Doing Things That Make No Sense

Yesterday evening, I was driving in the dark.

Alone. No radio, no phone, no traffic. Just the hum of the engine and my thoughts.

A few hours earlier, I had watched an interview with Riccardo Quaggio, the founder of Totem Automobili—a boutique carmaker born right here in Veneto. He started at 22 with essentially nothing, driven by an ambition that, on paper, made zero sense.

As the miles passed, a quiet distinction became clear to me: sense-making and meaning-making are not the same thing.

Sense-making is rational, structured, and strategic. It asks: Is this logical? Is it efficient? What is the probability of success?

Meaning-making is different. It is visceral, intuitive, and deeply personal. It asks: Does this make me feel alive?

The most transformative human endeavours—building an impossible car company from scratch, tackling the Dakar Rally as a privateer, or sparking real social change—rarely make sense at the start. They aren’t born from spreadsheet calculations. They are fueled by a conviction so strong that standard logic becomes irrelevant.

There’s a paradox here. When society tries to turn these extraordinary achievements into “best practices” or repeatable framework blueprints, it strips away the very spark that created them. You can replicate the outer structure, but without the inner fire, you’re left with an empty shell. Logic cannot manufacture conviction.

This is why meaning matters now more than ever.

Everything AI does makes sense. It is built on pattern recognition and optimisation. It can be right, wrong, effective, or flawed—but it always operates on logic.

Meaning, however, cannot be reasoned into existence through pure thought. It isn’t calculated. It is discovered through action and quiet observation—by paying attention to what you are willing to endure, what lights you up, and what your past choices reveal about who you actually are.

Sometimes, to find meaning, you have to be willing to do something that makes no sense at all.