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Last Tuesday, my laptop died mid-email. Blue screen, spinning wheel of doom, the whole tragic opera.

Every tech-savvy friend I texted said the same thing:

"Sounds like your hard drive failed. Time to buy a new laptop."

But I refused to accept that three years of questionable download decisions had sentenced my MacBook to electronic death.

So I did what any reasonable person would do… I stuck it in the freezer for two hours.

When I powered it back on, it worked perfectly. My wife found me doing a victory dance in the kitchen. "You put your laptop in the freezer?" she asked, like I'd just been caught making out with a houseplant. But sometimes the most unreasonable solution is the only one that works.

I wasn't being stubborn about following directions. I was being stubborn about refusing to accept defeat. And that kind of refusal — the pigheaded insistence that there must be another way — turns out to be the secret ingredient in every breakthrough that matters.

Your brain works like an overprotective security guard at an exclusive club. When new information tries to get in, this neural bouncer checks it against the VIP list of "things we already know to be true."

If the new info doesn't match, the brain literally rejects it — not because it's wrong, but because it threatens the established order.

Researchers call this cognitive rigidity, and it's why experts often miss breakthrough ideas that complete outsiders can spot immediately. The most creative people aren't necessarily smarter; they're just more willing to fire their brain's security guard and let the weird ideas into the party.

November 8, 1895. Würzburg, Germany. Wilhelm Röntgen was wrapping up another tedious evening in his physics lab, experimenting with cathode rays (because apparently physicists in the 1890s had nothing better to do on Friday nights). He'd covered his cathode ray tube with black cardboard and was about to call it quits when something across the room caught his eye: a fluorescent screen was glowing.

This should have been impossible. The screen was nine feet away, and cathode rays couldn't travel more than a few inches through air. Any reasonable scientist would have assumed equipment malfunction — maybe a loose wire, maybe faulty insulation. But Röntgen refused to dismiss the impossible. Instead of packing up and heading to the pub like a normal person, he became obsessed.

For the next seven weeks, he barely left his lab. His wife brought him meals. His colleagues thought he'd lost his mind. "Röntgen's seeing things," they whispered — and wait, it gets weirder — he was talking to himself and scribbling notes like a madman. He discovered these mysterious rays could pass through paper, wood, and human flesh, but not bones or metal.

On December 22, he convinced his wife Anna to place her hand on a photographic plate while he aimed the rays at it.

The result:

The world's first X-ray image, showing her wedding ring floating around the ghostly bones of her fingers. Anna's response? "I have seen my death!" (Talk about a supportive spouse.)

The medical establishment initially ridiculed him. "Photography through skin? Preposterous!" But within months, surgeons worldwide were using X-rays to locate bullets and diagnose fractures. Röntgen had revolutionized medicine by refusing to accept that you couldn't see through solid objects.

Dumb Moral: Sometimes the equipment isn't broken — your assumptions are.

You're a pediatric urologist in the early 2000s, and you're tired of watching kids born with bladder defects live their entire lives tethered to catheters and collection bags. The medical consensus was clear — once bladder tissue is damaged or missing, that's it. You can patch and reroute, but you can't rebuild.

Anthony Atala refused to accept this. While his colleagues focused on better catheters and improved surgical techniques, Atala was in his lab at Wake Forest doing something that sounded like science fiction: growing human organs from scratch.

His technique was bizarrely simple. Take a small tissue sample from the patient. Isolate the cells. Grow them in a nutrient-rich soup. Then — and this is where it gets wonderfully weird — build a scaffold shaped like a bladder using a biodegradable mesh, coat it with the patient's own cells, and let biology do its thing. "You can't just grow organs like vegetables," scoffed the medical establishment. But that's essentially what he was doing.

In 2006, Atala published results that made jaws drop worldwide: seven patients had received lab-grown bladders, and they were functioning perfectly. No rejection, no complications, no catheters. Kids who'd never known life without medical equipment were suddenly... normal. One patient, a teenager named Kaitlyn McNamara, went from being afraid to sleep over at friends' houses to playing competitive sports.

The medical world went from "that's impossible" to "how fast can we scale this?" in about six months. Today, Atala's lab has grown everything from tracheas to vaginas to — get this — miniature organs for drug testing.

Dumb Moral: When everyone says "that's just how it is," they're usually describing yesterday's limitations, not tomorrow's possibilities.

Apricity (uh-PRIS-i-tee) is the moment winter forgets to be awful. That thin strip of sun on your face when the air could slice celery. The warmth hits and your body files an official protest against the season.

I like to think Röntgen caught a little apricity leaking through his lab window during those seven manic weeks chasing invisible rays. And Dr. Anthony Atala absolutely knew the feeling in those fluorescent hospital corridors while insisting tiny bladders deserved more than “sorry kid, that’s how biology rolls.” Apricity is warmth that keeps showing up in hostile environments. It’s optimism with a heating element.

BTW, some heroic kindergarten teacher in Vermont is trying to bring this word back from linguistic hibernation. Let’s not leave them shivering alone.

Use it in a sentence: “Despite the committee insisting the prototype was doomed, Maya felt a quiet apricity rising off her ridiculous idea.”

(You can also say: The board meeting was subzero, but the intern’s question gave the room a flash of apricity. Use freely. Spread warmth.)

Bonus points if you can name your impossible thing something ridiculous (like "The Great Stapler Liberation" or "Operation Overthrow Tuesday Meetings").