Yes, I think it's absolutely worth arguing the difference between "it's hard" and "it's impossible", because those are two fundamentally different things. You

Yes, I think it's absolutely worth arguing the difference between "it's hard" and "it's impossible", because those are two fundamentally different things. You can overcome difficulty, you cannot overcome (by definition) impossibility. What you keep ignoring in what I'm saying however, is that I do think certain things are impossible for some people. I will never play in the NBA, for example, but that's a far cry from being "very good" at basketball. Learning calculus and completing a marathon are not the point at which "healthy" (and yes, it's fuzzy, but precision is impossible on this topic) people are sometimes unable to do things. Winning a marathon and getting a Ph.D. in mathematics, I would acquiesce to your argument. In other words, I think anyone can dabble in anything, but you do need an alignment of genetic and environmental circumstances to be in the top 1% of something. I could be argued into top 10%, but below that, it appears the data supports almost anyone being able to do almost anything, or at least well beyond whatever artificial lines we might draw to discourage people from achieving.