Major cheat code for life: Become difficult to rush. The world will pressure you to rush into everything. Rushed decisions. Rushed conversations. Rushed relationships. Rushed timelines. There's immense power in rejecting that trend. Slow down. Create space to think clearly.
❝I bought my first car as a student (brand new Volkswagen) in 1980 for 2800 Naira. Drove it to University of Nigeria, Nsukka... I used to enter Nigeria Airways to New York - 155 Naira ticket...❞
Peter Obi speaks about what Nigeria looked like when he was a young man.
Elon on Speed
“I always tell the teams: compress the timeline. Take a 10 year plan and try to do it in 6 months. You’ll probably fail, but you’ll be so far ahead of everyone else that it doesn’t matter. Most companies move at a glacial pace. We try to move at the speed of light.”
They asked Elon Musk what he’d do if he lost everything and only had $1,500 left.
He said it’s almost impossible for someone with his level of knowledge to ever fall that low unless civilization collapses and the world is in ruins.
And even if that happened, he’d simply ask people to give him money for a chance to multiply it.
Somebody has to be the richest person on the planet.
The fact that it’s the guy who popularized electric cars, made rockets reusable, and is working on curing blindness and paraplegia as a side quest seems fair to me.
The most manipulative but effective thing I’ve ever done in my life was when I read an article about how children moderate their behavior to protect their self-identity, so if a child believes he’s smart, for example, he’ll intentionally study and try to do well to protect his image of himself.
Anyway, I would pull kids aside with behavioral issues at church and tell them, “David (obviously fake name), you’re such a kind person and such a good listener. I can see that in you. Thank you for always listening.” “Little Annie, thank you for taking such good care of the babies around you. You’re going to be such a good big sister. Can you be in charge of watching Sally?”
They would ALWAYS behave afterward. ALWAYS. Worked like a charm. Morally questionable because it wasn’t initially true, but I kind of willed it into existence. Tbf, I did think that they had that in them or I wouldn’t have tried.
Will publish longitudinal results of this method once my kid is old enough to report back.
Elon Musk got rejected by Netscape. He walked into the lobby, was too shy to talk to anyone, and walked out. Never got the job.
At his first company Zip2, the board demoted him. Twice. They refused to let him be CEO.
He got fired from PayPal as CEO while flying to his own honeymoon. The board voted him out mid air.
He almost died of malaria in 2000. Ten days in intensive care. Lost 45 pounds. A day from death.
His first child died at 10 weeks old.
His first rocket exploded. Falcon 1, flight one. Burned on the pad.
His second rocket exploded.
His third rocket exploded. The last of his money was nearly gone.
Tesla nearly went bankrupt in 2008. The closest he ever came to a nervous breakdown.
Both companies almost died on the same Christmas Eve.
He was sued by investors. Mocked by the people who built cars before him.
His childhood heroes, the astronauts who inspired him, testified against his company to Congress.
The Cybertruck window shattered on live stage in front of the world.
He overpaid for Twitter by his own admission and watched its value collapse.
He was beaten unconscious as a child and thrown down a flight of stairs.
He has said he goes to sleep alone and it kills him.
He failed in public, over and over, for thirty years.
He is the richest man in the history of the world.
The difference was never the absence of failure. It was the refusal to stop after it.