Tim O’Reilly puts the point eloquently in his talk on why Idealism is the Best Marketing.

With Delacroix’s painting of Jacob wrestling with the Angel in the background he reads Rilke’s poem:

What we fight with is so small, and when we win, it makes us small. What we want is to be defeated, decisively, by successively greater things.

The point being that even if we lose we make the world a better place. So, go out there and find hard problems.

http://ecorner.stanford.edu/authorMaterialInfo.html?mid=3109