Successful people naturally gravitate toward predictable outcomes, which shrinks their ambition. David Freidberg explains how this preference pushes teams away from moonshot goals toward safer, shorter-range projects that feel more likely to succeed.
Thinking big, that sounds easy enough to understand. Sounds fun to do. Why do you think that's hard advice to follow in practice?
You are inclined naturally as a smart person, as a successful person, to only do things that you know what you're gonna get as an outcome. And guess what that does? That limits your horizon. And I see this all the time where the teams end up compromising on their big vision and they compromise on the moonshot because they're more likely to succeed and they feel more comfortable taking a shorter range, narrower horizon and minimizing the opportunity set significantly and saying, I'm just going to go do this because I know if I do X, I'm going to get Y. And that feels comfortable and I know it's going to happen.
