The phrase was coined by James Truslow Adams in The Epic of America, published in 1931.
Nineteen thirty-one. Unemployment near a quarter of the workforce, banks failing, the Dust Bowl beginning. That is when the country produced the phrase for its own optimism, and the phrase stuck.
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.
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.
A nineteenth-century American novelist who wrote the same book more than a hundred times: a poor boy, honest and hardworking, rises through his own effort. The plots were formulaic and the books sold enormously. His name became a common noun for the story itself.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Barbara Ehrenreich’s 2009 book attacked American positive thinking as a coercive ideology — one that makes suffering the fault of the sufferer and turns compulsory cheerfulness into a workplace requirement.
It was widely read and widely argued with. The critique is evidence for the thing it criticizes: no other culture needed a book like this.