Where Did "It'S Always Seems Impossible Until It'S Done" Originate?

Tough nights or lazy Sunday afternoons — either way, I reach for movies where sheer stubbornness and human grit win out against ridiculous odds. For me, nothing captures that electric mix of desperation and determination like 'Rocky'. It’s raw, imperfect, and somehow makes you believe an underdog with enough heart and training can stand toe-to-toe with a champion. The training montages, the little victories in the gym, and that final round are pure willpower distilled into cinema. Likewise, 'Rudy' scratches a similar itch: small-town dreams, ridicule, and a refusal to let limitations define you. Some films push physical will to the edge. '127 Hours' is a brutal, intimate study of survival where every breath becomes a choice, while 'The Martian' blends scientific ingenuity with stubborn optimism — I love how humor and nerdy problem-solving make perseverance feel triumphant. 'Cast Away' and 'Life of Pi' both reinvent solitude as a battlefield you have to out-think and out-feel. Then there are movies like 'Unbroken' (based on a true story) and 'Apollo 13' that show will as communal — it's not just survival but the refusal of an entire team or spirit to accept defeat. I also always recommend 'The Shawshank Redemption' for emotional endurance; hope there is its own kind of muscle. Other picks skew toward social and systemic obstacles: 'The Pursuit of Happyness' and 'Erin Brockovich' spotlight everyday perseverance against financial and institutional crushing forces, while 'Slumdog Millionaire' and 'Million Dollar Baby' mix fate with grind, proving that persistence often arrives as a mix of luck and relentless effort. Sports and team-up stories like 'Miracle' and 'Remember the Titans' give that communal, sweat-and-heart flavor, where leadership and belief turn unlikely teams into legends. If you want reading or deeper dives, many of these have books or true stories behind them — 'Unbroken' and 'The Pursuit of Happyness' especially — which add another layer of inspiration. These movies stick with me because they don’t sugarcoat the cost of perseverance; they show the small daily choices that add up into something impossible becoming possible, and that idea never fails to light a spark in me.

Back when I was deep into collecting rare game-related novels, I stumbled upon 'Impossible Creatures' and fell in love with its blend of fantasy and adventure. From what I've gathered, finding it as a PDF isn’t straightforward. The novel’s tied to a niche game, so it hasn’t gotten the widespread digital treatment like mainstream titles. I checked forums and even asked around in collector circles—most folks say physical copies are your best bet. Some out-of-print book sites might have scans, but they’re iffy quality-wise. Honestly, part of the charm is hunting down that elusive paperback edition. There’s something satisfying about flipping through its pages, especially with the artwork intact. If you’re set on digital, maybe keep an eye on indie bookseller sites or small publishers who occasionally digitize cult classics. Till then, happy treasure hunting!

When I first bumped into that phrasing on a café wall poster, it felt punchy and true — but I also winced at the grammar. The line that gets quoted a lot is, in its clearest form, It always seems impossible until it's done. Most reputable sources attribute that sentiment to Nelson Mandela, and that version is the one you'll see in quote collections and biographies. What trips people up is the way the phrase hops from speech to social media: contractions get added, tense shifts, and sometimes people accidentally stitch words together into clumsy variants like "it's always seems impossible," which is just a slip in spoken haste. Beyond the tiny grammar police moment, I think the bigger phenomenon is paraphrase-by-feel. Folks love to make quotes sound like the way they would say them — adding "it" or "it's" or swapping a verb tense — and that spreads faster than the original. I've seen it misattributed occasionally too, with people tagging other public figures or leaving the author out entirely. If you care about accuracy, the safe move is to use the clean version and name Mandela when possible, or check a reliable quote archive or the original speech transcript if you need to be formal. For casual use, though, I forgive the variations; they usually keep the spirit even if the wording gets messy, and that spirit has helped me grit through deadlines more than once.

Philosophy used to feel like a treasure hunt for me, and Zeno’s attack on plurality is one of those shiny, weird finds that keeps you thinking long after you close the book. Zeno lived in a world shaped by Parmenides’ scare-the-daylights-out claim that only 'what is' exists, and 'what is not' cannot be. Zeno’s point was tactical: if you accept lots of distinct things—many bodies, many bits—then you get into self-contradictions. For example, if things are made of many parts, either each part has size or it doesn’t. If each part has size, add enough of them and you get an absurdly large bulk; if each part has no size (infinitesimals), then adding infinitely many of them should give you nothing. Either way, plurality seems impossible. He also argued that if parts touch, they must either have gaps (making separation) or be fused (making unity), so plurality collapses into contradiction. I love that Zeno’s move wasn’t just to be puzzling for puzzlement’s sake; he wanted to defend Parmenides’ monism. Later thinkers like Aristotle and, centuries after, calculus fans quietly explained many of Zeno’s moves by clarifying infinity, limits, and measurement. Still, Zeno’s knack for forcing us to examine basic assumptions about number, space, and being is what keeps me returning to his fragments.

