I thought the attractions of being an astronaut were actually, not so much the Moon, but flying in a completely new medium.

The thrill of untrodden ground

There's something revealing in how Armstrong frames what drew him to space. Most people imagine astronauts as Moon-obsessed dreamers, but he's pointing at something deeper: the pure pull of doing something that's never been done before, in conditions that have never existed for humans. The Moon was the destination, sure, but the real magnetism was the flying itself—the act of moving through an environment where nobody had ever moved.

This actually captures something true about motivation that we ignore in everyday life. We often think we want the end result—the promotion, the finished project, the achievement—but what actually gets us out of bed is usually the novel challenge itself. A surgeon talks about the surgery, not the paycheck. A writer describes the sentences, not the book sale. The medium is the message, as they say, and it's also usually the actual reward.

What's useful here is recognizing that when something feels genuinely compelling to you, it might not be about reaching the finish line at all. It might be that you're attracted to the unfamiliar terrain you'd have to cross to get there. That distinction matters, because chasing pure destinations gets exhausting fast, but engaging with genuine novelty and difficulty tends to sustain us.