As a follow up to my last post, check out The Long Now 10,000 year clock project.
They are trying to build a clock that will last 10,000 years. It’s actually more impossible than you might think, and they’re on their way to building it.
Had a great chat with Russell last night about thinking about the impossible. Figuring out how to make 4 million widgets a year when you are already making 2 million a year is something normal. You make some projections about the impact of some new initiatives, shake it around, and boom, you’ve got something. Some people might even say that doubling in a year would be hard.
What if you wanted to make 200 million widgets a year?
Really - increase by 100x.
It’s a whole new problem and your brain tackles it completely differently. You start to think about different angles and in a different scope. Thinking big helps you develop a truly world-class plan for success and dominance.
Here’s another one for you. Windows Vista took years to develop. How long? 5 years? More? What if you had to ship something in 1 year? What about 30 days? How much crap could you cut out? What is the absolute minimum set of required features for a product to be a product? Cut cut cut. Once you get the minimum right and done really well, the rest can come later.
So next time your working on a product or business plan, try thinking impossibly big and impossibly small.