“The quest for a fantastic future”

“The quest for a fantastic future”

Credits : Elon musk biography by :  Ashlee Vance , Blomberg, Forbes , tesla.

Everyone has a role model someone that you look up to and say one day I want be be like him . I found inspiration in a man dubbed as the “Real life iron man” someone who is the personification of the saying “If you can dream it you can achieve it “.

He is none other than ELON MUSK .

The story that I am about to narrative  is of  the rise of a man from nowhere to the title of the “next Steve Jobs ” one of the biggest risk takers in the world .” Innovations ” like never before that are changing the world we live in as you read this , and most importantly” Imagination” every one of them revolutionary ,may it be the next mode of transportation by the “hyper-loop” or the”Tesla cars” , the power ball or the quest for a cleaner energy source with solar city , the gigafactory or the ambition of sending man on Mars and colonizing it . And for the people who are not fascinated by the great achievements , let’s talk money,  he started With $28,000 and now worth” $22.3 billion “

“For an aspiring entrepreneur like me and the millions of people who know about him , he is an inspiration. “

In a hundred years, when most people reading this and  I the person who has written this are long gone, Musk’s cars and rockets will still be circling the Earth and the skies.

How can such a person get started against all odds is the question I ask here. And, more importantly,what can we learn from him?

He is worth studying – you don’t get insight into the extraordinary by studying the ordinary. Even with a 1 % size of Musk we may find something in the way he started out that is fundamentally borrowable.

Sure, we can’t recreate the exact circumstances of his life for ourselves – we all have different parents, live in different countries, and have different bodies. Despite all the differences, we have control over our mindset as much as he does over his. This part of Musk we can borrow. The ways he deals with uncertainty, the books he reads, the ways he makes promises, and patches up his own mistakes are all borrowable.

You might be skeptical about how studying another person’s life can help?Trust me it does !

Learning Faster Than You Are “Supposed To” :

A pivotal moment in Musk’s life came when he got his computer. It came along with a BASIC programming language workbook. The workbook was supposed to take 6 months, but he decided to stay up for 3 nights in a row and finished the whole thing. Within 3 days he basically was a programmer by the 1984 standards. His new skill brought his first success – he wrote a video game called Blastar and sold it for $500.

Gandhiji said no work is to be considered small , so does Elon say’s.

Getting His Hands Physically Dirty :

Musk doesn’t seem to think that physical work is beneath him. He embraces it. When he moved to Canada at 17 on his own, he sought out a job that required him shoveling dirt in a boiler room wearing a hazmat suit. Even today, with his designer clothes on, Musk walks the floor of his rocket factory and sometimes gets physically involved in the process – his clothes ruined with epoxy.

“If you can imagine it you can do it “

Sharing his Ambitious Plans :

Compared to other people and companies, Musk has an unusually futuristic outlook. He has made and shared his plans for as far away as his death on Mars after he helps a million people move there on his rockets at $500,000 per ticket. It’s easy to dismiss this as marketing hype – and people did dismiss a younger Musk .By now it’s clear though that he lives up to his ambitions .

He is the personification of the saying failure is the first stepping stone to success.

Not Looking Back

Musk is known for not hanging on to things or people. He looks forward. Ironically he might have a lot more to look back at and be sorry about than many. His first child died at 10 months old, he divorced his first wife, the first 3 times he launched his rockets they blew up – one of them destroying an expensive NASA payload. He has blown promises, missed deadlines, miscalculated costs and had to charge customers extra after they had already paid (Musk had to ask 400 customers who already prepaid to add extra $17,000 for each Roadster). This list alone is enough.

I believe, to make most people look back and infer that maybe it’s time to reign in the ambition, to mend relationships, etc. But that is not the point – for all his failings, Musk is capable of greatness. His products justify his mistakes. At the age of 44 he still has more to gain than he has lost – more rockets to launch, more cars to manufacture, and even more children to have.

“A journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step”

Starting Really Small

Compared to what Musk is doing now – electric cars, rockets, and solar panels his first businesses were ridiculously straightforward – selling computer parts from his dorm room, running a glorified speakeasy from his house in college. Would he do this if he saw a straight path to making electric cars back in college? I think not.

It looks like he took incremental steps towards a goal he had no idea how to reach at the beginning.

Most people would say that it’s the lack of money that prevents them from starting a startup. Musk’s biographer  tells the amount he had when he started. Between him and his brother Kimbal they had $28,000 that came from their father plus $6,000 from their friend Greg Kouri, who joined as a co-founder of Zip2 . Today the $34,000 adjusted for inflation would be $53,000. This amount was enough to set up an office in Palo Alto. Musk and his brother slept in the office, and survived on a diet of fast food.

Self study is the best study . we at Sinhgad college of engineering are aware of it , just joking but it is true in Elon’s case .

Teaching Himself From Books

When Musk decided to do something with space he apparently realized that he needed to learn about space himself.

Jim Cantrell, an aerospace engineer that Musk cold called back in 2001 said this about how Musk learns, “He literally sucks the knowledge and experience out of people that he is around. He borrowed all of my college texts on rocket propulsion when we first started working together in 2001. ”

Jim Cantrell

No matter what , never quit.

How Many Tries Does It Take?

It took 4 tries for Musk to successfully launch his first rocket. This number is low compared to his competitors who blew up a lot more hardware before it would fly.

There is one key difference, though – Musk only had enough money to launch 4 times. If the 4th time didn’t fly that would have been it.

Let’s learn from this extraordinary man and be brave enough to  at least dream.

“The people who are crazy enough to think that they can change the world are the ones who do”

Steve Jobs

Shubham Rangari ©