Monday Musk Motivation - Responsibility, Future And Perception Of Fear

Yes it is Monday in Germany already! :D

So I watched this interview today that inspired me to write a blogpost on the bigger picture of humanity's mission , as well as take a look at the simple but powerful approach, or I should say perception when it comes to fear, that every entrepreneur should use as an affirmation.

Elon Musk, the real life Iron Man, is the definition of a passionate Entrepreneur & Investor. He has founded multiple world-changing companies. Here is a quick history check:

1995: Zip2, 1999/2000: X.com und PayPal, 2002: SpaceX, 2003: Tesla Motors, 2006: SolarCity, 2013: Hyperloop, 2015: OpenAI

Elon Musk Investments show his ambition to solve important problems and his social purpose already, but after watching this interview of him, I understood that his way of thinking and approach is much deeper and that if we had more people who would care about solving such major problems, as he does, we would not only be able to move forward faster, but we would actually save future generations and ensure that technology won't turn into hieroglyphics.

In an interview which I will link below, the interviewer states that he admires how fearless Musk is to do what he does and asks him where such internal strength comes from. His response:

"Actually I think I feel fear quite strongly.

But there is just times when something is important enough, you believe in it enough, you do it in spite of fear... It's normal to feel fear, There'd have to be something mentally wrong with you if you didn't feel fear."

He goes on to explain:

With SpaceX I thought the odds of success were less than 10% and I just excepted the fact that probably I would just loose everything. but that maybe we'd make some progress, if we could just move the ball forward even if we died... we'd still do some good.

Same with Tesla, the odds of a car company succeeding were extremely low."

Musk on the "crazy idea" of founding SpaceX:

"I agreed that it was quite crazy. 

But I came to conclusion that if something didn't happen to improve rocket technology, we'd be stuck on earth forever.

And the big airspace companies had no interest in radical innovation... all they wanted to do is try to make their old technology slightly better, in fact sometimes It'd actually get worse.

People think that technology just automatically gets better every year. But it doesn't, only if smart people work like crazy to make it better, that's how any technology actually gets better and by itself it will actually decline."

Musk goes on to give evidence of this by looking at history and ancient Egypt, where the people forgot how to build pyramids, which I find very interesting as a comparison to today's technology.

The Interview:

In the interview it becomes clear that E.M does what he does, not because he is fearless or doesn't think about failure, but because his feel for responsibility, urgency and importance is at such high level, that anything else doesn't matter. 

Now imagine there would be E.M times ten, how rapidly we could solve universal problems from A.I to curing diseases and the level at which we could experience life. Well I truly believe that there are many people out there, (and if they are on any platform I would place my bet on Steemit) with that kind of potential to move the world forward. Obviously we are all already part of and contributing to a revolution, called Cryptocurrency, Blockchain-Social Media etc., but what more is there and what are you capable of?

I mean that goes for any person with an incredible idea who's deciding on weather or not to execute, wasting time thinking about failure. Not doing something because of fear is pretty selfish in that sense and how much more exciting and amazing would our lives on earth (or in the next 8-10 years on Mars) be, with all kinds of seemingly impossible inventions. We are in charge of what we experience and future generations and that a lot more could be done if more people would feel that way.

source: @sirwinchester

Small changes, such as creating a new game that affect many or big changes, no matter what it is that we do I think one general message every person can learn and apply, especially entrepreneurs, is:

It is about believing in the impossible before you make it possible, doing it in spite of fear and because of the chance to create incredible things that move our world forward.