Ali isn't simply telling us that impossible things are possible—he's diagnosing *why* we abandon effort in the first place. Notice he calls "impossible" a word, not a condition; the real problem isn't the thing itself but our willingness to use language as a trap door out of responsibility. What sets this apart from cheerful motivational talk is his insistence that accepting limits is actually *easier*, more comfortable, a kind of intellectual surrender—so when someone declares something impossible, they're often confessing something about their own appetite for discomfort. A factory worker who stayed in a job he hated for thirty years might mutter "I could never start my own business" not because it's genuinely undoable, but because the familiar ache of that job required less of him than the messy uncertainty of trying something new.