Real Moonshots

“But why, some say, the Moon? Why choose this as our goal? And they may well ask why climb the highest mountain? Why, 35 years ago, fly the Atlantic? Why does Rice play Texas?

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, September 12, 1962

JFK berthed the term “moonshot” with this famous passage from his speech that day.

Today, we overuse it everywhere. We ask our kids about their moonshot. We ask our teams about our moonshot. Our investors ask us about our moonshot. Politicians trying to latch onto the JFK luster talk about moonshots.

What we’re really saying is, “What big ideas do you have? What’s your dream? What seems impossible but would be awesome? If we forget about reality, what would we do?”

Make the seemingly impossible real, and do it in one big transformational step, rather than incremental improvement. Like a PowerBall ticket that hits.

Moonshot discussions are great, especially with a bottle of red wine. In fact, keeping a moonshot on your personal “I will be” list is a great life hack.

But let’s remember how we got to the moon.

First, there was the X-15, then project Mercury, and then Gemini. All incremental steps before Apollo. And each of those was chock full of incremental steps. Plus, the post-war, capitalistic industrial complex outside of the space program was itself creating new technologies every day that folded into the march to the moon.

What’s the next step? 10% better. 5% better. 1% better each step. Try this little thing. Test this little thing. Make it better.

Maybe we got to the moon relatively quickly.

But it certainly was no moonshot.