George Bernard Shaw wrote that the reasonable man adapts himself to the world, while the unreasonable man persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore, he concluded, all progress depends on the unreasonable man.
It is one of those quotes that gets shared so often that it has lost its edge. So let's restore it.
To be unreasonable — in the sense Shaw meant — is not to be irrational or reckless. It is to refuse to accept the current state of the world as the permanent state of the world. It is to look at something broken, insufficient, or absent and decide, without anyone's permission, that you are the one who will fix it. It is to hold in your mind a vision of something that does not yet exist and to organise your entire professional life around making it real.
That is what dreaming big actually means. Not fantasising. Not wishing. Deciding.
Why we are trained to dream small.
Nobody sits a child down and tells them explicitly to lower their ambitions. It happens more quietly than that, through a thousand small corrections across the years of growing up.
You say you want to build a company, and you are asked when you will get a real job. You pitch an idea, and you are told the market is not ready. You describe a vision, and someone who loves you tells you to be realistic. You watch the people around you make careful, defensible, incremental choices, and you absorb, without anyone saying it directly, that this is what maturity looks like — the replacement of large ambitions with manageable ones.
In Africa, this dynamic has additional texture. Generations of economic instability have made risk aversion a rational survival response for many families. Parents who lived through currency crises, political instability, and structural unemployment have a legitimate reason to steer their children toward secure employment. Their advice is not foolish. It is the product of real experience with the cost of things going wrong.
But the advice optimises for survival. And survival is not the same thing as building. The founder who will create the infrastructure that provides stable employment for thousands of people must first be willing to choose something that does not feel stable. That is the paradox that dreaming big requires you to hold.
What big dreams actually do.
There is a practical case for large ambition that has nothing to do with inspiration and everything to do with execution.
When you set a small goal, you design a small system to achieve it. Your hiring decisions, your product decisions, your fundraising decisions, your partnerships — all of them are calibrated to reach the small target. The problem is that small systems are fragile. They have no slack, no redundancy, no capacity to absorb the unexpected. When something goes wrong — and something always goes wrong — a small system has nowhere to flex.
When you set a large goal, you design a system with capacity. You build teams, processes, and infrastructure that are sized for a larger outcome than you will achieve in the short term. That overcapacity is not waste. It is resilience. It is the buffer that allows you to survive the inevitable setbacks and still arrive somewhere worth arriving.
Peter Diamandis, the entrepreneur and engineer who founded the XPRIZE, has written about what he calls "moonshot thinking" — the idea that a 10x improvement in something is often easier to achieve than a 10% improvement, because a 10x target forces you to abandon the incremental approaches that feel safe and find genuinely different solutions. The 10% target keeps you inside the current paradigm. The 10x target forces you outside it.
This is counterintuitive until you experience it. The enormous goal liberates you from the local maximum. It makes you ask different questions.
The founders who refused to be reasonable.
Fred Smith, the founder of FedEx, wrote a paper as an undergraduate at Yale arguing that there was a massive unmet need for overnight package delivery in the United States. His professor gave him a C, noting that the idea was interesting but not feasible. Smith built FedEx anyway. It operates in over 220 countries and territories today.
Wangari Maathai founded the Green Belt Movement in Kenya in 1977 — a grassroots organisation that over the following decades planted more than 51 million trees across Africa, while simultaneously advocating for women's rights, democracy, and environmental conservation. She was told, repeatedly, that her ambitions were too large, that she was operating outside her lane, that a Kenyan woman with a biology doctorate should confine herself to more modest objectives. She was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 2004. The citation described her as contributing "to sustainable development, democracy, and peace."
Strive Masiyiwa, the Zimbabwean entrepreneur who founded Econet Wireless, spent five years in legal battles with the Zimbabwean government for the right to operate a private telecommunications network before he was granted a licence. Five years. Most people would have concluded after one year that the government's resistance was a signal to move on. He concluded it was a negotiation to outlast. Econet now operates across multiple African countries and has made Masiyiwa one of the wealthiest people on the continent.
The pattern, again: the big dream was not the guarantee. It was the commitment that made the fight worth having when the fight became the work.
Dreaming big in the context of building Africa.
Africa is, by almost any measure, the most target-rich environment for ambitious founders on the planet right now.
The continent has the youngest population in the world — a median age of around 19, compared to 38 in the United States and 45 in Western Europe. It has the fastest-growing middle class of any region. It has an infrastructure deficit that, viewed from one angle, is a problem — and viewed from another, is an inventory of unsolved problems that people will pay to have solved. Payments. Healthcare. Education. Logistics. Agriculture. Energy. Housing. Every sector contains a problem large enough to build a generational company around.
The founders who will build those companies need to be willing to hold a vision that, by the standards of current infrastructure and current convention, looks unreasonable. Because it is unreasonable — and that is precisely what qualifies it as worth building.
There is no modest path to transforming the agricultural supply chain for smallholder farmers across West Africa. There is no incremental approach to building financial infrastructure that brings the unbanked majority of the continent into a formal economy. There is no small version of the platform that connects Africa's professional talent to global opportunities at scale. These things are large, or they are nothing.
What dreaming big requires you to do differently.
A large vision without operational discipline is not ambition. It is wishful thinking. The distinction matters enormously, and it is the distinction that separates the founders who build things from the founders who talk about what they will build.
Write the vision down in specific terms. Not "I want to build a big company." Not "I want to change Africa." What specific problem does this company solve? For whom? At what scale? By when? What does the world look like when this company has done what it set out to do? The specificity is not a constraint on the dream. It is the thing that makes the dream actionable.
Reverse-engineer from the large goal to today. If the five-year vision is to have 100,000 businesses using your platform across West Africa, what does the three-year milestone need to be? The one-year milestone? The six-month milestone? What needs to be true in three months for the six-month milestone to be reachable? This process does not shrink the goal. It reveals the work.
Find the people who can hold the size of it with you. One of the least discussed costs of large ambition is how isolating it can be when the people around you cannot see what you see. This is not a reason to lower the vision. It is a reason to be deliberate about community — to surround yourself with people who have built large things, who are building large things, who understand that the gap between vision and current reality is not a reason to be embarrassed but a measure of the work ahead.
Treat doubt as information, not as verdict. Doubt — your own and other people's — contains data about the assumptions in your plan, the gaps in your evidence, and the places where your thinking needs to be sharpened. It is not a signal to stop. It is a signal to examine. The founders who last are not the ones who have no doubt. They are the ones who have learned to metabolise it.
The thing that only a big dream can give you.
There is a quality of motivation available to people building toward something genuinely large that is simply not available to people optimising toward something manageable.
It is not happiness, exactly. Building a company is frequently not happy. It is something more like significance — the sense that the work matters beyond the personal outcome, that the problem being solved is worth solving regardless of whether this particular attempt succeeds. That sense of significance is what sustains founders through the years when nothing is working, when the funding has not arrived, when the product is not quite right, when the team is tired, when the reasonable path keeps presenting itself as an exit.
The small dream does not offer this. The small dream is defensible, achievable, and finished. The large dream is an ongoing commitment to something that will outlast the setbacks. That is its gift.
Build something large enough that it still matters when it is hard. Because it will be hard. And when it is, the size of what you are building for is the only thing that will keep you at the table.
Xcuxion Labs was built for founders with unreasonably large visions and the discipline to work toward them. Applications for Batch '27 are open.