Naive Advantage
At fifteen, Richard Branson cold-called major companies from a phone booth, pitching advertising space in a magazine that didn't yet exist. "Had I been five or six years older," Branson said, "the sheer absurdity of trying to sell advertising to major companies in a magazine that did not exist and edited by two fifteen-year-old schoolboys, would have prevented me from picking up the phone to do it." He was too young to contemplate failure.
George Dantzig, a Berkeley math student, arrived late to class one day and copied what he thought were homework problems from the blackboard. After days of struggle, he solved them—only to discover they weren't homework at all, but two famous unsolved problems that had stumped mathematicians for years. By not knowing they were "impossible," Dantzig approached them with simple determination.
Sam Walton put it plainly: "It was a real blessing for me to be so green and ignorant." Sometimes ignorance isn't a handicap. Sometimes it's the very thing that allows you to attempt what experience would tell you is impossible.