I think it is often easier to make progress on mega-ambitious dreams. Since no one else is crazy enough to do... — Larry Page

I think it is often easier to make progress on mega-ambitious dreams. Since no one else is crazy enough to do it, you have little competition.

Author: Larry Page

Insight: There's a counterintuitive thing that happens when your goal sounds completely unreasonable. Everyone stops paying attention. The sensible people are all competing with each other in the crowded middle—same job titles, same career tracks, same playbooks everyone learned in business school. Meanwhile, if you're genuinely trying to do something that sounds absurd, you're operating in a space where you barely have rivals because most people filtered themselves out before they even started. This isn't about delusion. It's about the math of attention. When a goal seems ambitious but achievable, thousands of people compete for it. But when it seems impossible, that number drops dramatically. You get runway. You get resources that would've been scattered across a hundred similar projects. You get to learn things without a crowd watching your every mistake. The tricky part is distinguishing between "ambitious enough that others won't compete" and "just impossible." That line is thinner than it sounds, and it usually lives somewhere between what feels terrifying to you personally and what would make a room go quiet at a dinner party. The dreams worth chasing often look ridiculous from the outside precisely because the friction that stops most people is also the thing that clears your path.

Source: University of Michigan Commencement Address, 2009