a Shitty First Step

A counterintuitive proposition: bad first steps might be more valuable than good ones.

Why? Because failure is information-dense. You learn relatively little when you take a “good” first step and succeed. When you take a “bad” first step and fail, you learn:

  • Why that approach didn’t work
  • What assumptions you made that were wrong
  • What constraints you didn’t consider
  • What resources you’re missing
  • What skills you need to develop

This is why people who become household names and survive long enough to be denigrated on social media often have multiple failed ventures before their big success. Each “wrong” step built the knowledge base for eventual success.

The Real Barrier: Expectation Management

Most people expect progress to look like this:

Progress ↑
         |    /
         |   /
         |  /
         | /
         |/
         +----------→ Time

When in reality, it looks more like this:

Progress ↑
         |    /\
         |   /  \   /\
         |  /    \ /  \    /
         | /      \     \/
         |/
         +----------→ Time

This mismatch between expectation and reality causes folks to abandon projects when they hit their first setback, interpreting it as a failure rather than a natural part of the process.

Instead of finding the “right” first step, we need a framework for generating and evaluating potential first steps. Here’s one approach:

  1. Minimize irreversible decisions
  2. Maximize learning potential
  3. Minimize resource commitment
  4. Maximize feedback speed

Under this framework, a good first step isn’t necessarily one that moves you directly toward your goal — it helps you understand the landscape you’re operating in.

When we say something is impossible, we’re usually expressing one of three things:

  1. “I don’t know how to start”
  2. “I can’t see the whole path”
  3. “I’m afraid to try.”

The first can be solved with frameworks and research. The second is a feature, not a bug — no one sees the whole path. The third is the real killer.

I want to revisit the title of this post. Nothing is impossible (if you’re willing to be wrong repeatedly and publicly while figuring out how to do it).

The barrier to achieving “impossible” things isn’t knowledge — it’s the willingness to act without complete knowledge, to fail productively, and to maintain momentum through setbacks.

The first step isn’t about starting right — it’s about starting at all.