It is funny that so many people use the cliche "pull yourself up by the bootstraps" because that saying really is a metaphor for something that is impossible to do.

You CAN'T pull yourself up by the bootstraps, because you have no point of leverage, and that's why that phrase was coined. Now people who don't know any better use it to tell us to get better on our own, and they're really saying "Why don't you just do the impossible and get better?"

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