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I had trails of melted ice cream running down to my elbows and tears in my eyes.
As I watched a hologram of Apollo 11 take off from its projected base on the Washington Monument, my ice cream cone forgotten in my hand, I heard this line come through the loudspeakers:
“We choose to go to the moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard.”
It was a recording of President Kennedy, giving the speech he originally gave when Apollo 11 took off, still incredibly resonant on the 50th anniversary of the mission.
And it made me think, not so much about the moon, but about that spirit of choosing to do hard things that matter, and do them well. How that same spirit comes through in the small business world, when we’re at our best.
I made my job up in my head 10 years ago.
Now it supports me and a team of people, and a roster of clients that numbers in the hundreds.
People often ask me what drove me to do it, how I somehow made this ridiculous, ludicrously unlikely dream actually become a successful reality.
And it’s only been in the past couple of years that I realized that it wasn’t really about survival, or stubborness. (Although both those factors certainly played a role.)
It’s about my core conversation, that mission built into me from birth: to move the global conversation forward.
It’s what I’ve been doing, in some way, shape, or form, forever.
It’s what I’ll die working on.
It’s my moonshot.
And it’s worth doing well, not because it is easy, but because it is hard.
What’s yours?