The only limit is imagination

Everything Impakers exists for begins with being true to yourself. What does it mean to be yourself? Answering that question is extraordinarily hard. Often the way to find it is not to reach for an answer but to work out what the problem is, because the problems that pull us in are the ones that make us think in our most personal way. And we believe that thinking of that kind is what keeps us alive. If we give a grand name — a dream — to the answer we are trying to reach through that thinking, then all of us who live with problems are carrying dreams as well, large and small.

Put another way: to live most fully as ourselves, we have to work through the problems that are ours. Seen in that light, the entrepreneur's life is a remarkably compelling way to live. It always begins by defining the problem to be solved. Not everyone has to become an entrepreneur, but anyone can live in an entrepreneur's way. Impakers stands behind the people who define their own problems and claim their own selfhood in the process.

The way we support them is by making what they imagine real. Impakers is a team of makers who feel a genuine thrill in moving imagination into reality. And the problem we look at is this: on the way to finding out who you are, the capacity to build becomes the constraint that keeps imagination from becoming real. Through making, we help impakers get past the limits of technology and time so that the only limit left is imagination. This can never be the fundamental answer to their problem. But we are not the ones who find answers. We are people who define the problems that make us who we are, and who look for the road to solving them.

With the progress of AI, we now hold far more powerful means of making than before. Yet what to build, and why it should be built, still begins with human intent rather than with the tool. Tools can be replaced; intent cannot. The problem someone wants to solve and the way they want to solve it carry an intent of their own, and that intent comes from a life that is uniquely theirs.

Our competitiveness comes from their singularity. An impaker must never be someone who merely hands over answers. Understanding what makes them singular and carrying an intent that exists nowhere else into the world — we call that the essence.

In a sense, that essence is like a photograph. Point the same camera at the same subject and the brightness, the mood and the nuance all shift with the photographer's intent. Our role as impakers is to be the photographer who captures the essence. Let us stay with the photograph a little longer. When I first learned photography, my teacher taught me this: a good photograph needs three things — honesty, restraint and courage.

What we make can never be a hundred-percent copy of their life and their essence. It only carries the intent. That is exactly why we have to be scrupulously honest. We have to recognise that what we build can distort the intent. Being honest requires understanding the essence deeply. Making at Impakers must always begin by examining the problem to be solved, the way it will be solved, and the reason behind both.

We have to concentrate on ordering and taking away. Powerful intelligence keeps adding things, and keeps making it easier to add them. But intent reveals itself when you take away, not when you add. Just as photography is called the art of subtraction, we have to clear out the countless available methods and leave room for essence and imagination to enter.

Finally, we have to be brave. There are values you can only reach by taking on risk. This runs along the same line as the entrepreneur's life. To go beyond defining a problem and actually act to solve it is courageous in itself, and Impakers must not watch that courage from a distance. Impakers must be present where that courage is being spent.