How to Turn the Impossible Into the Imaginable Into the Actual

Success motivation from Iran's answer to Jordan Peterson

“If the impossible throughout history has become the imaginable, and then the actual, why do we think that our dreams are impossible for us to accomplish in our own lives?”

-Patrick Bet-David

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Quick Note Before We Begin: The last half of this post is behind a paywall, but I will NOT be asking you to pay for posts that you’ve been getting for free until now. You’ll still get those. Every week.

Except that I’ll also be publishing additional posts like these that will be behind the paywall, and will be available to paying subscribers of The Competitive Advantage.

Just wanted to let you guys know that, so you wouldn’t think that every post will be paid. I wouldn’t just spring that on you guys!

The publishing schedule going forward will be one post every weekday, 3 free and 2 paid, and I’ll be keeping the quality of the posts the same.

Alright, on with the show…

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Patrick Bet-David’s amazing story starts with his family immigrating to America when he was 10 years old. His parents fled Iran as refugees during the Iranian revolution and were eventually granted U.S. citizenship, something that Patrick has never since taken for granted.

Today, his YouTube channel has more than 3,000,000 subscribers and he runs one of the largest financial services companies in the entire U.S.

That level of success - especially for embattled refugees - is usually regarded as impossible.

The thing is that the impossible has never been done before.

Instead, what many people have believed was impossible had always been possible...we just couldn't see it.

I won't rehash the entire Roger Bannister story (readers of pop psychology books are already deathly tired of hearing about it), but the super short version is that there was a time when nobody believed it was possible for human beings to run a mile in under four minutes. Then Roger Bannister did it. Then everybody started doing it, simply because it was now believed to be possible.

Nowadays, high school track athletes routinely run 4-minute miles and nobody thinks it's such a big deal anymore. The impossible had become the imaginable, and then the actual.

The lesson is that many of us are poor judges of our own potential. We sell ourselves short in so many ways, and routinely fail to imagine the full scope of our possibilities.

We believe that we can't write our novel - but that's because we've never written before!

We believe that we can't release our own album of original songs - but that's because we haven't committed to taking our singing lessons seriously before!

We believe that we can't start our own company - but that's because we've never built a prototype and put it in front of potential customers before!

The deeper reason, of course, is that between the impossible and the actual is an intimidatingly large chasm called the imaginable that we have to bridge first. We have to see it in our minds first before we can ever hope to bring it into our reality.