Anything Is Possible

One of my sons came to me today with a business idea.

A really fucking good one.

It's in healthcare, which is where he's focused.

As he started explaining it, I did what I've spent most of my adult life doing.

I started taking it apart.

Who needs it?

Who pays for it?

What's the problem you're actually solving?

How big could it be?

And somewhere in the middle of the conversation, I stopped thinking about the business idea and started looking at my son.

He genuinely believes he can do it.

Not in the bullshit way we're all supposed to tell our kids they can be anything they want to be.

He actually believes it.

There was no I don't know if I could.

No, someone has probably already done it.

No who am I to do this?

He saw something that didn't exist, decided it should, and started figuring out how to build it.

And I thought: fuck. I know that feeling.

I have lived most of my life believing that almost anything is possible.

Some of that came from necessity.

When you're a kid and don't have much, you can spend a lot of time thinking about everything you don't have.

Or you can develop a pretty fucking good imagination.

I did.

The circumstances around me said one thing.

My head said something else.

I couldn't control what my life looked like, but nobody could control what I imagined it could look like.

That belonged to me.

I don't remember having some grand plan.

I certainly wasn't sitting there at seven years old mapping out companies I was going to build.

I just developed this almost irrational belief that whatever was in front of me wasn't necessarily where I had to stay.

There was always something else.

Somewhere else.

Some way through.

I could build something. Change something. Figure something out.

I could create the life I wanted instead of simply accepting the one I had been handed.

That belief never left me.

If anything, it got stronger.

I built companies with it.

I raised my boys with it.

I made some spectacularly stupid decisions with it.

You don't get one without the other.

If you're going to believe almost anything is possible, occasionally you're going to run headfirst into something that isn't.

Fine. At least you found out.

I've never understood starting with all the reasons something won't work.

Start with: what if it does?

Then go find out.

What I Actually Gave Them

That is probably one of the most important things I gave my boys.

Not money.

Not connections.

Not an education.

Those things matter, but they're not it.

I gave them the absolute belief that nothing they genuinely wanted to build for themselves was out of reach.

And I didn't just tell them that.

They watched me live it.

They watched companies work.

They watched companies not work.

They watched me make money and lose money.

They watched things go spectacularly right and occasionally spectacularly wrong.

And then they watched what happened next.

I got up. Adjusted. Built again.

There was never some predetermined finish line where I was supposed to stop and say: okay, I guess this is my life.

Fuck that.

Your life can be whatever you have the balls, imagination and willingness to work to create.

Nothing is out of reach when it comes to creating the life you want.

Well, almost nothing.

Apparently, the people you would like to include in that perfect life are still allowed to prefer a completely different route.

Very inconvenient loophole.

I'm working on it.

But everything else?

Go. Try. Build it.

Move somewhere. Start something.

Fall in love. Fuck it up. Start over.

Change your mind.

Make some money. Lose some. Make it again.

There isn't one version of your life you're supposed to discover. You get to create it.

That was the energy I gave my boys.

Their mother and I gave them a home where they knew they were loved and supported.

But this relentless sense of possibility?

I know that one.

When they were little, the energy mostly traveled in one direction.

Dad believed. Dad pushed. Dad encouraged.

When one of them had some crazy idea, my instinct wasn't to explain all the reasons it might fail.

It was: okay. How do we do it?

Sometimes I'm sure they needed a little less of that.

I have never been particularly gifted at moderation.

But they never had to wonder whether I thought they were capable.

I did. Completely.

• • •

And somewhere along the way, I discovered something about giving people that kind of belief.

It's addictive.

I felt it first with my boys.

I didn't just want them to know that I believed in them.

I wanted them to believe in themselves with the same absolute certainty.

Not maybe I can.

Not I hope this works.

Of course I can!

There's a huge difference.

And once you watch that belief take hold in someone you love, you want more of it.

At least I do.

Because this isn't something I only did with my boys.

It's who I am.

If I care about you, I'm probably going to believe in what you're capable of before you do.

I'm going to see the bigger version.

I'm going to tell you it's possible.

I'm going to push you to take the shot.

And if it doesn't work, I'm probably going to be standing there saying: okay. What do we try next?

I know what that kind of belief did for my life.

It changed everything.

I went from a kid who had very little control over the world around him to a man who eventually realized he could create almost any life he was willing to work hard enough to build.

Once you've experienced that, you want the people around you to feel it too.

That's the addictive part.

You give someone belief.

They start believing.

Then they do something they weren't sure they could do.

And suddenly their idea of what's possible gets a little bigger.

So does yours.

The energy feeds itself.

Now They're Men

That's what happened with my boys.

For years, I poured that belief into them.

Of course you can. Why couldn't you? Go figure it out.

Now they're men.

And I can see it living inside them without me.

I don't have to supply the belief anymore.

It's theirs.

That's what hit me today sitting across from my son.

He wasn't borrowing my confidence.

He had his own.

He wasn't a kid coming to Dad looking for approval.

He was a man with an idea.

A potentially very big one.

And I got to watch his mind work.

Watch him see something that doesn't exist yet.

Watch him believe he could make it real.

I recognized myself in him.

Not me. Him.

That's an important distinction.

He has his own brain. His own talents. His own way of seeing the world.

All three of my boys do.

I'm not interested in creating three versions of me.

One is plenty.

What I wanted to give them was the belief.

The voice that says: why not me?

And somehow, it stuck.

It's hard to describe the joy in that.

I've built companies. I've made money.

I've accomplished things the kid I once was couldn't have imagined.

But watching that belief become part of my three boys is different.

The best thing I built may not be any of those companies.

It may be three men who walk into the world believing they can build whatever life they can imagine.

And now something else has happened.

The energy comes back.

They challenge me. They make me think.

They get excited about something and I get excited because they're excited.

I tell them about something I'm building and they start pulling it apart.

Sometimes they tell me I'm wrong, which remains one of the more troubling consequences of raising confident children.

But the energy moves both ways now.

I spent years giving it to them.

Now they give some of it back to me.

And it doesn't stop with them.

That's the energy I want around me.

It's what I give to the people I care about.

Believe bigger. Try the thing. Take the fucking shot.

I'll believe in you until you believe in yourself.

Because I've watched what happens when that belief becomes part of someone.

Eventually, they don't need you to say it anymore.

They start saying it to themselves.

And then maybe they give it to somebody else.

That's how the energy grows.

• • •

I don't know what will happen with my son's healthcare idea.

I think it's brilliant.

We'll find out.

That's what you do with an idea.

You build it.

But what stayed with me after our conversation wasn't really the idea.

It was the look in his eyes.

I knew that look.

Possibility.

I've carried it with me for most of my life.

It got me out of places I didn't want to be.

It helped me build companies nobody asked me to build.

It helped me create a life that would have seemed completely fucking ridiculous to the kid I once was.

And somehow, along the way, I passed it on.

Now they have it.

Three men creating their own lives with the absolute belief that if there's something they really want, there's probably a way to get there.

And now, every once in a while, I get to feel that energy coming back at me.

Today was one of those days.

I spent a lot of years telling my boys: anything is possible.

Now I get to watch them prove it.

Paul Harkins