"and therefore I shouldn't do it."

It's normal to feel fear.

Like, there'd have to be definitely something

mentally wrong if you didn't feel fear.

And there's a friend of mine who says, like,

"Starting a company is like staring

"into the abyss and eating glass,"

and there's some truth to that.

And a successful company is very much more about,

"How quick are you to fix the mistakes?"

Not, "Will you make mistakes?"

The one thing I couldn't compress was the cost of launch

'cause there were only a few options,

and the US options were way too expensive,

so I ended up going to Russia three times

to try to buy the biggest ICBM in the Russian nuclear fleet.

- He's the CEO of SpaceX and Tesla Motors,

and the chairman of Solar City.

His goals of starting these businesses

always revolve around changing the world and humanity.

He has an estimated net worth of 11.5 billion dollars.

He's Elon Musk, and here's my take on his

top 10 rules to success, part two.

Rule number one is my personal favorite,

and make sure to stick around all the way

to the end for some special bonus clips.

Also, as Elon's talking, if he says something

that really resonates with you,

please leave it in the comments below.

Put quotes around it so other people

can be inspired as well.

Enjoy.

(dramatic music)

- You are unusually fearless and willing to go

in the face of other people telling you something is crazy,

and I know a lot of pretty crazy people.

You still stand out.

Where does that come from, or how do you think about

making a decision when everyone tells you,

"This is a crazy idea," or where do you

get the internal strength to do that?

- Well, first of all, I'd say I actually think

I feel fear quite strongly, so it's not as though

I just have the absence of fear.

I feel it quite strongly.

But there are just times when something is

important enough, that you believe in it enough,

that you do it in spite of fear.

- So, speaking of important things--

- Like, people shouldn't think,

"Well, I feel fear about this,

"and therefore I shouldn't do it."

It's normal to feel fear.

Like, you'd have to definitely have something

mentally wrong with you if you didn't feel fear.

- So, you just feel it, and let the importance

of it drive you to do it anyway?

- Yeah.

You know, actually, something that

can be helpful is fatalism, at some degree.

If you just accept the probabilities,

then that diminishes fear, so when starting SpaceX,

I thought the odds of success were less than 10%,

and I just accepted that actually, probably,

I would just lose everything,

but that maybe, we would make some progress

if we could just move the ball forward.

Even if we died, maybe some other company

could pick up the baton and keep moving it forward,

so that would still do some good.

Yeah, same with Tesla.

I thought, you know, odds of a car company

succeeding were extremely low.

I would definitely advise people who are starting a company

to expect a long period of quite high difficulty.

- Yeah.

- But, I mean, as long as people stay super-focused

on creating the absolute best product to service

that really delights their end customer.

If they stay focused on that, then basically,

if you get it such that your customers want you to succeed,

then you probably will.

- All right.

You have to focus on the customer and delivering for them.

- Yeah.

Make sure, if your customers love you,

your odds of success of are dramatically higher.

One does have to be focused on the short-term

and money coming in when creating a company,

because otherwise, the company will die,

so a lot of the times, people will think,

like, creating a company is going to be fun.

I would say it's really not that fun.

I mean, there are periods of fun,

and there are periods where it's just awful.

And particularly, if you're CEO of the company,

you actually have a distillation

of all the worst problems in a company.

See, there's no point in spending your time

on things that are going right, so you're only

spending your time on things that are going wrong,

and there are things that are going wrong

that other people can't take care of,

so you have, like, the worst.

You have a filter for the crappest problems in the company.

(laughs)

The most pernicious and painful problems.

So I wouldn't say it's, I think you have to feel

quite compelled to do it and have a fairly high

pain threshold, and there's a friend of mine

who says, like, "Starting a company is like

"staring into the abyss and eating glass."

And there's some truth to that.

(audience laughing)

The staring into the abyss part is that you're going to be

constantly facing the extermination of the company,

'cause most start-ups fail.

Like, 99% of start-ups fail.

So, that's the staring into the abyss part.

You're constantly saying, "Okay,

"if I don't get this right, the company will die."

Should be quite stressful.

