The book I’m reading this week is great. It’s a biographical anthology about nine people who achieved outsized success. I won’t spoil it (check the post on Monday for the title), but one of the authors said something that’s stuck with me. After reading tons of books in his field and interviewing the nine people in the book, he realized something:

[T]here is almost always someone achieving enormous success in doing something that you think is impossible.

I agree. If most people think something is impossible, it may be more the case that it’s really hard and tons of people have failed at it. If you’re one of the diligent people who figure it out, the reward could be massive. This is a classic power-law outcome. Only a small fraction of people succeed, but the ones who do receive rewards so large they’re hard to comprehend. Think Steph Curry’s salary of $62 million for the next NBA season (per spotrac) or Jeff Bezos’s $256 billion net worth (per Bloomberg as of this writing).

Hard things are . . . well . . . hard. That doesn’t make them impossible. Many hard things seem impossible but are actually quite possible if effort is applied to solving or mastering them over a long period of time. Bezos and Curry spent decades working at and perfecting their crafts. In the early years, they weren’t sure they’d succeed, but they knew their chances of success would continue to go up as they worked at it consistently. Each has achieved what, 20 years ago, many would have said is impossible. In reality, it wasn’t impossible; it was just really hard and required a ton of energy and commitment over a long period of time to make it happen.

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