The Artemis II mission will reach a maximum distance of about 252,757 miles from Earth.

Each night, you travel about 536,000 miles in your sleep due to the Earth's orbit around the sun—meaning you start each day with ~2.1x Artemis II missions of momentum.

Make it count.

P.s. More action awaits you in our archives, including how Steve Jobs cultivated great taste, the personality trait shared by 1381 millionaires, and why when you’re launching something new, you need social dandelions.

If your work is groundbreaking, expect rejection (at first).

In the summer of 2003, Francisco Mojica was on holiday at his in-laws' beach house in Santa Pola, a small town on Spain's Mediterranean coast. He hated everything about it. "I really do not like sand or being on a beach in the summer when it is hot and crowded with people," he said.

So each morning, while his wife headed to sunbathe on the shore, Mojica drove twelve miles north to his lab at the University of Alicante. He had more fun analyzing bacterial DNA sequences than lying on a towel.

For over a decade, Mojica had been chasing a question nobody else cared about. He'd studied the DNA of bacteria and noticed something odd: the same sequences repeated over and over, like a pattern that shouldn't be there. No one knew what it meant. 

Colleagues told him to drop it. Repeats like this cropped up all over nature, they said, and his were probably meaningless.

Did he listen? No.

That summer, as he studied the patterns, a realization smacked him over the head. His mystery sequences were an exact match with viruses that had previously attacked the bacteria. This meant something profound: bacteria have an immune system, just like humans! 

They were keeping a genetic record of every virus that had ever attacked them, so they could recognize and fight them off next time. And it had been hiding in plain sight for three billion years.

It was so elegant that Mojica teared up.

That evening, he drove back to Santa Pola and told his wife what he'd found. "I just discovered something really amazing," he said. "Bacteria have an immune system. They're able to remember what viruses have attacked them in the past."

She had no idea what he was talking about, but his excitement made her confident he was onto something. "In a few years, you'll see this thing that I've just discovered will be written about in newspapers and in history books," he told her. She laughed, less confident about that.

A couple of years earlier, Mojica had come up with a name for the mysterious repeating sequences. The acronym popped into his head on his commute home one night. CRISPR, for "clustered regularly interspaced short palindromic repeats." 

In October 2003, Mojica submitted a paper to Nature explaining that CRISPR was a bacterial immune system, one of the most fundamental biological discoveries in decades.

This is the part where the scientific establishment recognizes a landmark discovery and showers Mojica with praise and accolades. Right?

The editors rejected it. They didn't even bother to have it reviewed by other scientists. They dismissed it as offering little beyond what was already known.

He tried another journal. Rejected. Then another. Rejected again.

Eventually, the Journal of Molecular Evolution accepted the paper—a respected but far less prominent publication. Even then, the editors dragged their feet. Mojica chased them almost every week for months.

"Every week was so terrible, such a nightmare," he later said, "because I knew we had discovered something really great. And I knew that at some point others would discover it. And I couldn't get them to see how important it was."

The journal sat on the paper from February 2004 until February 2005. Two years passed between his discovery and its publication.

Mojica's finding would turn out to be one of the most consequential in the history of biology. Understanding how bacteria defend themselves against viruses, using CRISPR, laid the foundation for other scientists to develop CRISPR into a tool for editing genes with extraordinary precision. That tool would transform medicine and earn a Nobel Prize.

You can make a discovery so important that it reshapes modern science and still get rejected. In fact, the more original the work, the more likely this is. Groundbreaking ideas don't arrive with a label that says "groundbreaking." They arrive looking weird, unfamiliar, and easy to dismiss.

Creating great work is only the first step. The second step, getting the world to embrace it, can take just as long, hurt just as much, and require every bit as much persistence.

If your best work is being ignored, you're in good company.

Don't stop shouting from the rooftops.

Final Calls To Action

• Want to understand the implications of recent advances in tech, culture, and product design? If so, Scott Belsky's monthly analysis is essential reading. In his latest April edition, Scott explores what happens when we can remember everything (and why we might not want to), the three waves of agentic commerce coming for how we buy, and why change management may be the ultimate moat in the AI era.

• As our digital productivity systems become more sophisticated, the craving for analog tools only grows. The Action Method (recently featured in Lifehacker) lets you check your to-do list without accidentally opening an email or a Slack message. Just you, a pen, some premium 80lb Via Vellum Cool White paper, and the quiet space to actually get things done.

• Curious to dive deeper on the story in today’s edition? We recommend reading The Code Breaker by Walter Isaacson.

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