For most of my career, I’ve used the term #moonshot,
but I’ve never actually seen one live.
Sure, I’ve seen the Apollo Era footage. Who hasn’t?
There’s something deeply majestic
as the massive #Artemis program rocket
sits on the launchpad. 🚀
When I was young, my parents pointed at the moon.
They told me that people had
👣walked there
🪨 collected rocks and
🏌🏼even played golf
just a few years before.
As a five-year old, I thought:
“Surely we’ll go back to the Moon soon!”
So, I decided I would prepare and become
an astrophysicist 🛰️ & astronaut 👨🏼🚀.
(Voiceover: “Bill would become neither.”)
Now, I’m more than fifty years old.
And I’m guilty of talking about corporate moonshots.
Yup, I covered that square in biz jargon bingo.
The #Moon itself 🌗 had grown distant to me.
A dream we achieved in a past era.
We’d return some day,
but it maybe not in my lifetime.
Tonight’s image of Artemis on the launchpad,
proves that others didn’t give up the dream.
And I want to applaud their work.
The Artemis program is a bridge idea —
with ideas and equipment pulled forward.
In that rocket, you can see echoes of
🚀Apollo’s Saturn V
🚀the Space Shuttle,
🚀and the Constellation program.
Really big ideas require legacies and pedigrees.
They are rarely wholly original ideas.
It takes a lot of small steps.
Thought leadership has many mothers and fathers.
People who refuse to give up on a dream
and who work their whole career on the project.
And they pass that dream
from generation to generation.
I’m watching NASA’s livestream,
and I have goosebumps.
And maybe you do too.
Because tonight once again the word moonshot —
isn’t just a euphemism.
That’s the work of thought leadership.
“non est ad astra mollis e terris via” — Seneca the Younger
(“there is no easy way from the earth to the stars”)
—
I write about:
#ThoughtLeadership #OrgTL #Marketing
