Man continually proves he can do anything.
On May 6, 1954 a British medical student stunned the world by running one mile in three minutes, 59.4 seconds. Until then a sub-four-minute mile was believed impossible. Doctors said nobody’s heart and lungs could pump blood and oxygen fast enough to provide him with the quantities necessary to run that fast! But Roger Bannister proved them wrong by breaking the imagined human speed barrier.
Just one month after Bannister ran his 3:59:4- minute mile, John Landy, an Australian, ran full second faster. Today thousands have done it, and one man recently hit his 101st sub-four-minute mile!
It was October 14, 1947 when a B-29 bomber, soaring at an altitude of eight miles, dropped the Bell XS-1 aircraft from its cargo hold. Piloting this experimental Jet was captain Chuck Yeager who literally blasted off and was soon flying 670 miles per hour, which is equivalent to 720 miles per hour at sea level. Experts had said a human would black out at 600 miles per hour- the speed of sound. They thought the shock waves would tear a man’s body apart. Yeager, however, thought otherwise, and he proceeded to obliterate the imagined sound barrier.
With the NASA space shuttle cruising through space at 17,500 miles per hour while the astronauts eat, sleep, perform experiments, play games and watch television, the sound barrier seems silly, doesn’t it?
Tenzing Norgay scaled Mt. Everest. Others believed nobody could climb the world’s highest mountain and return alive. But Hillary and Norgay did it and returned joyously, having topped the imagined summit barrier.
Well over 100 persons have followed Sir Edmund Hillary and Tenzing Norgay to the summit of Mt. Everest. It’s even been done solo, without oxygen!
World history is chockablock with accomplishments like these. In each one and imagined barrier has proved to be just that: imagined. And immediately afterward others began repeating, even surpassing, these accomplishments, again proving that the impossible is possible, that all limitations are self-imposed.
And now that he’s running like the wind, speeding through space, and racing to the tops of the world’s highest peaks, what will man do next?
Anything he really wants to do, ANYTHING!
Joel Weldon
Inspirational Content Writer and Speaker
Here’s What You Can Do:
- Eliminate the words “Can’t” and “impossible” from your vocabulary.
- Realize that barriers in your life are self imposed.
- Record your achievements.
- Savor your victories.
- Look at all the barriers you’ve already proved were imaginary. Remember that man created number and therefore numbers have no magical powers, unless you think they do. When Amelia Earhart was asked why she flew across the Atlantic Ocean her answer was, “Because I wanted to!”
What do YOU want to do?
-Joel Weldon
