the.com/bootstrap
Pulling yourself up by straps on your own boots — physically impossible, financially mandatory.
means To build something from nothing using only your own limited resources, with no outside funding or help to lean on.
from From the literal straps or loops sewn onto the top of boots to help pull them on — not to hoist your whole body off the ground. The phrase 'pull yourself up by your own bootstraps' started as a joke about a physical absurdity, mocking the idea that pure self-effort could work such a feat. Over time the joke flipped into earnest usage, especially in American self-reliance rhetoric, and later computing borrowed it directly: a 'bootstrap loader' is the small program a computer uses to start itself up before any other software exists to help it — the machine, in effect, pulling itself up by its own straps.
- origin
- 19th-century idiom mocking an absurd, impossible act
- computing
- a program that loads the program that loads itself
- startup slang
- funding your company with revenue, stubbornness, and ramen
- irony
- the phrase literally describes something you cannot do