Born in Pretoria, South Africa, and now a US citizen, Elon Musk is one of the most visionary entrepreneurs alive in the world today.
The most special thing about Elon Musk is his daredevil appetite for risk.
At 45, Musk is responsible for several multi-billion dollar companies including PayPal (sold), Tesla Motors, SolarCity, Zip2, SpaceX, Open AI and the Hyperloop project.
In October 2002, his first successful company, PayPal, was acquired by Ebay for $15 billion.
Rather than retire, he threw all of his money into other VERY ambitious ventures, most notably, space exploration.
Elon Musk’s vision is to establish a city on Mars, the fourth planet in our solar system.
His goal is to reduce the risk of human extinction by making humanity a “multi-planetary species” and a space civilization.
All of this sounds insane, right?
Everybody thought Musk was crazy when he invested all the money he had into Space X, his space exploration business.
Yes, everything.
In fact, things got really bad as he tried to grow the business that he had to borrow from friends to pay rent.
But his difficulties didn’t end there.
Getting his rockets and spaceships to launch was a disaster. Musk and his team tried 3 times but failed to successfully launch.
Rather than give up like 99.99% of humans would, he decided to give it one last try.
According to Musk, if that fourth attempt had failed, his company would not have the resources to continue in business, and may have gone bankrupt.
But after his fourth and final launch turned out to be successful, things turned around for the company.
Just after the successful launch, NASA — the American Aerospace agency — called to announce that his company, Space X, had won a $1.5 billion contract.
It’s amazing, right?
It’s very easy to envy Elon Musk’s achievements as an entrepreneur, but the truth is you have to be “crazy” to take on the kinds of life-shattering risks he is taking.
Here are 3 pieces of advice he’s given to explain his attitude to life and business:
1) When something is important enough, you do it even if the odds are not in your favour.
2) You will surely face challenges in anything you’re doing, and if you really don’t like it or have a passion for it, you’re VERY likely to give up.
3) I work hard, really hard. If you work 100 hours a week when most people only work 40 hours, you will achieve in 4 months what most people could take a year to achieve.
At age 45, Elon Musk has created a legacy that would be remembered for as long as the human race exists.
Here’s a short documentary that explores his amazing achievements as an entrepreneur, especially with Space X.
Enjoy the video!
Video credit: Motivation Archive
Source; smallstarter