Goal-setting might be more counter-intuitive than it first appears.
In the early years of Google, co-founder Larry Page gave a talk on leadership in which he made a case that most founders get their goal-setting instincts exactly backwards — that playing it safe with narrow, specific targets is often harder than swinging for something big. “Healthy disregard for the impossible. Aggressive goals often easier. Never enough measurement. Work with people you like — and want to be like,” his slide said. The talk unpacked those points, and what Page said is worth reading carefully.
“I went to a leadership seminar once at Michigan, where I came from, and they have this great slogan, which is: have a healthy disregard for the impossible,” Page said. “And what this means is you should set really stretch goals that you’re not sure you can achieve, but are sort of reasonable. You don’t want completely outlandish goals either.”
Then he arrived at the insight that surprised even him: “One thing that I didn’t quite realize when I was starting Google is that it’s often easier to have aggressive goals. And what that means is, a lot of times, people pick very specific things they want to do because they think they’ll be easier to attain. What happens if you’re being more specific — smaller markets, that kind of thing — you also get less resources.”
The resource argument is the crux of it. “The question isn’t really how much resource you need. The question is: can you make a really good case for what you’re doing? Does it make sense? Do you have a really big advantage? If you’re building robots that are ten times less complicated than your competitors, that’s probably a good business, right? And maybe it takes a lot of money to get started up, and maybe it’s easier — they’re doing something simpler.”
The logic inverts the conventional wisdom neatly. Modest goals signal modest opportunity, which attracts modest resources. Ambitious goals, if they’re coherent and backed by a genuine advantage, attract investment, talent, and attention that can make them more achievable than the cautious alternative — not less.
It’s a principle Page himself embodied. In 1999, less than a year after founding Google, he told venture capitalist John Doerr that the company would reach $10 billion in revenue — not market cap, revenue. Doerr was stunned. Google crossed that threshold in 2007 and reported over $307 billion in revenue in 2023. Around the same time as that prediction, Page also told an interviewer that AI would be the ultimate version of Google — a prediction that has aged remarkably well. These weren’t idle boasts; they were the output of a goal-setting philosophy that treated ambition as a resource-mobilising tool.
The pattern holds more broadly. Google’s own moonshot culture — from self-driving cars to, most recently, TPUs in space — is a direct expression of this thinking: frame the goal ambitiously enough, and the resource conversation changes. The contrarian implication for founders is straightforward: if you’re trimming your vision to look achievable, you may be making it harder, not easier.