"People are always neglecting something they can do in trying to do something they can't do"
About this Quote
Howe skewers ambition with the cool impatience of someone who’s watched a lot of bright people waste their best hours chasing a mirage. The line lands because it flips the usual moral script: we’re trained to admire striving, to treat the impossible as a virtue project. Howe isn’t anti-dream; he’s anti-evasion. The real target is the psychological dodge where “trying to do something I can’t” becomes a respectable alibi for not doing the work that’s plainly within reach.
The phrasing is deceptively plain, almost homespun, but it’s engineered as a trap. “Always” is a blunt overstatement that dares you to object, while “something they can do” is intentionally unspecific. It could be mundane (practice, consistency, showing up) or ethical (repairing a relationship, keeping a promise). That vagueness is the point: everyone has an inventory of doable tasks they’d rather not face. By contrast, “something they can’t do” is the glamorous category, the one that flatters the ego. Failure there feels noble; failure at the doable feels humiliating.
As a late-19th/early-20th-century American writer and editor, Howe was steeped in a culture that fetishized self-making while also selling a lot of get-rich confidence. The quote reads like a corrective to that era’s boosterism: a reminder that competence is built from neglected basics, and that the hardest thing isn’t the impossible - it’s committing to the possible until it’s done.
The phrasing is deceptively plain, almost homespun, but it’s engineered as a trap. “Always” is a blunt overstatement that dares you to object, while “something they can do” is intentionally unspecific. It could be mundane (practice, consistency, showing up) or ethical (repairing a relationship, keeping a promise). That vagueness is the point: everyone has an inventory of doable tasks they’d rather not face. By contrast, “something they can’t do” is the glamorous category, the one that flatters the ego. Failure there feels noble; failure at the doable feels humiliating.
As a late-19th/early-20th-century American writer and editor, Howe was steeped in a culture that fetishized self-making while also selling a lot of get-rich confidence. The quote reads like a corrective to that era’s boosterism: a reminder that competence is built from neglected basics, and that the hardest thing isn’t the impossible - it’s committing to the possible until it’s done.
Quote Details
| Topic | Wisdom |
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