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- People should think, well, "I feel fear about this,
"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.