Ignorance

Interviewer: “What I´d like to know is, where did you get the confidence to…”

OW: Ignorance! Ignorance! Sheer ignorance! there´s no confidence to equal it. It´s only when you know something about a profession I think that you´re timid. I didn´t know that there were things you couldn´t do, so anything I could think up in my dreams, I attempted to photograph.

Interviewer: You got away with enormous technical advances, didn´t you?

OW: Simply by not knowing they were impossible.

This fragment from an interview with Orson Welles might very well summarize a universal truth:

If you don´t know that you can´t do it, it´s more likely you´ll try doing it because you ignore its impossibility.

Or, said differently:

If you know you can´t do it, you most probably won´t attempt doing it, because you know it´s impossible.

But, more often than you´d think, it turns out that it might´ve not been impossible.

Flying, the internet, television, x-rays, medical treatments, space travel, electric cars, special effects in movies, dodecaphonism.

Ok, that last one was probably imaginable, but to a 19th-century audience, it would probably have been very unpredictable and unlikely.

There´s an endless list of things that were not possible but now form part of our everyday lives.

So next time you think something is impossible, you might want to think again ;)

Have a nice day,

Claudio.

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