Most leaders confuse strategic thinking with visionary thinking. They spend months crafting elegant long-term plans while completely ignoring the most important question: What can you actually address today?
This is the addressability test—the degree to which a challenge can be overcome given your current skills, resources, and timeframe. It’s the difference between strategy and daydreaming.
Magic Leap raised $2.6 billion to revolutionize “mixed reality computing.” Their vision was grand: transform how humans interact with technology forever. For nearly a decade, they painted pictures of a spatial computing future where digital objects seamlessly blend with the physical world.
But they never addressed the fundamental questions: Can we make lightweight AR glasses that don’t look ridiculous? Can we create compelling software that people actually want to use? Can we solve the technical problems that have stumped every major tech company?
The result? Clunky goggles that nobody wanted and one of the most expensive failures in tech history.
Compare that to Stripe. Patrick and John Collison had an equally ambitious vision: “increase the GDP of the internet.” They wanted to make it easier for anyone, anywhere, to start an internet business and accept payments globally.
But instead of starting with the grand vision, they addressed one specific problem: online payments were broken. Developers needed weeks to integrate payment systems. What if it could be done with seven lines of code?
They didn’t build a global financial infrastructure on day one. They built something developers could actually use immediately. Then they addressed the next problem, and the next. Today, Stripe processes hundreds of billions in payments annually.
The difference wasn’t in their ambitions—both companies wanted to transform technology. The difference was in their approach to addressability.
Magic Leap tried to solve everything at once. Stripe chunked their impossible future into addressable steps they could take today.
This doesn’t mean abandoning long-term thinking. It means embracing the discipline of breaking complex challenges into smaller pieces, one of which you can tackle right now.
Can we eliminate poverty worldwide? Probably not in our lifetime. Can we address hunger in our city this year? Maybe. Can we start a program to feed 100 families this month? Absolutely.
The addressability test forces intellectual honesty. It separates real strategic thinking from elaborate planning theater. It asks uncomfortable questions: Do we have the skills? Do we have the resources? Can we actually move the needle in a meaningful timeframe?
Most strategies fail this test because they’re designed to sound impressive, not to drive action. They describe broad paths into the future while evading the hard work of distilling intentions into steps you can take today.
As Seth Godin says, “Strategy is the philosophy of becoming.” But without addressability, becoming remains forever theoretical.
Georges Doriot put it perfectly: “Without action, the world would still be an idea.”
What’s your next addressable step?