Can-Do Archives - understand-culture

It Ain’t Over Till It’s Over

On August 30, 1973, the New York Mets were “in last place, 6 1/2 games out of first.” They won 21 of their last 29 games, took the division on the last day, beat the Cincinnati Reds for the pennant and lost the World Series in Game 7. Their rallying cry was “You Gotta Believe.”

Their manager, Yogi Berra, is remembered for saying “It ain’t over till it’s over” that season. The press of the time shows other words. On September 4, 1973, the New York Post quoted him: “Yeah, it’s running out, but you’re still not out of it until it’s automatic.”

The War on Cancer

In his 1971 State of the Union address, President Richard Nixon asked for “the same kind of concentrated effort that split the atom and took man to the moon” to be turned toward cancer. On December 23, 1971, he signed the National Cancer Act, which became known as “The War on Cancer.” The aim was “nothing short of the eradication of cancer.”

The effort brought real gains. It also created “unrealistic expectations that a cancer cure was just around the corner.” In 2022 President Joe Biden relaunched the Cancer Moonshot with a new goal: to “reduce the death rate from cancer by at least 50 percent over the next 25 years.”

The comparison with the Moon landing stayed. The goal became smaller.

Pollyanna

In Eleanor H. Porter’s 1913 novel Pollyanna, a girl plays the Glad Game: “finding something to be glad about in every situation, no matter how bleak it may be.” It began when she hoped for a doll from a missionary barrel and got crutches instead. Her father taught her to be glad that she did not need them. Hayley Mills won a special Oscar for the role in Disney’s 1960 film.

The name became a word for someone with “an unfailingly optimistic outlook.” It is also used as criticism, for someone “whose optimism is excessive to the point of naïveté.”

The Ship Built to Wear Out

In Democracy in America, published in two parts in 1835 and 1840, Alexis de Tocqueville wrote: “I accost an American sailor, and inquire why the ships of his country are built so as to last but for a short time; he answers without hesitation, that the art of navigation is every day making such rapid progress, that the finest vessel would become almost useless if it lasted beyond a few years.”

From such answers, Tocqueville wrote, the American “infers that man is endowed with an indefinite faculty of improvement.” The chapter is titled “How Equality Suggests to the Americans the Idea of the Indefinite Perfectibility of Man.”

Forces Outside Our Control

In a survey published in 2015, the Pew Research Center asked young adults whether “success in life is pretty much determined by forces outside our control.” Among young Americans, 43 percent agreed. Seventy-three percent said that hard work is the key to getting ahead in life.

Whether You Think You Can

“Whether you think you can or you think you can’t, you’re right” is credited to Henry Ford. The earliest Ford attribution found by Quote Investigator is in Reader’s Digest in September 1947: “Whether you believe you can do a thing or not, you are right.” Ford had died that April, and the magazine gave no source.

The idea is much older. Virgil wrote “Possunt quia posse videntur,” which John Dryden translated as “For they can conquer who believe they can.” In 1905 John Herbert Phillips combined both halves of the saying in a speech to high school students in Alabama.

High Hopes

“High Hopes,” with music by Jimmy Van Heusen and lyrics by Sammy Cahn, was sung by Frank Sinatra and the boy actor Eddie Hodges in the 1959 film A Hole in the Head. It won the Oscar for Best Original Song. In the song, an ant moves a rubber tree plant all by himself, and a ram puts a hole in a dam.

In 1960 Van Heusen and Cahn wrote new lyrics, and the song became the theme of John F. Kennedy’s presidential campaign.

The Impossible Takes a Little Longer

“The difficult we do immediately; the impossible takes a little longer.” In March 1942 a newspaper column credited to the New York Sun reported this as the training slogan of the Army’s Ordnance Department. In January 1943 Major General Henry S. Aurand raised it one level for his supply command: “The impossible we do immediately; the miraculous takes a little longer.”

The idea came from Europe. A 1795 magazine quotes the French finance minister Calonne: “If it is possible, Madam, the affair is done; if it is impossible, it shall be done!” In 1925 the Norwegian explorer Fridtjof Nansen said: “The difficult is that which can be done at once: the impossible is that which takes a little longer.”

Can Do

In World War II the U.S. Navy created Construction Battalions. The name became “Seabees,” from the pronunciation of “C.B.” Their official motto is Latin, Construimus, Batuimus, “We build, we fight.” But the force also “adopted the motto “Can Do” as the force believed it could do anything it was tasked with.”

The Seabees’ own slogan went one step further: “The difficult we Can Do now, The impossible takes a little longer.”

I Think I Can

The Little Engine That Could was published in 1930 under the name Watty Piper, a pen name of Arnold Munk. Its little engine repeats: “I think I can, I think I can, I think I can.” The story was meant “to teach children the value of optimism and hard work.”

Earlier versions existed, including one in the New-York Tribune in 1906. In 2007 the National Education Association listed the book among its “Teachers’ Top 100 Books for Children.” Its publisher, Francesco Sedita, called the engine “the poster engine of the can-do attitude.”