Shape The Mountain

Every mountain top is within reach if you just keep climbing. - Barry Finlay

In The Endless Vision, I wrote about the three mountains that are the foundation of my dream for every child in the world to have the tools and skills to live a powerful life in this digital age. For the better part of a decade I fought on the front lines of this war for digital equity, traveling hundreds of days a year, in the field and working 100 hour weeks. At Endless, we have enabled tens of thousands of kids in slums and villages and refugee camps to access life-changing technology. In these places, I gleaned three key insights that make it possible to get this to millions more:

1) Use games to teach skills that are the future of work, like coding, design and management

2) Harness the power of storage to ease the internet divide

3) Unlock financing to enable every kid who wants a computer to get one

I suggest that you read more about them in The Endless Vision. 

Charlie Munger says "take a simple idea and take it seriously." These are simple ideas and I take them very seriously. But each one is a massive mountain. So, how do we conquer them?

In the real world you can choose the trail but you can’t shape the mountain. In 2007 I spent a month climbing Mt Marcus Baker. It was the highest peak in Alaska’s Chugach Mountains. We were a day from the peak and had to turn back. Real world mountains are made of immovable rock.

But in the world of products and technology, mountains can be reshaped. The mountaintop is a vision, the solving of a problem. There is freedom to shape strategies, to craft a series of summits, each achievable. Elon Musk had a vision of mass producing electric vehicles. His version of tapering the mountain was, “Create a low volume car, which would necessarily be expensive. Use that money to develop a medium volume car at a lower price. Use that money to create an affordable, high volume car.” Each was a camp on the way to the top.

This requires patience. And patience requires total faith. Bezos dreamt of an “Everything Store”. It was impossible at the start, so he built an online bookstore. It started humbly. One of his first innovations was a packing table so his knees wouldn’t hurt when he was taping boxes. But he knew that if he could build the world’s best online bookstore, he could advance from there.

We are pursuing a dream in which every kid can have: 1) a computer 2) that works in any internet environment and 3) that teaches the skills to participate in the modern economy. If we can shape the summits so that each victory leads us closer to the top, we will get there. I'll talk about how in future posts. But this point is important enough to emphasize on its own. 

While the scale of what Endless is attempting to achieve is quite literally world-changing, it is possible if we make each of the summits along the way surmountable. 

How will you taper the impossible mountains in your own life to let you conquer them? Perhaps thinking about the world this way can even allow you to be more aspirational, dreaming of the even bigger summits beyond the one that you are climbing.