I came across a quote recently that stopped me in my tracks:
“It is aerodynamically proven that, due to its size and weight, the bee cannot fly. But the bee does not know that.”
You may also have seen it attributed to NASA.
No reliable evidence shows NASA displaying this quote. And the science behind the famous bee quote isn’t quite what the internet would have us believe either. Yes, curiosity did lead me to check.
Bees can, quite obviously, fly.
Early attempts to explain insect flight used aerodynamic models that didn’t match how insects actually fly. A bee isn’t a tiny aeroplane. Its wings flap, bend, twist, and change direction rapidly, creating complex airflow patterns. Once scientists understood insect flight better, the mystery disappeared.
The bee wasn’t breaking the laws of aerodynamics. Our understanding of the bee was incomplete.
And honestly? I think that is an infinitely better story. Because now I can’t stop thinking about what that means for us.
What if “impossible” is just poorly understood?
We have all been the bee at some point. Someone looks at our circumstances, our history, our age, our qualifications, our finances, our past mistakes, or simply the way we’ve always done things, and concludes.
You can’t. That won’t work. People like you don’t do that. You’re too late. That’s not realistic.
And sometimes, they may even have evidence.
So, I’m not suggesting we blindly ignore anyone who tells us something can’t be done. I’m suggesting we learn to distinguish between a genuine limitation and somebody else’s model of our limitation.
Because those are not the same thing.
A person can make a perfectly reasonable prediction based on everything they know about you.
But they don’t know everything.
They don’t know how quickly you learn. They don’t know what happens when you really want something. They don’t know who you’re becoming. And sometimes, neither do you.
We love deciding our own limits. We often decide what we’re capable of before we’ve actually tried. We calculate the odds. Examine our past. Ask other people what they think. And then turn a prediction into a fact.
I’ve never done this, therefore I can’t. I’ve failed before; therefore I’ll fail again. I’m too old. I’m too inexperienced. It’s too late.
How easily we turn “not yet” into “never.”
And that is where I think the bee story gets interesting.
Maybe the calculation is based on the wrong assumptions. Maybe the equation doesn’t contain all the variables. Maybe there is something about the problem we haven’t understood yet. Maybe we haven’t met the version of ourselves who can do it.
That thought exhilarates me.
Not because I believe determination can magically overcome every obstacle. It can’t. But because I have become much more suspicious of certainty when it comes to human potential.
Especially certainty about my own.
What if we have misunderstood ourselves?
I have had my share of moments when the sensible thing was to stay exactly where I was.
I was told some choices were too risky. Too unrealistic. Things I once told myself were no longer for me. There were moments when I looked at my own life and thought: Surely this is how things will be now.
And then life did what life does.
It moved the furniture around. I started again. I changed my mind. I learned something new. I walked away from things that no longer fit. I walked towards things I couldn’t have imagined wanting before. I discovered that doing something alone wasn’t necessarily sad. That starting over wasn’t necessarily failure. That not having a map wasn’t the same as being lost.
And perhaps most surprisingly, I discovered that some of the things I thought were limitations were simply habits dressed up as facts. That has made me much more cautious about the word never. Especially when it is attached to me.
Because I am no longer entirely convinced that the person I am today is the final draft. And neither are you.
You may know yourself extraordinarily well. You may know your strengths, your weaknesses, your circumstances and your constraints.
But a version of you still exists that you haven’t met.
The one who learns the thing. Makes the move. Writes the book. Leaves the job. Starts the business. Travels alone. Falls in love again. Begins at fifty. Begins at sixty. Begins at seventy. Or simply wakes up one Tuesday morning and decides that the life they’ve been tolerating isn’t the life they want anymore.
You don’t know what that version of you can do. And neither does anyone else.
That doesn’t mean every dream will come true. It means we should be careful not to treat predictions as facts.
Someone can tell you they don’t think you’ll succeed. That’s their prediction. They haven’t been handed the final chapter. Neither have you.
The limitation existed in the model. Not in the bee. That distinction matters.
This, to me, is the most beautiful part of the bee story.
The bee wasn’t sitting on a flower thinking: The scientists say I can’t fly, I’ll show them. It was simply being a bee. Humans had misunderstood how it flew.
When someone tells you something is impossible, don’t automatically reject them. Don’t automatically believe them either.
Look at the evidence. Question the assumptions. Check the model. And then ask: Are they describing my limits, or merely the limits of what they understand?
Then ask yourself the harder question: Am I doing the same thing to myself? Have I taken something I haven’t tried and called it impossible? Have I confused “I’ve never done this” with “I can’t do this”?
Because those are very different sentences.
You don’t need certainty. You need curiosity. Try the thing. See what happens.
Maybe you’ll discover that you were wrong. Maybe you’ll discover that they were right. Or maybe, and this is my favourite possibility, you’ll discover that the question was wrong all along.
And then ask yourself: What if there is something here that neither of us understands yet?
Because sometimes impossible really does mean impossible. And sometimes it simply means: We haven’t figured out how yet.
So, if there is something you’ve been quietly wanting to do, but you’ve already decided it is too late, too difficult, too unlikely, too unconventional or too much of a stretch, perhaps don’t make the decision just yet.
Just give yourself permission to test the theory.
You might surprise yourself. You might fail. You might change your mind. You might discover an entirely different path. Or you might discover that the thing you were told you couldn’t do was never impossible at all.
The model was simply wrong. And you? You were busy flying.
Go, flap the damn wings! We can check the aerodynamics later.
