You can be anything you want to be, if only you believe with sufficient conviction and act in accordance with your faith; for whatever the mind can conceive and believe, the mind can achieve.

— Napoleon Hill

I went to Alcatraz. To visit. Not to stay.

I could feel the lingering energy of the place: the isolation, the loneliness, the anguish; fragments of violence and remorse.

I could imagine the hopelessness, the discouragement, the despair felt by those who were imprisoned there. As I looked across the Bay, I could sense what it must have been like to look out on such beauty, vibrancy, and vitality, and yet to be shut off and locked away.

Perhaps I could imagine it because I do it to myself.

Do you know how they train a baby elephant not to wander? They drive a stake in the ground and tether its leg with a short length of rope. As the elephant grows, its mass becomes such that it could easily pull the stake from the ground.  But the elephant presumes that it’s still stuck. It never tries to break free.

Too often, we are elephants.

Brian Tracy, author of Create Your Own Future, writes, “Your greatest limits are not external. They are internal within your thinking. They are contained in your personal self-limiting beliefs. These beliefs act as brakes on your potential.  These are beliefs that cause you to sell yourself short, and to settle for far less than you are truly capable of.”

Early on in life we are told what we can and cannot do.  Early on we are taught what to expect, what to believe, what to think we can achieve. We get “domesticated.” (Not good to be wild!)

Early on we get tied to a stake. We put ourselves in prison.

The quest – the Journey – is to break free.

What we are capable of is: anything.  There is no barrier to what is possible. Whatever we dream or imagine, we can achieve.

Michelangelo imagined the David. Edison the light bulb. Bannister the four minute mile. Disney imagined the Magic Kingdom. Jim Carrey his multi-million dollar career. Realities in their minds long before they “existed” in the world. (Or did they always exist?)

“Imagination is everything,” said Einstein. “It is the preview of life’s coming attractions.”

Edison wrote, “If we did all the things we are capable of doing, we would literally astound ourselves.”

“Thoughts become things,” writes Mike Dooley. “Choose the good ones.”  Choose the ones that will make you soar. Choose the ones that build cathedrals and bring peace. Choose the ones that make art and write poems and build Internet empires. Choose the ones that make manifest your wildest hopes and dreams.

In the new techno-thriller Limitless, the writer Eddie Morra played by Bradley Cooper discovers an “illicit” pill that, in an instant, releases the full potential of his mind; a pill that allows him to access all of his intelligence, his energy, his drive; a pill that allows everything to become possible. With it, he discovers a power beyond anything he could ever have imagined.

What if we were capable of anything? What if we were limitless?

What if anything were possible?

We need no pill.

It is.