"Imaginary obstacles are insurmountable. Real ones aren't"
About this Quote
“Imaginary obstacles are insurmountable. Real ones aren’t” is a pressure-release valve aimed at the most profitable saboteur of modern ambition: anticipatory dread. Barbara Sher, known for coaching people out of self-defeating loops, isn’t romanticizing hardship; she’s demoting fear from prophet to paper tiger. The line works because it flips our usual hierarchy. We treat external constraints (money, time, gatekeepers) as negotiable with grit, and internal constraints (anxiety, shame, “what if I fail?”) as immutable. Sher argues the opposite: the obstacle you invent is the only one you can’t get around, because it lives in a closed system where you control the rules and always rig them against yourself.
The construction is deceptively clean: two short clauses, a stark binary, a punchy reversal. “Imaginary” doesn’t mean fake in a childish sense; it means untested. The brain, trying to keep you safe, fills the vacuum of uncertainty with catastrophic specificity. Those obstacles are “insurmountable” because they can’t be measured, negotiated with, or chipped away. They expand to fit any evidence.
“Real ones aren’t” lands as a provocation. Real obstacles have edges. They force you into tactics: ask a different person, change the timeline, reduce scope, learn a skill, take a smaller bet. Contextually, this is peak late-20th-century self-help pragmatism: agency not as vibes, but as a disciplined willingness to swap rumination for contact with reality. Sher’s subtext is almost moral: you don’t defeat fear by winning an argument with it; you defeat it by gathering facts.
The construction is deceptively clean: two short clauses, a stark binary, a punchy reversal. “Imaginary” doesn’t mean fake in a childish sense; it means untested. The brain, trying to keep you safe, fills the vacuum of uncertainty with catastrophic specificity. Those obstacles are “insurmountable” because they can’t be measured, negotiated with, or chipped away. They expand to fit any evidence.
“Real ones aren’t” lands as a provocation. Real obstacles have edges. They force you into tactics: ask a different person, change the timeline, reduce scope, learn a skill, take a smaller bet. Contextually, this is peak late-20th-century self-help pragmatism: agency not as vibes, but as a disciplined willingness to swap rumination for contact with reality. Sher’s subtext is almost moral: you don’t defeat fear by winning an argument with it; you defeat it by gathering facts.
Quote Details
| Topic | Overcoming Obstacles |
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