The Self-Reliant Entrepreneur

March 4Unreasonable Ambitions

I would not always reason. The straight path / Wearies us with its never-varying lines, / And we grow melancholy. I would make / Reason my guide, but it should sometimes sit / Patiently by the way-side, while I traced / The mazes of the pleasant wilderness / Around me. It should be my counsellor, / But not my tyrant. For the spirit needs / Impulses from a deeper source than it.

William Cullen Bryant—“The Conjunction of Jupiter and Venus” (1854)

The essential belief of every creative entrepreneur is that there's always a better way to do something, maybe everything. This goes without reason quite often and falls into the realm of, as Bryant described, “the mazes of the pleasant wilderness around me.”

If you never look around the bend just to discover what's there, then your most original ideas may stay hidden forever.

Reason, of course, keeps us out of jail, prudently employed, and modestly goal oriented.

But achieving the impossible, implausible, or heaven forbid, unconventional, better way of doing something requires setting unreasonable ambitions buttressed with unreasonable actions. In fact, progress depends on it.

The only truly unreasonable act is to believe that everything is okay as it is.

Irish playwright George Bernard Shaw put it this way:

The reasonable man adapts himself to the world. The unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore, all progress depends on the unreasonable man.

Today, pledge to free ...