The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man.
George Bernard Shaw

1. Limiting Beliefs

George Dantzig, a grad student at UC Berkeley, showed up late to class, saw two problems on the board, and solved them. Turns out they were famously unsolved statistics problems, but no one had told him that. He thought they were just homework. So he did them.

Same deal with Andrew Krapivin, an undergrad at Rutgers. He discovered a new approach to searching inside a hash table, one that was much faster than the theoretical limit imposed by Yao’s Principle. Krapivin made the breakthrough simply by not knowing of the principle’s existence.

Sometimes the biggest breakthroughs come from people who just… don’t know they’re impossible. The idea that everything’s been done before is a mental trap. We learn the rules, the best practices, the limits, then we stick to them.

The internet, for all its wonders, makes this worse. It shows us every path that’s been walked, and when you see every well-trodden trail, stepping off it feels impossible.

Hence “beginner’s luck”. Zen Buddhism calls this shoshin, the beginner’s mind, a state of openness and curiosity free from assumptions. Cognitive psychology has a parallel concept: the Einstellung effect, where prior knowledge actually blocks people from solving problems in novel ways.

Sometimes, knowing too much makes you worse at innovation. This is because expertise refines the known. It optimizes for what’s been done, not what could be. But novelty often demands subversion of the known.

Another bottleneck: Being too smart for your own good. If you’re smart enough to see how hard something is going to be, you might lose the motivation to ever begin.

Richard Hamming, one of the great applied mathematicians of the 20th century, argued that the biggest reason brilliant people fail to do great work is that they don’t choose to work on hard problems. They rationalize, overthink, and assume difficulty means impossibility. In reality, hard problems are often just unattempted problems.

Then there’s the status trap. Working in any technical field, it’s easy to assume that all the low(er)-hanging fruit has been picked. You look at the titans of the field and think, if this was a good idea, someone would have done it already.

But in reality, even experts miss things. Daniel Kahneman’s work on cognitive biases shows that people systematically overestimate how much others know and underestimate how much is still left to discover. History is full of billion-dollar ideas that were obvious in hindsight.

Now this isn’t an argument for ignoring existing knowledge. It’s an argument for questioning received wisdom. Think outside the box, yes (and that’s easier when you’re not aware of the box) but it also doesn’t help to pretend the box doesn’t exist. It does, and knowing its shape can help you break out of it properly.

2. Talent as Social Signaling

Scott Alexander, of the Slate Star Codex fame, once wrote:

On any task more complicated than sheer physical strength, there is no such thing as inborn talent or practice effects. Any non-retarded human could easily do as well as the top performers in every field, from golf to violin to theoretical physics. All supposed “talent differential” is unconscious social signaling of one’s proper social status, linked to self-esteem.

A young child sees how much respect a great violinist gets, knows she’s not entitled to as much respect as that violinist, and so does badly at violin to signal cooperation with the social structure. After practicing for many years, she thinks she’s signaled enough dedication to earn some more respect, and so plays the violin better.

“Child prodigies” are autistic types who don’t understand the unspoken rules of society and so naively use their full powers right away. They end out as social outcasts not by coincidence but as unconscious social punishment for this defection.

This seems like an unhinged take and yet stereotype threat is real, impostor syndrome is real, and self-perception and confidence do influence performance, especially in subjective domains. That said, they cannot substitute for raw cognitive ability or fine motor skills. Even if talent were just “not self-sabotaging”, that itself would be an innate trait that varies between people.

Psychological research supports this to some extent. Robert Rosenthal’s Pygmalion Effect study found that when teachers were told certain students were gifted (even though they weren’t), those students ended up outperforming their peers. Belief shapes reality. Similarly, stereotype threat research shows that people underperform when they believe they’re expected to fail.

This ties into Buridan’s Ass Syndrome, where a person faced with too many options freezes and makes no decision at all. In fields with no clear script for success (like entrepreneurship or scientific research), this can be paralyzing. Many never take the first step because they don’t see an obvious path forward. In reality, most successful people made it up as they went along.

So maybe a lot of “talent” isn’t just skill but permission. Permission from society, permission from your peers, and most importantly, permission from yourself.

3. The Illusion of Permission

In 1971, Philip Zimbardo ran the infamous Stanford prison experiment, which showed that people will readily assume the roles they think they’re allowed to play, even if those roles are arbitrary.

The experiment was ethically dubious, but the finding is hard to ignore: Behavior isn’t just driven by ability. It’s shaped by the constraints we think there are.

This applies everywhere. Half the reason institutions stagnate is because nobody wants to be the first person to violate an unspoken rule.

Pluralistic ignorance describes this: everyone assumes everyone else believes in a norm, so they go along with it, even if nobody actually believes in it. A junior assumes their idea is dumb because nobody else has suggested it. In reality, everyone else is thinking the same thing.

This is why, paradoxically, acting without permission often gets you permission. If you take initiative and it works, people will assume you were supposed to do it all along.

It’s a form of retrospective legitimacy i.e. things that seem reckless in advance seem inevitable in hindsight.

This principle applies at the societal level too. Thomas Kuhn’s The Structure of Scientific Revolutions argued that paradigm shifts don’t happen because people slowly change their minds. They happen because an old generation dies and a new generation, unburdened by old assumptions, simply acts differently.

Scientific progress, in other words, often isn’t about new facts but about new people refusing to obey old constraints.

So next time you hesitate, ask yourself: Is this actually impossible, or am I just waiting for someone else to go first? Because the truth is, you don’t need permission.

You can just do things.