From impossible to ordinary

Make a list of the things that were impossible when you left school. Not difficult or expensive. Impossible, at any price.

Talking face to face, for free, with a grandmother in another country. Paying a fruit seller in Sharjah by touching a phone to a small box. Pointing a camera at a sign in a language you cannot read and watching it turn into one you can. Finding your way through a city you have never visited without asking a single person.

Each of these made the same journey. First it could not be done. Then it could be done by a few people with a great deal of money and patience. Then by anyone, without a second thought.

What has changed is the length of that journey. The early ones took the better part of a generation to travel from impossible to normal. The later ones took a few years. Some of the things people are passing around on their phones this month, work that only last year would have needed a studio, a crew and weeks of effort, have made the trip in what feels like a season.

For anyone who makes, sells or plans anything, this is the part worth sitting with. The belief that something cannot be done is now the belief most likely to be out of date by the time a plan is finished. Whatever looks out of reach this spring deserves a second look before the summer is over.

The distance between impossible and ordinary used to be measured in decades. It is shrinking, and each time it shrinks a little faster than the time before.