pull oneself up by one's bootstraps

Example: “She pulled herself up by her bootstraps and opened her own garage.”

Origin: Originally a joke about a task that was flatly, physically impossible — you cannot lift your own body off the ground by tugging upward on the straps of your own boots, no matter how hard you pull, since the force has nowhere outside your own body to push against. An 1834 issue of the Workingman's Advocate uses the image exactly this way, describing an absurdly implausible feat: hauling oneself bodily over a river or a fence using nothing but bootstraps. Only in the early 1900s did the phrase's sense begin to shift, dropping its original tone of mockery and settling into the now-familiar earnest meaning: improving one's own circumstances entirely through personal effort, with no outside help. Computer scientists later borrowed the same image for "bootstrapping," describing a computer loading its own operating system with no external program to start the process — an echo of the original joke about lifting yourself with nothing but your own resources.