Two steps for achieving big visions
How to embrace a moonshots mindset
Often during our book tour for Building Moonshots we were asked – and still today – what’s the one trait that can help me achieve my moonshot goal?
The quick response is a moonshots mindset. A longer response follows on how you can adopt a moonshots mindset in two steps.
Being in the right mind
First, let’s talk briefly about what a mindset is. A mindset is the mental attitude and beliefs that you bring to any situation. Having the right mindset is crucial because this mindset influences your motivation and overall approach to action.
Different mindsets abound. For example, maybe you have heard about fixed and growth mindsets. A growth mindset encourages a person to view challenges as opportunities for learning and personal growth – especially critical in education. An exponential mindset focuses on rapidly scaling the value of an idea. Or you have read about scarcity and abundance mindsets. With an abundance mindset, a person believes that enough resources and opportunities exist for everyone. This mindset encourages seeing situations in win/win (versus win/lose) terms – changing how groups consider outcomes ranging from sports to politics to medicine to economics. Author Simon Sinek names this an ‘infinite mindset’ based on the ideas in James P. Carse's book Finite and Infinite Games.
A mindset is a deeper, more ingrained way of thinking, which underpins your disposition and shapes the habits you develop over time. Changing a mindset doesn’t happen instantly. It involves a deliberate and conscious effort to shift your beliefs, attitudes, and thought patterns into a new way of thinking.
Big visions with a moonshots mindset
A moonshots mindset aims for big visions with potential big impact. This mindset encourages pursuing a long-term vision that feels almost impossible to achieve and dares groups to dream wilder and bolder. A team that has a moonshots mindset goes beyond conventional solutions – what seems easy or obvious – and instead pursues radical change that can lead to major breakthroughs for industries and society. The namesake original moonshot imagined putting a human on the moon and took a decade of concerted effort to accomplish it.
Any step toward innovation – from baby steps to massive leaps – is good. At times, nations and teams need the small, steady steps of incremental innovation – critical, for instance, when ensuring public services improvement or maintaining economic stability. Yet other times, nations and teams really need radical innovation (in fact, see our previous post for why Europe needs a Ministry of Moonshots). This is when a moonshots mindset is important.
When groups adopt a larger perspective, they demand more from themselves. They exert greater effort and reach for more because they feel connected to a larger purpose that they play a direct role in shaping. The strength of this bold thinking encourages them to step beyond their comfort zone and expand the range of opportunities possible.
Step 1: Take vision to heart
A moonshots mindset occurs as a self-reinforcing mix of feeling the big vision and doing the big vision. Feeling like a vision is truly yours involves a deep connection and commitment to that vision. Essentially, you take the vision to heart. One way of internalizing a vision is to think about how it resonates with your own experiences, dreams, and goals.
Some of you might be asking how you can do this step if you or your organization doesn’t have a big vision yet. You can instead introduce a visionary ideal in discussions, which helps put existing work in a larger context. Challenge yourself and others by frequently asking:
How might our current efforts fit into a bigger vision?
What do we really want in the long run?
As Tamara jokes sometimes, not everyone needs to be at the front of the rocket – but you all need to feel like you are on the same wild ride. A wonderful example is Gwynne Shotwell, president and chief operating officer at SpaceX. She works with Elon Musk – who is cofounder, CEO, chairman, and chief technical officer of SpaceX – and whose company vision is to reduce space transportation costs and “make life multiplanetary”. Shotwell joined SpaceX in 2002, and six years later, was promoted to president.
As a recent Financial Times article notes:
For 22 years, Shotwell has helped to guide Musk’s moonshot project to disrupt the space industry. This week, SpaceX became the world’s biggest private start-up, valued at $350bn.
Both Musk and Shotwell embody a moonshots mindset. Eric Berger, who has written two books about SpaceX, says “they share a lot of traits. It is SpaceX versus the world and they’ve been simpatico on that from day one.” The article adds:
She now oversees more than 13,000 staff tasked with developing reusable rockets capable of carrying humans to Mars. “If Elon is the visionary, she is the get-shit-done person,” says one employee. “She transforms vision into reality, watches the bottom line, manages the exec team and keeps him away from regulators.”
In their own way, they each focus on the outsized vision of SpaceX. Since she joined, Shotwell has taken the SpaceX vision to heart and then rose to leading much of the vision.
Step 2: Create new habits
As you become excited and emotionally invested in a moonshot, you should start to reinforce that feeling through doing. In psychology, this is called behavioral activation. The more you invest your time and effort, the more connected you will feel to the vision. This applies to individuals as much as groups.
In our Building Moonshots book, we introduce six specific ways that contribute to fostering a moonshots mindset:
Way 1: Always Focus on the Long View
Making the world a better place requires solutions that are not constrained by today, or even tomorrow.
Way 2: Start from the Almost Impossible
Moonshot leaders must manage across all four innovation horizons.
Way 3: Never Be Surprised
Being strategically paranoid enables an organization to move ahead of potential competition.
Way 4: Fund for Breakthroughs
Funding breakthrough ideas, inventions, and innovation requires you to adopt opportunistic financing methods.
Way 5: Plan to Adopt Shiny Things
Building an innovative team means you will always be learning new ideas and technologies.
Way 6: Be an Optimist
Choosing to have an optimistic outlook is a visionary’s most powerful tool.
Each of these ways involves a set of habits. By creating consistent patterns of behavior that reinforce a new way of thinking, habits lead to a mindset change. These repeated actions help form new neural pathways in the brain, making a moonshots mindset a regular part of your (group’s) way of working.
In Way 6: Be an Optimist above, one example highlighted in our book is from Astro Teller, captain of moonshots at Alphabet’s moonshot factory X. He emphasizes optimism as one lesson for unleashing radical creativity, saying “Dream like a child, test like a grownup.” He explains, “You can get way further than you think just by being optimistic enough to try.”
Two habits anyone can do for smart daydreaming – either during or off work hours – is mental wandering and literal wandering. You could start by scheduling brief windows of unstructured time to let your mind wander freely without specific tasks or goals. Or you could take walks in nature, preferably with a colleague, that offers a change of scenery to provoke shared daydreaming. (Read our wandering series here.)
Repeat and renew
In summary, embracing a moonshots mindset occurs in two steps. Step 1 is to take the vision (or visionary ideals) to heart. Step 2 is to create new habits. Having a moonshots mindset becomes core to making visionary decisions and making moonshot-class ideas real. Leaders and teams with this mindset take the long view, believe in doing the impossible, and push for opportunities that might seem almost impossible to others.
Moreover, the six Moonshot Ways, noted above in Step 2, will be saved as topics in future newsletters. Is there a particular Way that you would like to hear about sooner? Let us know at hello@buildingmoonshots.com.
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