This is the third part of my writing on ambition. You can read the first part here and the second here.

Conservative

Humans are naturally conservative in estimating of what can be achieved, this is reasonable because humans think in linear and independent event terms, though there is little that is linear or independent in the universe.

Universal effects are cumulative and exponential. Today’s events build upon yesterday’s events which built upon the day before yesterday’s events, which … these events continuously building, the one on the other, produce effects that are essentially cumulative and exponential in that effects produced by events in one place get amplified by another effect from a different or similar event in a another place.

Hence, the universe operates cumulatively and exponentially, but we think linearly and incrementally, hence our natural tendency to be conservative in our ambitions.

Alphabet

Alphabet - Google’s parent company, at the time of writing, is worth over one trillion dollars, that is an incredible achievement.[1]
For a company, started by two Ph.D. students 24 years ago, to bring in more money in a year than many countries bring in could not have come by chance, yet not in their wildest dreams could either of them have thought, that some code on their personal laptops, would form the core of a company that would be worth over a trillion dollars, yet, today, here we are.

The google guys set out to be big, they set out to achieve an ambitious goal, yet, by the effects they have attained today, even they were conservative. In 17 years their valuation has been multiplied by 50 - (Google was valued at 23 billion dollars at IPO in 2004).

Effects

Me sitting to write this essay seems like an independent event, but that is far from the truth. The events I have encountered and lived through, books I have read or other essays I have written, do factor in enabling me write this one essay.

The universe keeps building on itself to no end in sight – cumulative and exponential.

Take Google, if the founders could estimate what they were worth today at the time they started, they would have priced their net present value into their prospective stock price when going for IPO, but they could not and were therefore, though ambitious, quite conservative (this is with the benefit of hindsight based on their valuation today).

Google’s estimate at IPO might have been an accurate prediction of the worth of their product or service, but they could not project nor price in the effect other event’s effects would have on the value of their service.

They could not project the policies of several governments to expand broadband reach in various countries, the invention of powerful computers that people could carry around – smartphones, the increase in enlightenment of the world at large, the decision of an individual in the remotest parts of the world to purchase a device that could access their services, the drastic drop in the cost of fiber optic cables and mobile data subscriptions, amidst varying other factors that I myself cannot see right now.

Yet these events and their effects reverberated to amplify the effect Google has had in the world.

Implications

There are more events in the world that determine the aggregate effects of events or actions you take than you can conceivably imagine, and you have little control, if any, over most of them, yet you can be a beneficiary or a victim of those cascading effects from other events.

Cocky

This leads me to the reason for writing this third part – be incredibly ambitious to the point of being faulted as cocky.

In 1999, one year after being founded, before they had figured out how to make their first cent, Larry Page told an early Google investor that he envisions the company being big enough to generate 10 billion dollars in revenue (implying a future valuation of 100 billion dollars), in 1999! Without having figured out how to make money from the service! Now that is cocky.

If you had a goal before reading this, take it right now and “multiply it by 10”[2].

Why?
If the universe amplifies effects of each individual’s action or events, then it is reasonable to say that those who already have big effects by virtue of their own actions, will, by reason of the amplification brought about by cascading universal events, have, on aggregate, a cumulative bigger share of “the pie”[3].

“For whosoever hath, to him shall be given, and he shall have more abundance: but whosoever hath not, from him shall be taken away even that he hath” – Matthew 13:12

What then?

“If your ambitions don’t scare you, they are not big enough”, has some significant truth in it.

Thank you for reading.

Notes:

1 - Though examples like this are outliers and bad for sample size, they are good for driving home cogent points.
2 – You can do a literal multiplication by 10 if your aims are material in nature, if not material, you will have to abstractly apply the multiplication.
3 – The pie is not always tasty. Tasty or not, it gets amplified nevertheless.