Decide You Don’t Know It’s Impossible

One way into a new piece of work is the CITIZEN KANE position. It’s Orson Welles giving the answers in this interview:

A: I thought you could do anything with a camera that the eye could do or the imagination could do. And if you come up from the bottom in the film business, you’re taught all the things that the cameraman doesn’t want to attempt for fear he will be criticized for having failed. And in this case I had a cameraman who didn’t care if he was criticized if he failed, and 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.

Q: You got away with enormous technical advances, didn’t you?

A: Simply by not knowing that they were impossible.

“I didn’t know there were things you couldn’t do.” It’s an invitation to forget what you know and come to a space fresh. Imagine that whatever form or function in front of you is an impossible machine for presenting dreams. And instead of deciding the machine cannot possibly generate any given dream, figure out what you have to do to it to make it work right.

Decide you don’t know it’s impossible, and do it anyway.