The Impossible Thing
Why me and my 4yo love it
On most nights, I try to read to my 4yo. Recently, we have been reading Hugo and the Impossible Thing. https://a.co/d/0dmv8XPu
I told my wife that I really love it and she told that the person that gave it to us told her that my Founders should read it. I agree. But more so, it really reminded me of something I say a lot about startup evolution.
Individual Scale. Founders do everything themselves to get the company going.
Team Scale. Hire smart people with various expertise. They work together but never 100% focused just on their specific expertise. I relate it to street ball.
Functional Scale. People’s expertise starts to align with their departmental function. Everyone on the team is working to make the organizational function work better.
Hugo and the Impossible Thing is about Team Scale. Stop reading, if you plan on reading the book.
Hugo is a little dog that lives in a forest. At the edge of the forest lies The Impossible Thing. He asks around to see if anyone has been beyond the impossible thing. Not only has nobody been, none have tried. Why? “It’s the Impossible Thing!!”
His friends-
The Big Strong Bear
The smart and quick Fox
Miss Otter, the swimmer
and Mr Old Goat the climber.
All try to dissuade him from trying to tackle the impossible thing. Hugo is determined. After an amazing
night of rest and dreaming about all the things that may exist on the other side of the impossible thing, he wakes up and heads out to get past it.
He visits all his friends on the way there, but nobody is home. He gets to the foot of the impossible thing. Getting past it involves moving boulders, making through a thorny maze, across a river and climbing up a cliff. If you haven’t figured it out, his friends help him through each phase with their expert skills. Hugo is the first to make it past the impossible things. It’s an amazing
place. The water is clear, the air is amazing and the berries are sweeter (my 4yo can’t tell what type of berries they are, but his guess is huckleberries)
Hugo is an obsessed leader. He communicates his North Star well. He is also naive that he can do it all alone. The key thing is that while his team doesn’t get it, they still show up.
I don’t recommend a ton of books, but I do recommend this one.