People think there’s no more room to do great things (mainly because other people tell them so), that all the great things have already been discovered.
Leaving aside that it’s a big old universe out there, sometimes the biggest discoveries are right in front of us, even literally staring us in the face.
It’s all a question of mindset.
Francis Drake took on the entire Spanish Empire with a single ship and circumnavigated the globe. Winston Churchill kept the fight alive against one of the greatest evils the world has ever seen. A grammar-school boy from Stratford (you might have heard of him, his name was William Shakespeare) wrote some of the most enduring works of literature ever known.
It just goes to show, you never know what you can do until you try.
And sometimes you don’t realise what you have achieved once you have – but that is another story, as the saying goes.
Another grammar-school boy, this time from a little village outside Beaconsfield, in our own time wrote some of the best stories of the last hundred years. His name was Terry Pratchett.
Because, as he said, nobody ever told him it was hard. Nobody ever told him he wasn’t supposed to.
There’s a lesson in there somewhere …