Lenny RachitskyHost of Lenny's Podcast | Author of Lenny's Newsletter

Why you need to set "crazy big" goals

3 Nov 2025 · 1 min

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1:00

A short talk arguing for setting extremely ambitious (“crazy big”) goals because they force you to imagine a desired future, motivate sustained effort, and prevent settling for easy, realistic targets. The speaker recommends vividly visualizing long-term futures (example: a 2050 vision wall) and emphasizes that such goals must be deeply important to justify the work required to realize them.

Chapters

The thing that I love about a crazy big goal is that you feel completely inadequate before it. I really like to start by just imagining what is the future that you actually want? What is the world that you want to live in? What is the future of transportation? What is the future of healthcare? What is the future that you want to live in and exist in? For example, right now, I have a wall in my house, in my office, which is my vision for what I'd like the world to look like in 2050. With a crazy big goal, you want to work really hard to will it into existence. And so if you start with a reasonable goal or a realistic go goal, then you kind of get to it and you're like, oh, cool, whatever. Or more importantly, if something happens, all the problems and roadblocks come along as they always do, then you're like, okay, I won't bother with that. And then you can just, like, go and choose another course. And so a crazy big goal is both crazy big, but it's also something that you think is incredibly important, that you actually want to will into existence, because it is so much work to will a crazy big goal into existence. So it better be one that you want to actually achieve.