“Ideas are like fish. If you want to catch small fish, you can stay in the shallow water. But if you want to catch the big fish, you have to go deeper. In the deep, the fish are more powerful and pure. They are giant and abstract. And they are very beautiful. ~David Lynch
The goals we set for ourselves are like fish. Do we choose a small fish or a big one? It’s easiest to aim for small fish, but I think we should all aim for bigger fish.
We should all aim high. Higher than what we first think is reasonable. And there are several reasons why.
We do it because it is hard
In September 1962, President John F. Kennedy gave a speech at Rice University in which he promised to put a man on the moon and return him safely before the end of the decade.
Many of the technological requirements for going to the moon had not yet been developed. Kennedy himself mentioned in his speech that the rocket that would carry astronauts to the Moon would be “made of new metal alloys, some not yet invented, capable of withstanding heat and stress many times greater than has ever been experienced, all assembled with a precision better than the best watch” and sent “on an untried mission to an unknown celestial body”.
This was an extremely ambitious goal. Not only was it doubtful whether the United States would be able to put a man on the moon, but also why. What was the reason for such a complicated goal? Kennedy himself answered in his speech: “We choose to go to the moon in this decade, and to do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard.
We’re not doing it because it’s easy. We do it because it’s hard. Because if we choose to do hard things, we may fail, yes, but we will have more opportunities to improve. We need to set ambitious goals because our goals determine how far you can go. If we set a small goal, bigger goals are automatically out of reach.
As James Cameron said, “If you set your goals ridiculously high and it’s a failure, you’re going to fail on top of everyone else’s success”.
Your transformation as a person
Imagine you have never run before and you decide to set yourself the goal of running your first half marathon within 6 months. But because you like to aim high, you don’t just want to run a half marathon, you want to run a marathon. That’s your goal.
There is a big gap between not running and finishing a half marathon. But there is a huge gap between not running and finishing a marathon. Before you start, you should know that if you aim so high, you will most likely fail. It’s that simple. It’s also almost certain that many people will try to persuade you to set a more conservative goal, such as just running the half marathon. Or even not to run the half-marathon at all, but just to run occasionally. Should you listen to them? Yes, but I don’t think they’re right.
If you’re satisfied with running a half, you’re not doing enough to finish the marathon. Arnold Schwarzenegger said, “If I’m satisfied with being Mr Austria, I’m not doing enough to be Mr Olympia”. I’m not saying that running a half marathon is worthless (of course it is not).
But I think that what is really important is not finishing a half or a marathon, but your personal transformation in the pursuit of that goal. And the greater the challenge you set for yourself, the greater your opportunity to improve as a person.
If you decide to run the marathon, you’re going to have to work that much harder. You’ll need to be in better physical shape, which means exercising more, eating healthier and prioritizing your rest even more. And to achieve all this, you will need to be more disciplined, have more self-control, know how to deal with the self-imposed pressure of your aggressive goal, and much more.
If you really think about it, whether you achieve your goal or not is a fleeting moment. Once you’ve achieved it, it’s a thing of the past. But all the qualities you have learned stay with you. If running a marathon instead of a half marathon helps you become more disciplined and confident, the long-term benefits are great because you can apply these skills to other disciplines in your life, such as work or personal relationships.
A more ambitious goal will accelerate the rate at which you learn these qualities and help you become a more complete person. You may think this all sounds very nice, but setting a big goal is more likely to lead to failure. And nobody likes to fail. That’s true, but it doesn’t mean that failure doesn’t matter. It does matter. But there is something more dangerous than failure.
The Italian sculptor Michelangelo Buonarroti once said: “The greatest danger to the majority is not in aiming too high and failing, but in aiming too low and succeeding”.
When Kennedy announced his intention to put a man on the moon, it was such an ambitious goal that it was also a leap of faith. And sometimes that is what we need. To throw ourselves into an ambitious goal, knowing that failure is very likely, and without any certainty about the journey we have to take. And who knows what might happen.