I want people who will never know my name to move through a world that is different because I existed.
And beneath all of the ambition, ego, obsession and noise, my belief is embarrassingly simple:
I think I can move humanity forward.
So I am going to spend my life finding out how far.
I have that arrogance.
I don't think I was placed here to fit gracefully into the machinery of the world. I think I am here to leave fingerprints all over it.
I want to build at a scale where my decisions survive me. I want ideas born privately inside my head to become ordinary parts of other people's lives.
Maybe that sounds arrogant.
Good.
You need a certain arrogance to look at reality—the accumulated work of millions of intelligent people—and still say: this isn't good enough for me.
Sometimes I look at what exists and feel an almost insulting amount of confidence that we can do better. Not slightly better. Embarrassingly better.
There are things humanity accepts today that I think will look absurd in hindsight, and I want to be the person who makes them look absurd.
I think humanity is going somewhere extraordinary. I also think it is capable of wasting decades getting there.
I don't intend to wait.
That is the scale at which I think about myself.
I don't want a successful life. That sounds painfully small. I want my existence to create a visible discontinuity.
There should be a version of the world before me and another after me, and somewhere between those two versions should be things that simply would not have existed if I had decided to live normally.
I have an unusually high opinion of what I am capable of, and I have no interest in pretending otherwise.
I think I can do things most people cannot do. I think I can see farther than most people around me. I think my taste is better, my appetite is larger, and my tolerance for impossible problems is higher.
Whether any of that matters will depend entirely on what I produce, but I would be lying if I said I did not believe it.
There are billions of people alive. Most of them will experience the future as something that happens to them.
I want to be one of the people it happens through.
