Daily Inspiration Quote by Edwin Land

The line reads like a dare dressed up as a management principle, which is exactly the point. Edwin Land isn’t offering a productivity tip; he’s drawing a moral boundary around what counts as worthy work. “Manifestly important” is a high bar and a loaded phrase: not “interesting,” not “profitable,” not even “useful,” but so obviously consequential that the value is hard to argue with. It’s a way of inoculating ambition against the small-bore temptations of incrementalism.

Then comes the twist: “nearly impossible.” Land makes difficulty a feature, not a bug. The subtext is that creativity doesn’t flourish in the comfortable middle where timelines are safe and outcomes are predictable. By setting “nearly” as the qualifier, he’s also sneaking in a pragmatist’s wink: it must be just barely within reach, the kind of challenge that forces new tools, new thinking, and, crucially, a new kind of confidence.

Context matters here. Land built Polaroid on moonshot engineering that had to feel like science fiction before it became consumer magic. Instant photography wasn’t simply a better camera; it was a reimagining of time, proof, and possession - a technological flex that turned waiting into an anachronism. His quote is the ethos behind that kind of leap: choose problems that justify obsession, because obsession is what “nearly impossible” demands.

As advice, it’s ruthless. It quietly dismisses “good enough” culture and makes a claim about identity: serious innovators are the people who volunteer for the work that scares them, as long as it matters.