Maybe Superman Was Simply Never Told What He Couldn't Do

The other day I went in to talk to my boss about an idea I had. Without going into too much unnecessary detail, I basically brought up some thoughts I had about changing an approach to some things we were doing. I had been thinking about some ways of revamping the current system and wanted to know what she thought about them. All I got was…

“No, you can’t do that.”

“No, that won’t work.”

“The problem with that is…”

“Everything would have to be completely rethought and changed…things that have been in place for a long time."

“Well, this is just the way things are.”

“That’s a nice idea, but…”

“No.”

“No.”

“No.”

Now I’ll give her some credit because she was basically bringing up all of the realistic roadblocks and potential problems with my ideas, but I just didn’t like the way I was handled. I’d been thinking about this stuff for a long time. My plans were going to make improvements for everyone, I hoped, but then my hopes got dashed pretty quickly. And while I appreciate my boss’s feedback, I would’ve preferred a more positive approach. How about…

“That's a great idea. Let's talk about developing that. Here are some other things that you may want to consider."

Even if the end result would be that my ideas were unrealistic, at least I would’ve been encouraged to dream further and shown that new ideas are not only helpful, but also important to my own career and to the establishment I work for.

When I started really thinking about it, are we maybe told “No” too often? Are people told what they can’t do as opposed to told what they possibly could do? Sometimes those negative voices are too hard to overcome.

I often wondered how different we’d be as a species if we had no idea of limits. I know this sounds weird, but could I breathe underwater if I simply didn’t know that I couldn’t? Do people drown because that’s what they expect to happen, because that’s what we’ve been brought up knowing? You’ve certainly heard of the stories where a car rolls onto some man’s child and miraculously that man is able to lift the otherwise unliftable car off his kid. How does that happen? Is it adrenaline that somehow gives him strength that he never had, or is it fear that supercedes his knowledge of his personal limits and allows him to perform an act he never knew he could do… because he’d been made to think that he couldn't do such things? It’s so often said that humans only utilize a very small percentage of their brains. Why is that? Maybe it’s because we’re told that that’s all we can use.

I'll leave you with this: If a bird was taken as a baby and never saw its mother or another bird and was caged in a human home, would it ever know that it could fly? And with no one encouraging it, would it stay forever grounded, unaware that it had the ability to soar among the clouds?