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Sí Se Puede

In 1972 Arizona passed a law that denied farmworkers “the right to strike and boycott during harvest seasons.” Cesar Chavez began a fast in protest at Santa Rita Hall in Phoenix. Local Latino leaders told Dolores Huerta: “No, aqui en Arizona, no se puede,” meaning no, here in Arizona it can’t be done. She answered: “Si se puede en Arizona.” Huerta recalled: “Everybody stood up and they started clapping ‘Si Se Puede.'”

The phrase became the rallying cry of the farmworkers’ campaign in Arizona. On January 8, 2008, Barack Obama came in second in the New Hampshire primary. That night he said: “when we’ve been told we’re not ready or that we shouldn’t try or that we can’t, generations of Americans have responded with a simple creed that sums up the spirit of a people: Yes we can.”

Science the S— Out of This

In Andy Weir’s novel The Martian, first self-published as a serial on his blog and released as a book in 2011, astronaut Mark Watney is left behind on Mars. He grows potatoes in the habitat, makes water from rocket fuel, revives the old Pathfinder lander to contact NASA and modifies a rover for a 3,235-kilometer drive.

In Ridley Scott’s 2015 film, Matt Damon’s Watney sums up his position: “In the face of overwhelming odds, I’m left with only one option: I’m gonna have to science the s— out of this.”

In the closing scene he says: “You just begin. You do the math. You solve one problem… and you solve the next one… and then the next. And if you solve enough problems, you get to come home.”

The First Fireside Chat

On March 12, 1933, Franklin D. Roosevelt spoke on the radio about the banking crisis. He began: “I want to talk for a few minutes with the people of the United States about banking.” He promised to explain “what has been done in the last few days, why it was done.”

Near the end he said: “It is your problem no less than it is mine. Together we cannot fail.”

Learned optimism

Martin Seligman spent his early career on learned helplessness: after repeated uncontrollable adversity, people stop trying even when they could succeed. It became a leading model for depression.

Then he inverted it. If helplessness can be learned, so can optimism. He identified explanatory style as the mechanism — pessimists attribute bad events to causes that are internal, stable and global, and those attributions can be disputed and changed.

Elected president of the American Psychological Association in 1998 by the widest margin in its history, he used the position to launch positive psychology as a field. An American psychologist turned optimism into a research discipline and then into a training programme.

The Power of Positive Thinking

Norman Vincent Peale published it in 1952, and it stayed on the bestseller lists for years. It is one of the most widely sold books in American publishing history. The title is an argument: that thinking has power, and that the direction of the thinking determines what follows.

We choose to go to the moon

Kennedy at Rice University in 1962: we choose to go to the moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard.

The difficulty is offered as the reason rather than the obstacle. Nobody had been to the moon, no vehicle existed that could go there, and the deadline was set anyway.

Failure is not an option

The line is associated with Gene Kranz, the NASA flight director during Apollo 13. He did not say it. It was written for the 1995 film.

Kranz liked it enough to use it as the title of his memoir. An invented line about American determination was adopted by the man it was invented for.

Grit

Angela Duckworth’s research argues that sustained effort over long periods predicts achievement better than talent does, and her book on it was a substantial American bestseller.

The finding is congenial, and that is part of why it travelled. It says the thing did not work yet, rather than that it will not work.

Figures of speech

Can-do attitude. A hiring criterion, stated as such.

Where there’s a will, there’s a way. The way is asserted to exist, conditional only on wanting it.

The sky’s the limit. Which is to say, no limit you will encounter.

When life gives you lemons, make lemonade. The instruction is not to endure the lemons but to convert them.

Nothing’s impossible. Said flatly, in ordinary conversation, about ordinary difficulties.

The reframe

American workplace vocabulary systematically renames difficulty.

A problem is an opportunity. An obstacle is a challenge. A failure is a learning experience. A collapse is a setback, which contains the assumption that forward motion resumes.

None of these are euphemisms exactly. Each one carries a claim about what happens next.