"DO NOT Shoot For The Moon!"

The internets don’t seem to know who first said the following oft-repeated platitude, so please forgive the lack of attribution:

Shoot for the moon — if you miss, you’ll still land among the stars.

We’ll come back to that in a sec.

Broadly speaking, the idea behind such traditional metaphorical adages is that there is some kind of literal truth to the statement meant to extend out to the implied figurative truth of whatever message it attempts to convey. I suppose this is because the human mind seeks to cope with the chaotic/nonsensical/absurd universe in which it finds itself by constructing patterns or models that may be applied to distinct but apparently similar phenomena. We refer to these phenomenological patterns or models as “understanding” or “insight” or “wisdom.”

Take this old saying, for instance:

A stitch in time saves nine.

Sure, it’s a dated metaphor. I mean, hardly anyone spends much time on stitching nowadays. But generally speaking, as far as I know, it’s literally true — the sooner one stitches up a hole in one’s clothes, the less that hole will tend to expand over time, and therefore less overall stitchwork will be required. Similarly, this figurative concept also applies to problems that become more difficult to solve as time passes. Of course, sometimes you can just ignore a problem until it goes away, or resolves itself, or whatever, so “a stitch in time” isn’t necessarily always true, but nevertheless the wisdom of the advice resonates in plenty of cases.

Okay, now take this one:

A watched pot never boils.

Here we have a less-than-perfect adage where the figurative meaning is generally accepted as true in spite of everyone knowing for a fact that the statement is literally false. Watched pots definitely do boil — your gaze does not hold some kind of magical power over the fundamental laws of physics.* But we as a society keep this adage around because the idea behind it (i.e., that it’s hard to get anything accomplished when somebody is either literally or figuratively looking over your shoulder and/or breathing down your neck) has some truth in it and can be useful advice.

The moon-shootin’-est game around!

Now, the problem with the “shoot for the moon...” adage is that it is neither literally nor figuratively true. In fact, it is complete bullsh!t. It is one of those things that people say merely because it sounds nice, and positive, and encouraging, and makes them feel good, and (as long as they don’t apply much critical thinking to it) seems like something they would want to believe.

Without getting into a nerdy discussion of why “shoot for the moon...” is obviously literal garbage, I challenge you to talk to some people who have figuratively “shot for the moon” but missed. I bet a lot of them (if they are being honest) will tell you that they regret it and wish they had instead set more realistic, achievable goals for themselves.

Of course, when it comes to adages, there’s usually some contradictory (if not mutually exclusive) piece of conventional wisdom floating around. So maybe “shoot for the moon...” could be countered, or at least tempered, by something like:

If you fly too close to the sun, you’ll only end up melting your fake wings and dying in the middle of the sea.

But why bother with such a counter-adage (even one that does draw on similar astronomical material for its metaphor, as well as “ups the ante” by embedding an allusion to one of humanity’s most cherished ancient myths) when we can revise “shoot for the moon...” to be more accurate both literally and figuratively, thus:

Shoot for the moon — but be aware that if you miss, you will end up hurtling off into the infinite blackness of space, eventually losing radio contact with Earth, and slowly dying of asphyxiation after suffering through maddening hours or even days of unimaginable terror, loneliness, and despair.

Or, more succinctly:

DO NOT shoot for the moon.

You’re welcome, humanity!

---

*Granted, quantum theory tells us that actually it does.