“Impossible is just a big word thrown around by small men who find it easier to live in the world they’ve been given than to explore the power they have to change it. Impossible is not a fact. It’s an opinion. Impossible is not a declaration. It’s a dare. Impossible is potential. Impossible is temporary. Impossible is nothing.”
Muhammad Ali

There’s a bagel shop near my house I sometimes go to when I’m in need of a tasty lox-and-cream cheese combo. For a long time, on one wal there was a poster of “The Greatest” in boxing stance with the headline “Impossible is Nothing.” One day, looking at it, my eye separated the word nothing into “no thing” — and suddenly, I realized what Ali was saying: “Impossible is no thing” — it has no reality, no substance, it’s just a construct, a figment. Later, I saw someone take the word “Impossible” and point out that it has the same letters as “I’m possible.”

There are so many paper tigers in our lives! So many barriers that we build out of our own fears and then give substance to, as if they were made out of bricks or concrete. Let’s bust through them all!

“Anything’s possible if you’ve got enough nerve,” J.K. Rowling once said — and if anyone is living proof of it, she is.

So let’s dump that word “impossible” from our writer’s lexicon. And let’s start thinking about the “possible dreams” we can dream for ourselves.

Winning a contest — a possible dream.

Seeing our stories in print — a possible dream.

Finding the perfect agent for our novel — a possible dream.

Landing a book contract — a possible dream.

And once we start seeing all these as possible dreams, let’s find enough nerve to do what we have to do to make them realities. Impossible is nothing! Write on.