Almost Impossible Puzzles

Many novice puzzlers give up.  They will say to themselves “I have tried everything I can think of, this puzzle is impossible.”  Impossible is an interesting concept.  It is a self-fulfilling prophesy.  If you think that something is impossible, that it can’t be done, how much time and energy will you apply to it?  Probably very little. What impossible really means in the puzzle context is that you simply haven’t figured out how to get to the solution yet. It does not mean that the puzzle cannot be solved; it means that you don’t know how to solve it.  With puzzles, we have an opportunity to conquer the impossible.  This is a great lesson that children can learn early in life by playing with puzzles.