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In 2001, Elon Musk desired to spend part of the fortune he had amassed from selling Zip2 and X.Com (later PayPal) to begin an agricultural project on Mars. What did he know about sending cargo into space? Few. Never be afraid to rely on the knowledge of others, Musk (*3*)called cold former NASA aerospace consultant Jim Cantrell for help. They ended up bussing to Moscow to purchase refurbished ballistic missiles because the price in the US was prohibitive
The negotiations weren’t going well. One of the chief designers of the Russian National Space Agency allegedly committed a coup he spat on their shoes.
It says a lot about Musk’s mentality that the first thing he did after returning from the plane was to crunch the numbers and sketch out a plan to build his own rockets. He realized that the prices of the rockets were significantly inflated above the cost of materials. Today, Musk SpaceX dominates the industrial launch market, responsible for 525 of 626 spacecraft were launched in the first quarter of 2024. Will you are taking “no” for an answer? Instead of shying away from a seemingly insurmountable problem, Musk sees it as a challenge.
I know something about turning the “impossible” into reality. I once began a small bakery in Glendale, California, which grew into a 500,000 square foot wholesale business with 1,300 employees. The dream continued to unfold.
As I built many corporations, part of my journey was studying visionaries like Musk. Here are some principles I model as a leader who defies expectations.
1. Connect your purpose to alter
Two years ago Elon Musk he gave Jay Leno a tour a SpaceX factory surrounded by 10-foot-tall rocket engines called Raptors, standing like statues from Easter Island. According to Musk, these were the most advanced engines ever produced.
“How quickly can you produce one of these,” Leno asks in a recording of the visit.
“About one a day,” Elon replies.
The drive it will take to attain this level of performance is incredible. And he doesn’t even say it with pride.
But what comes next is much more extraordinary. When asked if he has patented his rocket design, Musk replies: “Patents are for the weak” and are normally used as a “blocking technique” to stop creativity. Anyone can replicate Musk’s mental property, so long as they do it higher and faster. Its goal is to not lock down technology, but to rework the industry.
As for his other big interest – renewable energy – Musk is equally confident that Tesla will likely be the first to create a sustainable system anyway. It takes some boldness, but visionaries take the initiative and move forward. The broader issue is to have well-defined goals and objectives so that you simply can align your employees and the corporations you create to really drive change and succeed.
2. Choose unconventional considering
Yes, Elon is different. As Cantrell he said about his attitude on what’s going to turn out to be SpaceX: “He didn’t just throw in some virtual money. He put in his heart, his soul and his mind.” I attempt to approach my various interests, especially regenerative agriculture, in a similar way.
I’m driven by the undeniable fact that the U.S spends almost twice extra money for health care than other developed countries – 17.8% of GDP – and yet it has the worst health outcomes of all high-income countries.
By investing in this area, I see an opportunity to introduce significant changes in the quality of the food we eat, which is able to make us healthier and prevent diseases. However, returning to proper agriculture would require unconventional considering and a problem-solving attitude.
When the Russians treated Musk like a neophyte, he turned around and said, “I can hire the best rocket engineers and we can make our own rockets.” When everyone assumed rockets were unnecessary, burned up in the atmosphere or hit the ocean, he was given boosters to survive re-entry and landed in an upright position.
Musk’s belief in doing business on his own terms shows us that when conventional wisdom says “impossible,” there is an opportunity for innovation. So where others see barriers, look for missing opportunities.
3. Fail fast, learn faster
You’ve probably heard of failing quickly. It’s a concept from the software industry that implies that learning from failure can save a lot of money in the future, so long as leaders don’t repeat mistakes. Having experience with this strategy at Zip2 and X.com, Musk adapted the approach to SpaceX, although the stakes at least seemed higher.
After Musk was asked how his night was after the SN1 prototype bursting during a pressure test in 2020, he tweeted, “Okay, we’ll just fix it.” The mission was part of a series of launches designed to check a reusable rocket system intended for missions to the Moon and Mars. Every spacecraft flight was reality achieved greater than before: :
The first one barely left the ground, the second one reachedhot stagingThe third plane circled the Earth at an altitude of 150 km before disintegrating. On their fourth flight, they landed a huge booster in the ocean, allowing the spacecraft to survive reentry. This is an example of SpaceX’s mantra: “fail fast, learn faster.”
Iteration has never looked like this. I have seen CEOs burned by previous experiences and closed off to progressive ideas. But in Musk’s case, he at all times finds a solution.
At times throughout my business profession, I used to be pushed to the point where I lost the whole lot, but I used those experiences to unravel our problems and keep the company on the path to success. These problems made us stronger and ultimately we did greater than we thought possible. My final piece of advice is this: motivate yourself with a challenge, and if you do it right, there’ll at all times be a recent one on the horizon.