The Impossible Dream

Challenge is its own reward

One of the odder problems with industrial society is that most of the hard problems have already been solved — adequate nutrition, food safety, keeping warm, getting around. This sounds like an unambiguously good thing, except that once the hard problems are solved, what remains is the easy and the impossible.

Founders should set out intending to do the impossible. Knowing they will fail, and fail again, and trying anyway, because eventually they may not. If you can keep diligently chasing something impossible for long enough, you stand a genuine chance of arriving at it.

Find something truly worth doing, because the world needs it, and because of the positive externalities that doing it would create. That it is impossible does not much matter. Gather and inspire the best people you can to come and do it with you. Stay locked onto the summit — the why — and be prepared to pivot like hell on the route — the how.

We choose to go to the moon. We choose to go to the moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard, because that goal will serve to organize and measure the best of our energies and skills, because that challenge is one that we are willing to accept, one we are unwilling to postpone, and one which we intend to win, and the others, too.

— John F. Kennedy, Rice University, 12 September 1962

There will be many false starts and a great deal of backtracking. That is simply the nature of moonshots. But a journey towards the impossible, endured with real diligence, transcends its own destination.

The antithesis is to do the easy: to take something benign and prosaic and jazz it up with a dripping layer of pretence. Hence artisanal toast, artisanal pickles, and all of that ilk — enormous care and branding lavished on a problem that was never a problem. There is nothing wrong with making a good living from a small good thing. What I object to is the substitution of aesthetic for ambition, and the way a whole ecosystem of advice quietly steers people towards it because it is safer to sell.

We need to set our sights higher. We need to dare harder, and to aspire to snatch the possible out of a surly shroud of nothingness.

So: will you settle for pretence, or will you live the impossible dream?