I can do all things through him who strengthens me.
This line gets stitched onto gym walls and graduation cards so often that it's easy to miss what it's actually saying. Read the whole sentence and it isn't a promise of unlimited personal achievement. It's a statement about contentment — Paul had just said he'd learned to be at peace whether he had plenty or nothing. The strength he's talking about is the strength to endure, not the strength to win.
That reframing matters if you've ever heard this verse used to suggest that enough faith guarantees success, and quietly concluded the whole thing sounds like wishful thinking. What Paul is actually describing is smaller and, honestly, more believable: a source of strength that shows up specifically inside hardship, not instead of it.
You don't need to have your circumstances under control to test a claim like this. The question worth sitting with is narrower — not "can I do anything," but whether there's a strength available for whatever you're actually facing right now, that doesn't depend on the outcome going your way.
If you've written this verse off as a slogan, it might be worth reading what Paul says right before it about learning contentment.
A short video on this is coming soon — for now, read on.