Earth from the International Space Station

Beautiful video. Amazing colors.

This made my night. Thanks!

Come on... pick a different name. (I did not post twice.)

Anon is short for anonymous. It is not your name silly.

It is when you're the one who's been using it on the blog for months...

Okay, sorry, I'll stop using it 🙂

No sweat. I can always post as Real Anon.

"From a business perspective, whenever I am facing a challenge that seems insurmountable, I think about the scale of this. Right here. And suddenly everything seems achievable and things I thought were going to be too difficult turn out to be simple. Even a skyscraper isn’t really a huge accomplishment on this scale. It’s a great way to approach the world."
That's very interesting. I know that feeling. I can relate. But it seems like you are going somewhere different with it. It reminds me of something Henry Ford once said: whether you think you can do something or that you can't, you're right. It sounds like you are saying that changing your feelings about the problem solves the problem. Does that describe your experience?

Yes. I'll write a decision tree post about how I approach problems so you can see it visually and more completely if that will help you (it may take a few days because I'm booked for the next week), but the short answer: Yes.

On the topic of Henry Ford, he also made one of my favorite observations: "Nothing is particularly hard if you divide it into small jobs." There is so much truth in that.

Let's imagine that your dream is to build a giant warehouse superstore. Not a chain, just one. The idea of creating a business that generates $100,000,000 in annual sales with $3,000,000 in pre-tax profits (a high-volume, low-margin = high return on equity model) seems overwhelming. That is until you take the world view - just like this video. Looking at the planet Earth from space, total gross world product (GWP) is $78,950,000,000,000.00. That is $78.95 trillion dollars. Your "giant" store would make you very rich over time and provide enough money to do almost anything over a 10-year period of saving (apartments in New York and London, a beach house in Southern California, private jets, et cetera), yet you'd be only 0.000127% of the global economy. You wouldn't even qualify as a rounding error.

Capturing 0.000127% of the global economy is far more attainable than building a $100 million a year business. My focus would be on the former, the by-product the latter, if that makes sense. It's just a lens shift, like putting on different color glasses or switching to night vision from infrared. It works for my psychology.

(This is probably a bad example because, personally, I'd rather have a small $10,000,000 business with extremely high profit margins that sold a product I loved generating that $3,000,000 in income. It fits my personality better. The concept still applies.)

That makes a lot of sense. The principle of reverse induction/rollback/starting with the end in mind/heat seeking missile/etc. is the cornerstone of successful planning whether you want to send a parcel at the post office before they close for lunch or you are solving for a Nash equilibrium in a global scenario of realpolitik. Whatever they call it, in my experience it's always the first chapter in a success book.
One of the targets I have for reading your blog is to cultivate a better understanding of the distinction between recruiting self agency to overcome unnecessary internal limits e.g. irrational doubt or fear and practicing denial and irrational hope. I have watched a lot of people who proceed through life on blind faith. Sometimes that gets them through "when nothing else will." Other times it gets them into a lot of unnecessary pain. That's what I liked so much about Bedell's book. It was the most rational, realistic success book I have ever read. I have lived through a Depression. I have seen countless dreams and plans fail--some were my own. But even the Potato famine and the Holocaust left survivors. Statistically, some lucky few people will survive anything. Planning to be one of them... that's the trick. And my sense is, you can't be too limited by your fears EVEN as I have learned that you can't give in to unbridled hope. Your ability to overcome your doubts is legendary. That's why people come to your site. Perhaps you are a statistic. But I am comforted by the possibility that my fears and doubts are less rational than they seem to me.

P.S. I should point out that you still have to be smart about it. You could not build a $100 million single-location business in a town that had a total market volume of only $20 million. I would start by working the problem backwards; pulling data on all of the metropolitan areas in the United States and saying, "I need to find a location that could support a store of this volume, that has the demographic profile I need based on household income, debt levels, education, etc., a tax-friendly state and local government, ad infinitum ..." I'd then find the best locations based on the overall variables, go out and raise money from investors or structure some sort of synthetic capital (e.g., if I were running a mail order business, convincing a warehouse owner to lease me the space based entirely on a percentage of sales so I didn't have to come up with rent for the first few years).

Wow. I work at MDA, (now called Maxar) the company that designed and built the Canada Space Arm (Canadarm) and it makes me so proud to watch this video and see it in space. I work with brilliant engineers (but I'm not one of them - I'm the happy admin for the brilliant engineers) and every day I come to work and I'm always in awe. Ordinary individuals doing extraordinary things.