The most agonizing process of setting up this page was deciding on a name. I’m that person who spends more time on picking out a name during character creation in every video game ever than on the important stuff (like hair color and so on), so this was tough for me. I finally settled on what you see now, impossible-things.net. It’s inspired by one of my favorite quotes of all time, by Lewis Carroll in “Alice in Wonderland” :
Sometimes, I’ve believed in as many as six impossible things before breakfast
I’m not pretending to be unique in thinking that this is a great quote to use, especially in a business environment. Seeing how many different variations of websites with “six impossible things” are already out there would have cured anyone of the notion that their idea is in any way, shape or form special. However, I like it, and none of us are that unique anyway, so I went with it.
In the chapter that this quote is taken from, Alice speaks to the Red Queen (if you’re thinking of zombies now: wrong reference) and basically says that one cannot believe in impossible things. The queen chides that as lazy thinking – and while the queen is pretty much utterly insane during the rest of the novel, I agree with her in this regard. I’m not talking about violating the laws of physics, I’m talking about beliefs like “no woman could ever be head of a country” (wrong), or “noone can climb a mountain without safety gear” (wrong, but oh so risky), or “nobody can change Bayer’s culture without a huge change project” (we’ll see). It’s about testing the limits of your imagination – and even more important, testing the limits of the organization around you. It’s about asking why – why can this not be changed? Why does this have to be this way? – and believing that you have the power to influence things, even if it seems impossible.
Sappy stuff aside: I’m pretty sure most of us are limited in some way by believing things are impossible, and overall, I’d rather push myself to try anyway. What about you?