Safaris

Originally published on Tumblr.

This morning I tracked my wife’s plane as she flew from New York to Austin. Looking at the map I noticed that the distance between New York and Austin is similar to the distance between New York and Havana.

WolframAlpha confirmed this. In fact, Havana is closer to New York than Austin. It takes 8ms for light to travel to Austin in a vacuum, but only 7 to Havana.

This got me thinking about the relationship between the journey and the destination.

On modern safari you learn two things: safari means journey in Swahili, and “The journey is the destination”. It’s good to know at least one word in Swahili, and little folk wisdom never hurt anyone.

“The journey is the destination”

The idea that we should ignore the destination for the journey is appealing. After all, if you’re going to spend a lot of time getting from point A to point B, or point A to point A in today’s safaris, you might as well enjoy it. But does this still apply today? Does it apply to modern travel? And does it apply our metaphoric journeys?

It’s apparently nonsense when applied to modern travel, because modern travel is always so short! Car journeys and plane trips are never long by historic standards. In fact, modern travel often seems closer to time travel than the journeys our ancestors experienced. New York to Havana is a 60 year, more than a 1,300 mile journey.

Although it doesn’t apply to travel anymore, let’s see if that folk wisdom applies to two metaphoric journeys: life and work.

“The journey is the destination.”

Applying this to life, unfortunately, also seems like nonsense. Most of us aren’t looking forward to the destination. If we were, we’d be taking the obvious shortcut the way some early Christians did. It doesn’t make sense to apply a straw man contrasting or conflating the journey and the destination when the only thing we value is the journey in the first place.

So far our Maasai warrior guide is 0 for 2. Maybe he’ll have better luck with business. Since I’m a startup guy, that’s what I’ll consider.

If I ask a roomful of entrepreneurs: “If you could snap your fingers to fulfill your company’s vision, would you do it?”, how many would say yes? I’d wager most.

But if I rephrase the question: “Knowing that 9/10th of your will end up bankrupt, if you could snap your fingers and instantly reach your company’s ultimate outcome, would you do it?”, the answer might be different.

A walking safari is about the journey. A plane trip is about the destination. A life is not about ultimate nothingness. But building a new business might just be about both.

A few people may answer no to that first question, that is, they wouldn’t want to jump right to the end. Maybe they’d answer no because they recognize value and pleasure in the struggle to invent and build, or because they believe that employing people along the way is a net positive that trickles down to those people’s children, or because they value the relationships that are formed when people work together. For those reasons the journey might be worth taking.

The science fiction writer Ursula LeGuin said: “It is good to have an end to journey toward; but it is the journey that matters, in the end.” I like that she at least considered the importance of the destination, but, applied to business building, I don’t think she went far enough.

The goal matters. People work together to reach a goal. Investors don’t invest in journeys. They invest in goals. No one starts a business for the journey.

So does the journey matter at all?

I listed three reason why it might. Relationships and sustenance are clearly side-effects, albeit positive ones. But invention and building aren’t. They are part of the journey, and they are goals themselves.

I think this is key. The journey isn’t separate from destination, because the journey itself is made up of destinations. The reason the relationship is misleading is because we perceive a journey in two dimensional space, when it is fractal by nature. Each part of the journey is a journey with a goal, and each part of that journey is a journey with a goal.

When it comes to work, our Maasai warrior guide might have had it just right: the journey is the destination. I’m not sure about life, and I’m a long way from figuring out how to apply this wisdom to modern travel. If I ever manage, I’ll certainly write about it.

I’ve always wondered how much of the work we do every day is destined to end in failure. If Mandelbrot is my guide, there can only be one answer: 9/10ths.