We Can Do Impossible Things
It's all too easy to lose sight of ambition when we're busy playing whack-a-mole with the world's problems.
By Corinne Iozzio | October 21, 2026
There is a particular kind of fatigue that sets in when you spend your days responding to crises rather than pursuing possibilities. The problems of the world arrive faster than we can solve them—climate disruptions, public health emergencies, geopolitical instability, the relentless churn of misinformation—and each one demands immediate attention. It is, in many ways, the defining posture of our era: reactive, defensive, and perpetually behind.
The Whack-a-Mole Trap
When every waking hour is spent containing the latest fire, ambition becomes a luxury. We optimize for damage control. We measure success by what we prevented rather than what we built. And slowly, without quite noticing, we begin to believe that incrementalism is the only responsible path forward.
This is understandable. It is also, arguably, the most dangerous assumption we can make.
What We Forget
The history of technology is a history of impossible things becoming ordinary. Flight. Vaccines. Instantaneous global communication. Machines that can reason, write, design, and diagnose. Each of these was once dismissed as fantasy—until it wasn't. The through-line is not genius or luck but the stubborn refusal to accept the current limits of the possible as permanent.
In 2026, we stand at a similar threshold. The tools at our disposal—advanced AI systems, gene editing, fusion research, quantum computing, synthetic biology—are not merely incremental improvements. They represent entire new categories of capability. The question is not whether we can do impossible things. It is whether we will allow ourselves to try.
The Cost of Small Thinking
The biggest risks today are not the moonshots that fail. They are the modest proposals that succeed and leave us nowhere. A patch here, a subsidy there, a marginal efficiency gained—these can consume enormous resources while never addressing the underlying challenge. Worse, they can create the illusion of progress, crowding out the more ambitious work that real breakthroughs require.
We see this dynamic across sectors. Energy systems optimized for the last century rather than the next. Healthcare models that treat symptoms rather than anticipate disease. Educational institutions designed for an industrial age preparing students for a world their grandparents could not have imagined.
A Case for Radical Ambition
To be clear, ambition is not the same as recklessness. The most transformative projects in history were not naive—they were rigorous, collaborative, and deeply informed by evidence. The Manhattan Project, the Apollo program, the rapid development of mRNA vaccines: each combined audacious goals with disciplined execution.
What they shared was a willingness to name a target that seemed unreachable and then organize around it. That is a mode of thinking we have largely lost—and must recover.
What Comes Next
The decade ahead will be defined by a choice. We can continue to play whack-a-mole, or we can set our sights on the problems that feel impossible and treat them as engineering challenges rather than permanent features of the human condition.
That does not mean ignoring the urgent. It means refusing to let urgency crowd out vision. It means building institutions, funding mechanisms, and cultures that make room for long-horizon work even as we manage the present.
We can do impossible things. We have before. The only real question is whether we remember that we can.