Aim for the moon; even if you miss you’ll land among the stars

Aim for the moon

The title is a well known quote which I’m almost sure most of us would have heard. The message is clear: shoot for your goal, and if you miss you will still have achieved something. Positive thought, isn’t it? My critics often say that I’ve an aura of negativity around me (which they say is evident from what I write). I’m not sure I have it for I haven’t noticed any of it. It is just that I have a different perspective. In fact, I try to place myself at a vantage point from where I can see the things differently, but definitely more clearly than those in the views offered by the other similar positions. Or I might be incompetent to see things that others see. Negative or not, I have a protocol of understanding things: first I question them, then I analyse them and then I decide whether or not I believe in them, and while doing so I totally disregard the reputation of the proposer.

Once again I have decided to analyse. This time the subject under study is a quote- the title of this piece – enunciated by W. Clement Stone. Since intellect lies in the ability to read between the lines, and the meaning between the lines is already clear, I’ll take on the more interesting task of reading the lines instead. The author was certainly imagining some game in his mind when he said the words, “Aim for the moon.” A sane guess would be archery or shooting. And then he adds, “even if you miss, you’ll land among the stars.” Well, there’s some fundamental flaw in the conclusion, for it contradicts the science we know. This guy lived a hundred years from 1902 to 2002 and this piece of information might come handy to convince ourselves that certainly there’s something wrong with the saying. I intend no disrespect to Stone or his sense of sapience but the chap must’ve struggled with his Geography or his maths, if at all he was a student. The moon is about 40.4 x 10^-9 light-years away from the earth. On the other hand, the nearest known star (other than the Sun), Proxima Centauri, is about 4.22 light-years away. Now you do the math. The stats reveal that the nearest star is too far away than the moon is from us and we simply can’t reach the stars if we are aiming for the moon. Nevertheless crap is crap and you can’t get rid of it for it is a gift from nature and you can’t say no to nature. So there we go, aiming for the moon and convincing ourselves that something good will come out of the exercise for we’ll land among the stars even if we miss.