Strive for the Impossible

“MEN WANTED for hazardous journey, small wages, bitter cold, long months of complete darkness, constant danger, safe return doubtful, honor and recognition in case of success.”

Ernest Shackleton allegedly published this ad looking for men to join him on his Imperial Trans-Antarctic Expedition, now commonly referred to as the “Endurance Expedition.” Seeking to cross Antarctica, Shackleton’s ship Endurance got caught in pack ice that sank the ship, leaving the crew stranded on the ice for months. Once the ice began to break apart, Shackleton led the rest of his men to the uninhabited Elephant Island. Shackleton then made one of the most daring small-boat voyages in history: an 800-mile open-ocean crossing in a 22-foot lifeboat through the Southern Ocean to South Georgia. From there, he and two companions crossed the island’s unmapped, glaciated mountain interior to reach the whaling station at Stromness. From Stromness, he mounted four successive rescue attempts to retrieve his men. Not one life was lost.

The story of the Endurance Expedition is one of exploration into the unknown and perseverance through impossible odds. The men who joined Shackleton understood the risks but deemed them worth taking in the pursuit of new frontiers. While the borders of the continental earth have been discovered, the frontiersman spirit has found a new home in the field of hard tech startups. Through these companies, men work day and night to pull the future into our reality.

Take Rainmaker, for instance, a company using state-of-the-art drone technology to literally make clouds rain. Rainmaker drone pilots travel to remote mountains and valleys in the dead of winter all across the American West to seed clouds whenever the right conditions arise. Bitter cold? Yes. Long months of dark nights? Absolutely. The payoff? Untapped potential to replenish reservoirs, water crops, and steward the earth God gave us. Cloud seeding has never been used to replenish watersheds at scale before, but just because something hasn’t been done before doesn't mean it can’t be done. And with Rainmaker’s cracked team of engineers, operators, and scientists, it will be done.

Valar Atomics is another startup working to usher in a new age of nuclear power. The company has one goal: make energy ten times cheaper over the next ten years. The team at Valar plans to manufacture and deploy small modular nuclear reactors in a way that reduces the cost of maintaining reactor sites. The Valar team works at impossible speeds compared to industry standards. For instance, most nuclear startups build a thermal prototype reactor four or five years into a project and spend well over $100 million to do it. Valar Atomics built a prototype reactor, Ward 0, in ten months. And they only spent $12 million to do it. The success is due in part to CEO Isaiah Taylor’s philosophy of work. “If you look at your production timeline, and it’s not literally impossible to get everything done in that timeline, then your goals are not ambitious enough,” says Taylor.

Another company leveraging technology to steward the earth is Ulysses, a maritime autonomous drone company striving to both explore and steward the Earth’s oceans. Their Mako submarine can operate up to 12 hours at a time, diving down to five thousand feet below the surface. These drones can withstand the harshest maritime environments and perform tasks such as restoring seagrass meadows, securing sea-floor fiber-optic cables, and patrolling our nation's coastlines.

Whether the goal is to modify the weather, construct advanced nuclear infrastructure, or manufacture deep-sea drones, every startup founder faces problems that at first appear impossible to solve. It takes Shackletonian levels of grit to take on the challenge. One of my favorite quotes from Elon Musk encapsulates just how difficult it is to be a founder. “Starting a company is like eating glass and staring into the abyss.” Not just any man is called to lead a startup. Working at a startup, however, is not nearly as impossible a challenge. Furthermore, someone with a liberal arts education is particularly prepared to step into this unique and chaotic world.

Taken from New Saint Andrews College’s own definition of the liberal arts, as an art, the liberal arts produce the ability to learn. And because they are liberal arts, they liberate us from the servile dependence on the tutelage of others. They enhance someone’s ability to think clearly and effectively, thus making the liberal arts especially important for leaders, who themselves must be guides.

In addition to learning how to learn, the liberal arts introduce students to a variety of different subjects to increase their wisdom, courage, and temperance. As students of history, they learn from both the successes and failures of nations in conflict. As students of language, they observe how different words' meanings change through history, shaping language into what it is today. As students of philosophy, they trace questions of being, morality, and reality, answer them the best they can, and ultimately realize that they take way too many conclusions for granted. And if done right, the liberal arts student begins to draw his own connections, seeing how science relates to philosophy, philosophy to literature, literature to language, language to rhetoric, rhetoric to history, history to theology, and theology to everything.

The opportunity to explore modern frontiers is open to all capable men. The burden is set upon those NSA men who have been given the education of kings because of the following sentence: Omni cui multum datum est, multum quaeretur ab eo. “To whom much has been given, much will be required.”

The liberal arts student then becomes an effective generalist—knowledgeable in many things but specialized in nothing. In our credential-obsessed society, this might look like a one-way ticket to unemployment. I assure you, it’s not. To the man who knows how to learn, the opportunities are endless. He needs only to apply himself to the work. It’s true, you might not be hired as a mechanical engineer or a software engineer right after college. However, the liberal arts student can learn how to design a drone or debug its software. He might not have any experience with nuclear reactor maintenance, but given instructions and a goal, the liberal arts student can excel at and even find more efficient ways to complete his assignment. When you know how to learn, you can learn anything quickly, which is perfect for the world of startups.

For many startups, procedures, hardware, software, and operations are all changing on a week-by-week basis. Employees at any level need to be flexible, roll with the punches, and most of all, execute violently on their assignments. If liberal arts students can learn quickly, then they have an edge when it comes to rapid iteration. In startups, capability is the currency, and grit is the gold standard. But most importantly, every employee needs to be a problem solver. Every grand, earth-shaping innovation, whether it be cloud-seeding drones or self-landing rockets, starts as one big problem. You take the big problem and break it into as many little problems as you can. Then you start solving them one by one. You solve the hardware problem, then the software problem, and so on. You try different methods, different equipment, different strategies, and you don’t stop trying until you find a solution. Wash. Rinse. Repeat. There’s no easy way to keep a drone in the air that’s fighting fifty-knot winds while ice accumulates on its propellers. There’s no easy way to catch a 500 metric ton rocket falling from space. There’s no road map to accomplishing the impossible. There’s just the trying, the failure, the learning, and the trying again and again and again until you succeed.

The opportunity to explore modern frontiers is open to all capable men. The burden is set upon those NSA men who have been given the education of kings because of the following sentence: Omni cui multum datum est, multum quaeretur ab eo. “To whom much has been given, much will be required.” Every graduating class is charged with these words at commencement. It is a charge not to waste what you have been given, and an encouragement to consider your effective capability. You can work fifty hours a week running your town’s Chick-fil-A franchise. Or you can work the same amount of time shaping the world that the rest of us want to live in. You don’t know what you can do until you try.

I end with the wise words of the liberal arts-educated frontiersmen, widely considered one of the most intellectually formidable men to hold the presidency—Theodore Roosevelt.

“It is not the critic who counts; 

not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, 

or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. 

The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, 

whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; 

who strives valiantly; who errs, who comes short again and again, 

because there is no effort without error and shortcoming; 

but who does actually strive to do the deeds; 

who knows great enthusiasms, the great devotions; 

who spends himself in a worthy cause; 

who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, 

and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, 

so that his place shall never be with those cold and 

timid souls who neither know victory nor defeat.”