Myth of the Moonshot

There are milestone events that change the fabric of our world. Moments in time that grab our collective essence and refocus us on the great possibilities of who we are and who we can be. Some of these milestones are positive, generations of people can remember where they were on July 20, 1969 when Apollo 11 landed on the moon or November 11, 1982 when the Space Shuttle Columbia took off for the stars. We remember tragic milestones, the death of Kennedy, the explosion of the Space Shuttle Challenger, the fall of the World Trade Center. We also remember when we heard about events that both positively and negatively changed our world, Pearl Harbor, D-Day, the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. As outsiders, because we experienced these events as a moment in time, we assume that the greatness that occurred came into being as instantaneously and effortlessly as the moment itself. Unfortunately, life's greatest achievements don't occur because of short bursts of high energy work but rather long journeys of incremental improvement.

On May 25th, 1961, three and a half years after the Soviet Union had launched Sputnik, President John F. Kennedy set forth the goal for the United States to put a man on the moon. The speech, given before a joint-session of congress, was intended to provide both broad goals for the country and give details on how to strengthen an economy recovering from recession. Fifty years later, the same needs and goals apply to our society. We imagine, due to the length of history and personal experience, that only a couple of years later, an astronaut landed on the moon. Unfortunately, that's not true. It was eight years and 6 Apollo missions later. It came at great cost, the initial projected costs in 1961 7 billion dollars. The actual cost of the Apollo program in 1973 was 25.4 billion dollars ($170 billion in 2005 dollars). The Manhattan Project, began in 1939 and employed 130,000 people over the course of its journey. Six years later the work produced 2 nuclear bombs that were used on Hiroshima and Nagasaki to end World War II. The project cost nearly 2 billion dollars ($26 billion in 2013 dollars). Each program that aimed to take great leaps forward was neither inexpensive nor instantaneous.

In our lives, we constantly look for "moonshots" opportunities to make gigantic leaps forward, rushing through the work and the challenge and reaching some great target on the horizon. This happens to us as individuals whether it is hoping to drop great amounts of weight, win the lottery, make dramatic improvements our job, or fantastic gains in an athletic event. It also happens to us as a society with initiatives such as No Child Left Behind, Race for the Top, and the War on Poverty.  What we learn from these "moonshot" experiences more often than not is that there is no gigantic leap, improvement is gradual and incremental in nature. Effective change occurs in an evolutionary not revolutionary manner. It is important to dream big but in order to make the dreams become reality, the journey is one of inch by inch improvement.

When we take on our daily journeys and work to improve as people, as parents, as teachers, and as leaders, it is not by making giant leaps forward. Improvement occurs in manageable steps. When the goals are small, attainable, and incremental, we grow. With each step of growth, we move closer and over time those moonshots happen and we didn't even notice. When we see the step in front of us, we can move our feet. One step at a time, moment by moment, we change, we evolve, we become a little more perfect than before. If we show those steps to our children instead of the great leaps, they too will achieve.

The most amazing thing is that we live in one of the most revolutionary time periods. The Internet has taken down many of the barriers between countries and people. Computers more powerful than ones that once took up whole buildings of college campuses can now be found in our pocket. How many of us remember where we were when we first saw the World Wide Web, our first email, our first smartphone. Just like all moonshots, the evolution of these has been evolutionary also. As we think about what we want to be, what we want our children to be, lets remember how far we have come, inch by inch, in the few short years since the iPhone first appeared on the stage on January 29, 2007. It has come far and so have we.