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It always stuns me what people are able to explain away when it comes to these Captains of Industry.

If we can realize the goal is ridiculous, surely the engineers who work on this full time will realize it's ridiculous.

And maybe their takeaway is the same as ours: "This is a big priority and I need to get it done ASAP". Isn't that exactly what Musk is trying to get across?

Urgency and scarcity also encourage folks to find solutions that they wouldn’t otherwise search for if they could just wait for the status quo approach.

The flip side to doing things that don’t scale is that once those practices become a standard part of your operations you are forced to figure out how to scale them. This causes you to find the scalability hell or high water whereas if you didn’t do the thing in the first place you never would have invented the scalability.

If you were in a meeting where an executive set a clearly impossible goal, would you be more likely to feel a huge swell of motivation or to grumble at the water cooler about clueless business types ignoring the engineers?

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