“The ceiling on your dreams determines the ceiling on your results. Shoot higher.” — Steven Bartlett
Most people approach ambitious goals by starting with the plan: market analysis, resource requirements, timelines, and risk assessments. Bartlett argues this is the wrong starting sequence.
Before you plan, you must first expand your sense of what is possible. Before strategy, you need psychology. Before the roadmap, you need a destination that genuinely fires your imagination — something so compelling that the obstacles between here and there become logistical details rather than fundamental limits.
A “psychological moonshot” is an aspiration so large that it changes the way you think about what’s achievable. When Kennedy announced the US would land on the moon within a decade, the technology to do it didn’t exist. But the aspiration organised enormous resources, talent, and creativity in service of a goal the old constraints said was impossible.
Nobel Prize winner Daniel Kahneman's peak-end rule shows that people's memory of an experience is shaped primarily by two moments: the peak (the most intense point) and the end. This means small improvements to these two moments yield disproportionate returns in how an experience is remembered and valued. The same logic applies to stories: engineer the emotional peaks deliberately.
Counterintuitively, setting modest, “realistic” goals is often more expensive than setting outrageous ones. Here’s why:
The effort required to achieve a 10x goal is often not 10 times greater than the effort required to achieve a 2x goal. The path to 10x forces you to think fundamentally differently — to question assumptions, find leverage, and discover approaches that 2x thinking would never identify.
Meanwhile, the 2x goal keeps you on the existing path, working harder within the existing constraints. You achieve the modest goal and discover you’ve spent the same energy for a fraction of the return.
Moonshot thinking breaks the existing constraints and forces the discovery of new paths.
Expand your psychology before you develop your strategy. The ceiling on your belief determines the ceiling on your results. Shoot the psychological moonshot first — then plan backward from the impossible destination.
Immerse in examples of radical achievement. The more you encounter people who have achieved what seems impossible, the more your brain recalibrates its sense of what is realistic. Spend time in the company of people who have achieved more than you currently believe is possible.
Ask the 10x question. Not “How can I improve this by 20%?” but “How could this be 10 times better or bigger?” The question itself forces different thinking.
Study the moments of peak experience. When have you felt most alive, most engaged, most energised? These moments are clues about what kind of moonshot would genuinely ignite your psychology rather than just sound impressive on paper.
Take your current biggest goal and run it through this process:
Beyond personal goals, the peak-end rule has powerful implications for how you design customer experiences, team cultures, and communication. If people remember peaks and endings, design these deliberately. The beginning of an experience, the middle of a product journey, the midpoint of a presentation — these matter far less than the moment of greatest intensity and the final impression.