The week I signed my rookie contract with the Adelaide 36ers, I did what every insecure young player does. I googled myself.

It took me to a basketball forum. Strangers with usernames, picking apart the new signing. Me.

Too skinny. Not athletic enough for the NBL. Decent SEABL numbers, but SEABL isn’t the NBL. Bench player at best.

I read every comment. Then I read them again. I sat on the edge of my bed, phone getting hot in my hand, absolutely furious. Not because they were cruel. Because they sounded so sure.

They measured my potential without knowing anything about who I am.

My rookie year I averaged 3.4 points. There comments rang true in my ear. 10 years later and they couldn’t have been further from correct.

The forum wasn’t wrong about who I was that day. Those anonymous accounts were wrong about who I could become.

When my head was filled with doubt and insecurities, I was lucky enough that I stumbled across an odd mentor to start my pro career. A physicist.

David Deutsch spent his career studying how knowledge grows. In The Beginning of Infinity, he lays out what he calls the principle of optimism:

All evils are caused by insufficient knowledge.

His argument is simple and radical. Any problem that isn’t forbidden by the laws of physics can be solved. The only thing between you and the solution is knowledge you don’t have yet. And knowledge can always be created.

That doesn’t mean anything is possible. Physics still applies. I’m never going to be seven feet tall. But “not strong enough for the NBL” isn’t a law of physics. It’s a knowledge problem. How do you build strength on a frame like mine? What do you eat? Who do you learn from? Every one of those questions had an answer. I just didn’t have it yet.

That’s what the forum got wrong, and it’s what every prediction about your potential gets wrong. It assumes your knowledge is frozen. It never is.

So stop letting other people define your ceiling. They can only measure what you know today. They can’t see what you’ll learn tomorrow, or next year, or in ten. Their opinion isn’t a forecast. It’s a photo.

Every problem in front of you that isn’t forbidden by physics is solvable. The body, the skill, the confidence, the fear. Not easily. Not quickly. But solvable, by learning what you don’t know yet.

Deutsch named his book well. Knowledge has no ceiling and neither does the person who keeps creating it. You are not at the end of who you can become. You’re at the beginning of infinity..