Knowing what is possible is a great mentor.
Until you make the unconscious, conscious. It'll direct your life, and you'll call it fate.
Too often in life, we end up accepting the reality. It's at that moment, that you've settled.
Funny enough, the rest of the world will always be encouraging you to believe in that exact reality. Not for ill intent, but they truly believe in it too, or else that would not be the reality.
If you told people in ancient times that you can kill people with something as small as a "metal sphere called a bullet", the warriors would've laughed at you and smacked you with their spear.
If you told people in the 1500s that you could "soar through the sky with mechanical metal machines", they would tell you "you're stupid and it's impossible".
If you told people in 1900s that when you uproot and migrate to a new country, the biggest thing you'll miss is your car and trees and not your family and that there was a way to stay connected to them, see them, and "facetime them", they would just be confused.
You'll have mentors, experts, and people you look up to (which you should continue to) in their own regards that tell you of their stories and experiences. While I'm not saying to not listen to them, just know that there's a fine balance between accepting their past reality as current reality vs. taking in their advice but continue to push for the possible.
Knowing what is possible is a great teacher. It humbles you, yet gives you courage.
Wanted to list a few things that impress me, this blog post hopefully acts as a reminder to myself to not settle for anything less. (Please call me out when I do. I'm sure I will fall into this same trap, as reality is simply what the majority of the people deems as the "truth".)
Simply knowing the possibility opens up your horizon. I think as a leader or entrepreneur, it's your job to do that for your team and open up their horizons and then motivate and help will it to become the new reality.
Patrick Collison along with his Fast blog is an amazing read because it opens your mind to what is possible.
This is why first principles thinking is quite powerful. Because it challenges the very notion of "why not?". Technically it's possible.
Asking: "what is the bottleneck" or "what would need to be true for X to happen" are great questions. It pushes us to re-think the reality we live in.
It's a similar concept to the series "whys". If we ask ourselves: "what needs to be true" over and over again, we often find ourselves pleasantly surprised by the true bottleneck.
Some examples of events that shifted behaviours:
Software (or 0 marginal costs to scale) businesses has changed the business model
Every phone had a keypad before the iPhone
WeChat and AliPay made China cashless
GPT3 opened up the applications of AI
2020: preference to shop online rather than in-store (Amazon)