Not because they are easy, but because they are hard

Every once in awhile, you come across something so inspirational it sends shivers up your spine.

While watching The Martian the other night with Mr 12, they included a snippet from John F Kennedy’s Rice Speech, which JFK delivered when I was two years old.  I’d seen the quote before, but I’d never seen the entire speech. It’s worth the 17 minutes to watch, not only for the inspirational content, but for the inspired way in which the speech was constructed.

This notion is at the heart of every startup, and indeed of most worthwhile human endeavors.

“We choose to go to the moon. 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, because that goal will serve to organize and measure the best of our energies and skills, because that challenge is one that we are willing to accept, one we are unwilling to postpone, and one which we intend to win, and the others, too.”

“But if I were to say, my fellow citizens, that we shall send to the moon, 240,000 miles away from the control station in Houston, a giant rocket more than 300 feet tall, the length of this football field, made of new metal alloys, some of which have not yet been invented, capable of standing heat and stresses several times more than have ever been experienced, fitted together with a precision better than the finest watch, carrying all the equipment needed for propulsion, guidance, control, communications, food and survival, on an untried mission, to an unknown celestial body, and then return it safely to earth, re-entering the atmosphere at speeds of over 25,000 miles per hour, causing heat about half that of the temperature of the sun — almost as hot as it is here today — and do all this, and do it right, and do it first before this decade is out–then we must be bold.”

Which begs the question: what happened to America in the last 54 years? Perhaps that’s the subject of a future blog post.