As I embrace my new role as Entrepreneur in Residence at the Bayes Centre, I’m tempted to weave a little poetry into my occasional musings. I can’t promise a weekly sonnet, so this will be decidedly ad hoc, and may expand or contract depending on feedback.
Inspired by William Sieghart’s wonderful Poetry Pharmacy collections, I’ve been enjoying poems that speak, sometimes unexpectedly, to different aspects of business life: leadership, resilience, ambition, uncertainty, failure and change. Until now, I think most poems I could occasionally bring to mind feature either love, life, grief or war!
I take no credit for discovering the one below, which appears in The Poetry Pharmacy Forever, but it feels like a good place to start. It resonated with me personally, having spent much of my [working] life being drawn to ideas that others thought unlikely, difficult or simply couldn’t be done.
I’ve kept Guest’s original 1914 wording.
To the cohort … for inspiration
It Couldn’t Be Done
Edgar A. Guest
Somebody said that it couldn’t be done,
But he with a chuckle replied
That “maybe it couldn’t,” but he would be one
Who wouldn’t say so till he’d tried.
So he buckled right in with the trace of a grin
On his face. If he worried he hid it.
He started to sing as he tackled the thing
That couldn’t be done, and he did it.
Somebody scoffed: “Oh, you’ll never do that;
At least no one ever has done it”;
But he took off his coat and he took off his hat,
And the first thing we knew he’d begun it.
With a lift of his chin and a bit of a grin,
Without any doubting or quiddit,
He started to sing as he tackled the thing
That couldn’t be done, and he did it.
There are thousands to tell you it cannot be done,
There are thousands to prophesy failure;
There are thousands to point out to you one by one,
The dangers that wait to assail you.
But just buckle in with a bit of a grin,
Just take off your coat and go to it;
Just start in to sing as you tackle the thing
That “cannot be done,” and you’ll do it.
[first published 1914]
