Quote of the Day: Robert Rodriguez on Daily Inspiration

Before he was the filmmaker who could greenlight his own visions, Robert Rodriguez was a broke twenty-something in Texas, scraping together money by volunteering for medical research studies and shooting a feature on a shoestring because no one was going to “allow” him to be a director. That’s the lived origin of his insistence: “Don't be told something is impossible. There's always a way.”

“Impossible” is rarely a neutral diagnosis. More often it’s a social verdict, spoken by people protecting their own limits, their job security, their taste, or their fear of looking foolish. The trouble is how quickly that verdict becomes internal law. Once you accept it, you stop testing the edges of a problem. You stop asking better questions. You stop doing the unglamorous work of iteration, the place where most breakthroughs actually happen.

Rodriguez’s line isn’t magical thinking; it’s a discipline. “There’s always a way” doesn’t mean the first plan survives contact with reality. It means you refuse to outsource your imagination. You trade the comfort of certainty for the discomfort of experimentation: smaller prototypes, weirder angles, new collaborators, a different toolset. That mindset turns setbacks into data and keeps resilience from being a slogan. It also demands courage: the kind that withstands eye-rolls, gatekeepers, and the quiet temptation to quit before you’re contradicted by success.

Robert Rodriguez earned the right to say this by building a career on resourcefulness, moving from early DIY filmmaking to groundbreaking studio work and collaborations that proved constraints can be a creative engine, not a coffin.

July tends to expose our friction points: midyear goals that stalled, plans that melted under heat, routines that slipped. If someone labels your next step “impossible” this week, treat it as a challenge to revise the method, not abandon the mission, then go looking, stubbornly and intelligently, for the way.