You may have heard this story, but probably not the true one, the one that George Dantzig himself recounted in a 1986 interview for the College Mathematics journal.

In 1939, George was a student at University of California at Berkeley. He’d showed up late at  Dr. Jerzy Neyman's class, the head of the statistics department, one of the two founders of modern statistics. On the blackboard he saw two statistical problems he figured were the class’s homework, so he copied them down.

Several days later, he apologized to Neyman for taking so much time to do the homework, but the problems had seemed a little harder than usual. He asked Neyman if he still wanted to grade it, and the professor told George to toss the paper on his desk on top of  piles of papers.

Some six weeks later at 8 am one Sunday morning George and his wife Anne were woken up by hard banging on the front door. He opened the door with a shock. Neyman was standing there, holding his two papers.  ‘I’ve just written an introduction to one of your papers!’ he exclaimed. ‘Read it so I can send it out right away for publication.’

George had no idea what his professor was talking about, until the professor explained that he was going to send George’s paper to a scientific journal to publish.  The two math problems George had believed were homework were in fact two famous statistical problems that had remained unsolved and were thought to be impossible. In both cases, George had solved statistical problems that had confounded the best minds in statistics.

The following year, when George was scouting around for a subject for his thesis Professor Neyman told him that the solutions to the two problems alone were PhD thesis fodder enough and told him to simply put them in a binder.

The first paper got published at the time, but the second one wasn’t published until 11 years later. A man called Abraham Wald sent George final galley proofs of his own paper, about to go to press in a statistics journal, after someone had alerted him to the fact that George had already solved that second problem in his thesis. Wald graciously inserted Dantzig’s name on the paper and they were ultimately published as co-authors.

George eventually ended up as professor of operations research at Stanford and even received the National Medal of Science. This story turned into urban myth, was greatly embellished and appropriated by many ministers, including  Christian televangelist Robert Schuller, and was even considered the source of the film Good Will Hunting.

The takeaway in any version, though, was George’s attitude to the ‘homework.’ By arriving late, he didn’t know that the two problems were unsolvable. He assumed his professor expected the students to solve the problems, so he did. He didn’t know they were considered unsolvable, and without that limitation, he able to successfully tackle the impossible.

This is an important lesson about the thoughts you think about your own ability, especially when it comes to a challenging situation.

Like the old saying goes, whether you think you can or you think you can’t . . . you’re right.