And then, the eating glass part is,

you've got to work on the problems that the company

needs you to work on, not the problems you want to work on,

and so you end up working on problems

that you'll really wish you weren't working on,

and so that's the eating glass part.

And that goes on for a long time.

- [Audience Member] So, how do you keep your focus

on the big picture when you're constantly faced with,

"We could be out of business in a month?"

- Well, it's just a very small percentage

of mental energy that's on the big picture.

Like, you know where you're generally heading for,

and the actual path is going to be some sort of

zig-zaggy thing in that direction.

You're trying not to deviate too far from the path

that you want to be on, but you're going to

have to do that to some degree.

But I don't want to diminish the,

I mean, I think the profit motive is a good one

if the rules of an industry are properly set up.

So there's nothing fundamentally wrong with profit.

In fact, profit just means that people are paying you more

for whatever you're doing than you're spending to create it.

That's a good thing.

(laughs)

And if that's the not the case,

then you'll be out of business, and rightfully so.

'Cause you're not adding enough value.

First of all, I really need to give some thought to, like,

how can I provide advice that would be most helpful,

and I'm not sure I've given enough thought to that

to give you the best possible answer,

but I think, certainly, being focused on something

that you're confident will have high value to someone else,

and just being really rigorous in making that assessment,

because people tend to, a natural human tendency

is wishful thinking, so a challenge for entrepreneurs

is to say, "Well, what's the difference between

"really believing in your ideals and sticking to them

"versus pursuing some unrealistic dream

"that doesn't actually have merit?"

And that is a really difficult thing to,

can you tell the difference between those two things.

So, you need to be sort of

very rigorous in your self-analysis.

Certainly extremely tenacious,

and then just work like hell.

I mean, you just have to put in, you know,

80 to 100 hour weeks every week.

- That is a lot of work.

- All those things improve the odds of success.

If other people are putting in 40 hour work weeks

and you're putting in 100 hour work weeks,

then even if you're doing the same thing,

you know that in one year, you will achieve in

four months what it takes them a year to achieve.

- So failures are not the most terrible things.

You have to learn from it and react to it.

- Yeah, exactly.

When you're building something new,

there's going to be mistakes, and it's important to

recognize those mistakes, acknowledge them,

and take corrective action.

And the success of a company is very much more about

"How quick are you to fix the mistakes?"

Not, "Will you make mistakes?"

- Or admit the mistakes.

- Yeah, absolutely.

And if you see the difference between

a start-up that is successful and one that is not,

it is because the successful one,

they're both made of mistakes,

but the successful one recognized the mistakes,

fixed them very quickly, and the unsuccessful one

tries to deny that the mistakes exist.

- You know, extremely smart people

are sometimes quite arrogant, because they believe in

what they believe in, right,

and so when they face criticism,

it's less likely to admit they can make mistakes.

Was that in your case?

- I learnt it when I was studying physics.

In physics, you're taught to always question yourself,

you're taught to always assume that you're wrong,

not to assume that you're right, and you have to prove

yourself not wrong, and so I think that physics framework

is really where I learnt it, and it's very effective

for learning counter-intuitive things that aren't obvious.

- Mm.

So, you are very famous in saying that failure

is actually an option, and if you're not failing

that means you're not innovative enough.

- Yeah.

I mean, it's not like I like failure.

I mean, who likes failure?

But if you only do things that are certain to succeed,

then you're only going to be doing very obvious things.

- A question that has been discussed

over the past couple of days.

Should we be considering one-way only trips to Mars?

What's the best approach to colonize the planet?

Is it, well, what's your view?

Is that socially acceptable?

You think people will sign up to do it?

- I think there's plenty of people

that would sign up for a one-way trip to Mars.

(audience laughing)

- Maybe if I could have a show of hands.

Who would consider such an option?

(audience chattering and laughing)

I see some.

Not many, but perhaps enough for a couple of missions.

(audience laughing)

- Certainly be enough.

I think it's sort of, like, is it a

one-way mission and then you die,

or is it a one-way mission and you get resupplied?

There's a big difference.

(laughs)

- We're for the second option.

- Yeah, exactly.

But I think it ends up being a moot point,

because you want to bring the spaceship back.

Like, these spaceships are expensive, okay?