What do you want to be when you grow up?
I have vivid memories of having people ask me that as a kid. My response? “An astronaut.” Entrepreneur and business owner were never on my list. It was the eighties – Star Wars, The Right Stuff, NASA and Shuttle launches on TV. I got a telescope for my birthday. My science fair projects were solar systems made out of styrofoam balls. I read sci-fi books and dreamed about martians. Strap me in. I was ready to go.
For years I put all of this on a shelf, moving on in my adult life. Recently though, seeing my daughter get excited about her robotics team has re-ignited me. Combine that with a new future-focused tech client who has expanded my thinking around AI, self-driving cars, and all of the things I was excited about in middle school, and my mind is racing.
I never became an astronaut. Instead, I went to work, got a job, and I run a business. From what I can tell though, my life as an entrepreneur didn’t take me too far off course from my dreams of space.
Risky, not Safe
I caught an interview the other day with Frank Borman, Commander of Apollo 8, the first mission to fly around the moon. Consider this for a moment. It’s 1968. Borman and his crew get strapped into a rocket that is 36-stories tall. It’s been launched two times prior, never with human passengers. The technology driving their mission, compared to today’s standards, is minimal. They travel 36,747 feet per second, go 240,000 miles over three days, and orbit the moon ten times. Surviving re-entry requires dropping through the atmosphere and into the North Pacific Ocean. Their mission was covered in risk – life and death were never far apart.
If those astronauts and their families had not been willing to embrace risk fully, they would have never gone to the moon. For us in business, we make decisions every day, choosing what is safe vs. what is risky, sometimes bringing our families with us. Many times the safe choice involves settling for the status quo, and shields us from answering the question, “What if it doesn’t work?” Risk, on the other hand, is where innovation lives. Risk requires the ability to be comfortable with the possibility of failure, putting ego and reputation on the line, and realizing our dreams may not turn out as expected. Real progress is never made without some risk.
Hard, not Easy
JFK’s support of NASA was a driving force in accelerating man’s exploration of space. His words were powerful. “We choose to go to the moon.” He continued, “Not because it is easy, but because it is hard.”
Every day, in my work and my personal life, I choose. Easy or hard? Each of us has this same choice. It shows up in a myriad of ways. Here’s what I know about the hard path. It is not well worn, paved, or manicured. It is rocky, it winds and climbs. Traveling it requires work and toil. The payoff? Along the way, the views are amazing, and the final destination is one reserved for those who are willing to trade the easy walk for the tough climb.
Future, not Past
Supersonic parachutes the size of a house. Jet backpacks with rockets. Sky cranes and Mars rovers. Over the past 100 years, each generation has experienced emerging technologies that were mere imagination decades prior. Who drives this emergence? Who creates these technologies and moves them from imagination to reality? The dreamers, the curious, the makers, and the visionaries. They’re the ones that have brought us our spaceships and satellites, our rovers and space stations, and images of the vast beyond.
In business, these are the same people who drive innovation across all categories. From med tech to marketing and social connection, automotive to food sciences and how we feed the world, the ones who are leading innovation all share one common trait. With a respectful understanding of the past, they are future-focused, always looking toward a better tomorrow rather than getting stuck in how things were done yesterday. The future is their north star.
The Takeaway
Here’s to the risk-takers, the ones that choose the hard path, the future thinkers and pioneers. If these words seem familiar to you, congratulations. If they feel foreign, use today to move one degree closer to risk, challenge, and the future.