— The Courage to Begin —

It always seems impossible until it’s done.

Nelson Mandela

About the Author

Nelson Rolihlahla Mandela (1918–2013) was born in the small village of Mvezo in the Transkei region of South Africa, the son of a Thembu chief. He became a lawyer, then an activist, then a prisoner — and finally, the man who would hold a fractured nation together with the sheer force of his belief that freedom and dignity belonged to everyone. He spent twenty-seven years confined to Robben Island and other South African prisons, much of it in a cell barely large enough to extend his arms fully. He broke rocks in the prison quarry under a sun that damaged his eyes permanently. He was denied the right to attend his own mother’s funeral. And yet, when he walked out of Victor Verster Prison on February 11, 1990, he raised his fist in a salute to freedom rather than to vengeance — and the watching world understood that it had just witnessed something almost beyond human accounting.
He served as the first democratically elected President of South Africa from 1994 to 1999 — and when his term ended, he stepped down. Voluntarily. In a continent accustomed to leaders who held power by force, the act of choosing to leave was itself a kind of revolution.
He was called Madiba, his clan name — a term of deep affection used by those who loved him. He was given the Nobel Peace Prize in 1993, alongside F.W. de Klerk. He died at his home in Johannesburg at the age of ninety-five, a man who had lived long enough to see the impossible become ordinary.
He appeared in this book once before, on January 11, for his words about rising after falling. He is here again because he earned the right to speak to us twice — and because this particular sentence is addressed to everyone who has ever stood at the edge of something hard and told themselves it cannot be done.

Historical Context

Mandela offered this line not as abstract philosophy, but as the conclusion of a life that had been lived against the grain of every reasonable expectation. When he began the work of dismantling apartheid, the obstacles were not merely difficult — they were enshrined in law, enforced by the state, and backed by an international community that, for too many years, looked the other way. The men who imprisoned him believed they were stopping something that could not happen. They were right for twenty-seven years. Then they were not.
The sentence is elegant in its simplicity: it always seems impossible until it’s done. The word “always” is doing the heavy lifting. Not “sometimes.” Not “often.” Always. Mandela is telling us that the feeling of impossibility is not a reliable forecast — it is simply what the beginning of hard things feels like. Every task that has ever been accomplished in human history was, at some point before its completion, a thing that seemed beyond reach. The feeling of impossibility is the default state of the unfinished.
What Mandela learned on Robben Island — and what he spent the rest of his life quietly teaching — is that the feeling is not the fact. The feeling passes. The work remains. And one day, the thing that could not be done is simply done.

A Story to Sit With

In 1964, the year Mandela was sentenced to life in prison, a young South African journalist asked a government official how long it would take to end apartheid. The official laughed. “It is written into the constitution,” he said. “It is the law of the land. It will never change.”
Twenty-six years later, Mandela walked free. Four years after that, he took the presidential oath of office in Pretoria — the same city where he had been tried for treason — and the man who swore him in was the same white-led government that had imprisoned him.
The journalist who had asked that question in 1964 was still alive to see it. He later said he had remembered the official’s laughter every single day of those intervening years, and that watching the inauguration, he had thought: this is what the impossible looks like when it finally finishes becoming possible.
Mandela would have nodded. He already knew.

Scripture Cross-Links

Matthew 19:26 — “With men this is impossible; but with God all things are possible.”
Philippians 4:13 — “I can do all things through Christ which strengtheneth me.”
1 Nephi 3:7 — “I will go and do the things which the Lord hath commanded, for I know that the Lord giveth no commandments unto the children of men, save he shall prepare a way for them.”
Doctrine and Covenants 123:17 — “Therefore, dearest brethren, let us cheerfully do all things that lie in our power; and then may we stand still, with the utmost assurance, to see the salvation of God.”
Ether 12:27 — “And if men come unto me I will show unto them their weakness… for if they humble themselves before me, and have faith in me, then will I make weak things become strong unto them.”

Thematic Reflection

There is a particular kind of paralysis that comes not from laziness but from imagination. We can see the distance between where we are and where we need to go, and our minds — helpful, well-meaning, risk-averse — lay out every obstacle between here and there. And the list is usually accurate. The obstacles are real. The distance is genuinely far. The conclusion that it cannot be done is logical.
Mandela’s sentence is not an argument against careful thinking. It is a warning against letting careful thinking become the final verdict. The mind that sees all the obstacles is doing its job. But it cannot see the end of the story — because the end of the story has not happened yet. “It always seems impossible” is a description of a moment in time, not a judgment on the outcome. The impossible feeling is early-stage information, not the final report.
And here is the thing our Father in Heaven seems to know better than we do: He does not ask us to feel confident that something is possible before He asks us to begin. He asks us to begin. The confidence — what scripture calls faith — comes in the doing. Not before.
This is the testimony of every great thing that has ever been built or healed or changed: it seemed impossible, and then it was done.

Richard’s Personal Reflection

Thirty years of medicine taught me to sit with the families of people who had been given impossible diagnoses — and to watch, often enough to make a skeptic pause, as some of them walked out of outcomes that no textbook would have predicted. I learned very early not to use the word “impossible” in a room where a patient was still fighting.
But I have also learned this same lesson in my own life, in quieter rooms. There have been projects — this book among them — where I stood at the beginning and could see clearly how much work stood between me and the end, and felt the weight of that distance settle over me like weather. The impossible feeling is very specific: it does not announce itself as fear. It disguises itself as reason. It says: look at the facts. Be realistic. You are one person, with limited time, and there is very much to be done.
What I have learned — slowly, imperfectly, with Grandma’s patient help — is to answer that voice with action rather than argument. Not “I can prove you wrong,” but simply: I will begin. And then to do the next thing. And the next. And to trust that the distance, which looked so permanent from the start, has a way of becoming history once you are moving through it.
The entries in this book were, each one, impossible until they were done. This one too.

Grandfather’s Counsel

My dear ones, you will stand at the edge of hard things more times than I can count, and the feeling you will have — almost every time — is that the thing before you cannot be done. I want you to notice that feeling, acknowledge it, and then take one step forward anyway.
Not because the feeling is wrong about the difficulty. It is usually right about the difficulty. But it is wrong about the outcome. The difficulty is real. The impossibility is not.
You are descended from people who crossed oceans and plains and deserts to build a life they believed in. They stood where you are standing now, looked at distances that dwarfed what they had, and they began. The doing is what made it possible. It does not work the other way around.
Start. Keep going. One day, what seemed impossible will simply be your life — the ordinary, finished, beautiful result of all those moments when you chose to begin anyway.
It always seems impossible until it’s done.