Have you heard of Roger Bannister?

In 1954, he ran the four-minute mile. For decades, experts called it impossible. A hard ceiling. Settled science.

Then he did it.

Within 46 days, someone else broke it. Within three years, sixteen runners had.

The human body didn't evolve. Track technology didn't transform. What changed was belief.

This is the Possibility Switch.

We filter out what feels impossible. Our minds don't engage with problems beyond reach. But the moment someone proves something can be done? That switch flicks. The invisible becomes visible. Fantasy becomes puzzle.

Puzzles get solved.

Here's where it matters.

Tesla didn't just build cars. Musk flicked the switch on an entire category. For 80 years, no new American car company had succeeded. Too capital-intensive. Too entrenched.

Then Tesla worked. Rivian and Lucid followed. They didn't imagine the destination; they reverse-engineered the path. The hard part was done for them.

The implication is uncomfortable.

If knowing something is possible is most of the battle, then revealing what's possible is the most generous gift you can give your competition.

You're not sharing information. You're activating minds that would never have engaged. You're recruiting competitors who didn't know the game existed.

Disney understood this. They never published a book on the business model of animation. Explaining how lucrative it was would invite competition into a monopoly they'd held for decades.

Their silence was their moat.

Biggie Smalls had a phrase for it: "Bad boys move in silence."

For high-performance sport, this principle deserves more attention than it gets.

The best IP protection isn't patents or NDAs. It's obscurity.

The moment a competitor learns what you've figured out, you've flicked their switch. You've handed them the most valuable thing: the knowledge that it can be done.

Questions worth sitting with:

Where are your organisation broadcasting methods that could stay quiet? Conference presentations. Secondary networks. Casual conversations at industry events.

If you have genuine R&D capacity, real innovation in athlete development or performance systems, are you protecting it through silence, or just paperwork? Is it incentivised to move quickly and quietly?

Are competitors filtering out opportunities because they seem impossible? How do you keep it that way?

The most defensible advantage is the one no one knows to attack.