The Origins of Insurmountable Opportunity

Had to come from somewhere

Having some kind of grip on the meaning of the phrase insurmountable opportunity, I started wondering where it came from. Turns out there is an interesting story there as well – there is an origin to the statement. 

Scanning the internet, the earliest attribution of this quote I found was to a guy named Don Mitchell from something called the Creative Education Foundation in Buffalo, New York. He supposedly said it to someone from General Electric at an advertising conference in 1956. Later, in 1959 and 1962, other people in business used similar versions of the quote, usually for laughs. By March 1968, important U.S. figures like Secretary of Labor W. Willard Wirtz and Vice President Hubert Humphrey were quoting it and linking it to a comic strip known as Pogo.

Now, it is my understanding that Fred Luddy is a big fan of the old Pogo comic strip. Written by Walt Kelly, Pogo ran from 1948 to 1975. While it was ostensibly for kids and ran on the comics page of the daily newspaper (once a major form of entertainment) Pogo also had a satirical undertone, often poking fun at the folly of modern life and surfacing some real truths. Probably the most famous quote from the strip, one that entered the popular conscience, was, “We have met the enemy, and he is us.”

Because the entire run of the strip has never been digitized, there's no solid proof that Walt Kelly's Pogo comic strip actually used this line. But it is generally agreed that the statement “we are surrounded by insurmountable opportunity” comes from Pogo. And it is entirely possible Fred picked it up somewhere along the way of his Indiana growing up, remembered it, and said it enough times for it to enter the ServiceNow vernacular. 

Regardless of the origin, Fred is amazingly quotable.