I get a little thrill every time I think about this line because it feels like a tiny, hard nugget of truth dropped into the middle of chaos. In 'Macbeth' the phrase 'What's done is done' is spoken to calm and steady — it comes in Act 3 when Lady Macbeth is trying to soothe Macbeth's frayed nerves after the terrible chain of events they set in motion. At face value it simply means the past is fixed: you can't unmake an action, so dwelling on it won't change what happened. It's practical, blunt, and meant to move someone out of paralyzing regret and back into action. But the way Shakespeare uses it is deliciously complicated. For me, watching a production years ago, that line landed as both consoling and chilling. Lady Macbeth is trying to hold things together, to convince herself and her husband that they can contain the mess they've created. Yet the play then shows the slow, relentless return of conscience — sleepwalking scenes, haunted visions, and a sense that some things refuse to be brushed aside. Later she even says, 'What's done cannot be undone,' which flips the consoling tone into a tragic realization: the past won't just pass quietly; it will gnaw. So the phrase is both a coping mechanism and, ironically, an early hint of doom. I also like how the line travels out of its original context into everyday life. People use 'what's done is done' when they want to stop ruminating about a mistake — on a forum, in a text to a friend, or even in a workplace after a screw-up. But Shakespeare’s usage reminds me to be cautious: sometimes moving on is wise, and sometimes the refusal to reckon with consequences simply lets problems fester. As a reader and theater-goer, I find the tension between stoic acceptance and moral accountability to be the most interesting part. It’s a short phrase with a lot of emotional baggage, and that’s why it sticks in my head whenever I’m weighing whether to forgive myself or fix what I can.

I love that little line — it feels like folklore now, but it actually comes from William Shakespeare. He wrote the phrase in the tragedy 'Macbeth', and the line appears in Act 3, Scene 2. In the play, it’s Lady Macbeth who utters the curt comfort "What's done is done" as she tries to steady Macbeth after they’ve both been pulled into murder and its fallout. The cool part is that the phrase is meant to sound decisive, but the play later dismantles that neatness: guilt keeps rising until sleepwalking and madness, which makes the line bittersweet rather than truly consoling. If you like dates and editions, scholars date the writing of 'Macbeth' to around 1606, during the early Jacobean period — Shakespeare was writing for a court that had fresh anxieties about regicide and power after the Gunpowder Plot of 1605. The play was first collected in the First Folio of 1623, but composition and likely early performances were a decade or so earlier. I find it neat to think about a packed indoor theater in London, candlelight and all, when that throwaway sentence landed and started echoing for centuries. It’s a tiny line with huge cultural life, and whenever I read it I imagine both the stage and the quiet aftermath where the real consequences live.

Honestly, when I hear 'What I've Done' I always feel the song reaching for a clean slate — like someone finally saying out loud that they need to change. The band wrote those lyrics during the 'Minutes to Midnight' era when they were pushing away from the heavier nu‑metal label and trying to be more direct and human in their words. The lines are spare but charged: it's confession, it's accountability, it's the desire to erase or at least confront past mistakes. I liked hearing that the song wasn't just theatrical anger; it was personal and also global. The video piles on images of violence, fame, and environmental damage, which turns a personal apology into a collective mirror. Musically the track puts the voice and that stark chorus front and center, so the words land. For me, it’s the kind of song you sing badly in the car and somehow feel lighter afterward — like admitting something half‑out loud makes it easier to start fixing it.

When I’m sketching out a season, my desk looks like chaos: sticky notes on the monitor, a stack of index cards, my phone full of voice memos. For the actual heavy lifting I lean on a mix of specialist and general tools. Final Draft still feels like the industry lingua franca for tight script formatting and page-based timing, but for real-time collaboration I jump into WriterDuet or Google Docs so people can annotate and riff together. Scrivener and Notion are my go-to for storing research, scene fragments, and character dossiers; I love how Notion can hold episode bibles, scene lists, and a rolling to-do board in one place. When ideas need visualizing, Milanote or Trello become my index cards — draggable, color-coded, and great for beat sheets like Save the Cat! I also use Obsidian for linked notes when I’m building complex lore, because the bidirectional links make every connective tissue show up like a map. For table reads and remote sessions, Zoom with an Otter.ai transcript saved to Dropbox or Google Drive is a life-saver; having searchable text from a read-through speeds revisions exponentially. For production logistics I peek into StudioBinder or Movie Magic for scheduling and call sheets. And when I’m procrastinating, I let a tool like ChatGPT or Sudowrite spitball scene sparks — then I always immediately move back into a structured tool to keep everything version-controlled. Honestly, the trick isn’t one perfect app; it’s the habit of moving between ideation, drafting, and organizing tools so nothing falls through the cracks.