That’s unreasonable.
That sentence can stop the conversation before it even begins.
Here’s the problem: Ideas that make a big impact will seem unreasonable at first. If they were reasonable, someone else would have thought of them already.
Unreasonable often means untried or unfamiliar. Unreasonable means that an idea deviates from your preconceived benchmark of what is reasonable.
But, in many cases, it’s not your idea that’s misplaced. It’s your benchmark.
We do this—not just with ideas—but with our own self as well.
We tell ourselves that it’s unreasonable for us to launch a new business, apply for a promotion, or ask for what we want—because we’re not good enough, smart enough, worthy enough, or fill-in-the-blank enough.
To be sure, life comes with real limitations.
But then there are the self-imposed limitations, where you stand in your own sunshine. You block your own wisdom. You become your own limit. You close doors before the universe even has the opportunity to open them. You turn into your own gaslighter—the one who manipulates you, misleads you, and makes you question your own reality.
“Birds born in a cage think flying is an illness,” the filmmaker Alejandro Jodorowsky purportedly said. But the caged bird is capable of flying regardless of how unreasonable it may seem to her. And so are you.
So stop stopping yourself. Don’t let unreasonable cage you in. Unreasonable is often reasonable not yet made reality. Yes, you can’t always get what you want—as the Rolling Stones remind us—but by expanding your vision, you’ll also expand the boundaries of what you thought was reasonable.
And what you assumed was a cage will often reveal itself to be an illusion.
