What’s your lighthouse goal?
I want you to believe in one crazy fucking dream.
When I talk about my goals. I don’t think most people take me seriously. I don’t think they believe that I’m serious, that I’m in touch with reality, or that I have any chance at achieving them. That’s because I believe in setting goals that anyone else would laugh at. I believe in setting goals that seem so far fucking out that they could turn me into a laughing stock.
There’s a lot of ideas running around my head at any given moment, and they’re often crazy. You know what I want to do? I want to impact 1,000,000 students about entrepreneurship and business. I want to build a generation of founders. Land a major publishing deal.
These are the goals that keep me up at night, working my ass off and struggling to grind through a to-do list that, to quote Malcolm Tucker, is longer than a Leonard Cohen song.
To my mind, being an entrepreneur is about taking risks, it’s about being prepared to put yourself on the line and aim for something higher. It’s about understanding that what you are working on can only be realised, can only be made into a reality if you let go of the inhibitions, and the limitations that you were never born with.
When I was a kid, I had no concept of what was humanly possible or achievable, and so I set my sights on the moon. I wanted to be an astronaut, a cowboy, a billionaire, a jet fighter pilot and a chef.
These weren’t conflicting dreams – to 8 year old me, I would juggle all of these professions as a day job, while still skateboarding for fun. It never would have occurred to me to even question how possible these goals were, what my chances looked like, how feasible it was…or whether the rest of the world would accept my dreams.
That kind of reckless fucking abandon is what I want to recapture right now. Because I know that If I stopped to worry about the chances of achieving my own personal moonshots, the statistical likelihood, the odds, I imagine I would be fucking depressed.
If I stopped to think about the way other people would react to my dreams, I’m not convinced I could even get the fuck out of bed in the morning. I’d be a piss-poor excuse for an entrepreneur with no chance of ticking off any goal, wandering around the Internet with my ass hanging out.
The best way to avoid crashing is to never leave the runway. Never take flight. The best way to avoid accomplishing anything remarkable is to never try to accomplish anything remarkable. If you avoid committing to big ideas, you’ve made a commitment to only working on small ones.
Small ideas have their place. Small ideas are important. Small ideas can make a lot of money. Small ideas have to be the starting point for big ones. But there’s something epic about living your life with a bunch of crazy ideas in your back pocket, one dream that is bigger than you, and bigger than your limitations.
If someone tells you that you should think smaller, that’s not a judgement on you. It’s a judgement on them. When I work on a business, I think in terms of the block first, and the world next. I think about how to turn the idea into a profitable, manageable business, that can bring in money and support employees, profits and growth.
That’s my first goal. My second goal is to imagine a world in which my idea is the biggest thing on the planet, and I start working on the road map to get from the small business to the sky. I imagine that massive entity, and I keep my mind open to its possibility.
When I was hanging out at the Microsoft cloud show in Sydney recently, I got to thinking about end points vs. origins. How companies didn’t start out being huge, global entities. Redmond were originally a company of one, a company without a product. Bill Gates sold one operating system that he didn’t even have to a company called IBM and then set about growing his small idea.
That’s the origin. Today, Microsoft booking out three levels of the Sydney Hilton for a developer conference isn’t even news. It’s inconsequential. The company are changing the world on a daily basis, with Office used by almost every business on the planet.
If you’re starting a business right now, you might be at the start of the journey Microsoft were on. And the company you’re about to build could one day eclipse them – who knows?
But if you don’t have that goal, that glimmer of an idea that you could do it, you’ll never see the opportunities that would make it possible.
It’s impossible to know where your idea will end up, where it will take you, what it will enable you to do. If you think you can predict it, you’re dead wrong. But if you set it as a goal, if you set it as your single greatest shot, you at least have a chance of making it.
I talk a lot about small business entrepreneurship, about how important it is to found your startup as a profitable, small company rather than an empty vehicle driving around looking for funding. And when I say that it’s important to set crazy fucking goals, that’s not me changing my tune. I still think a startup should kick off their journey in a basic, manageable, profitable way.
I read a book called Totally Wired recently, about Josh from Pseudo.com in the late 90s. In a series of interviews with some of his former team members, they talked about the sense of hubris that surrounded the entrepreneurs of the dot com era – and their example was Josh’s idea that he could somehow turn his tech startup into a company that would explore outer space. They thought it was insane. Insane that he thought such a goal was even possible.
In 2016, Elon Musk achieved that dream. He turned his PayPal success, his dotcom dream, into as space exploration company that is pushing the boundaries of humanity. That’s incredible. And to me, it proves just one thing. There is nothing wrong with setting yourself an insane, incredible, edge of possibility goal that seems nigh unachievable.
Because you just might make it.
So where does this leave you? As an entrepreneur, I would challenge you to set just one single crazy fucking goal. One single insane idea that you yourself can’t even believe is possible. Just one. That’s going to be your lighthouse idea, the one concept that will guide you through everything else, that you can see out there in the darkness.
It could be a personal one, or it could be a professional one. Either way, it will keep you focused and driven. Gary Vaynerchuk wants to buy his favorite sports team. Sean McCabe wants to by a Lambo. These goals are big, and they’re probably going to sound conceited and crazy to most people.
But if they ever want to reach those goals, they’re not going to do it by pretending they don’t want to. They’re not going to make it by acting like they don’t have those dreams. Sean and Gary are going to keep working, every single day, until they reach the level at which they will be able to drive through a Starbucks in a $500,000 car or put on a cap and look in the mirror and know that they’re a part of their team’s legacy.
I’m going to keep working until I’ve reached 1,000,000 students, and made 100,000 entrepreneurs. I’m going to keep working until I’m investing in million dollar companies and speaking all over the world, and building software, and challenging myself to do more.
When you have an insane goal, you have a chance at making it. If you lose, you lose. If you win, it’ll change everything.
What’s your lighthouse goal?
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Jon Westenberg has appeared and published in Business Insider, Inc.com, TIME and dozens of other publications, talking about startup entrepreneurship, writing and innovation. Jon has helped hundreds of businesses worldwide grow their audience and take control of their future. Jon is an investor, an entrepreneur and a dreamer.
