Been reading the book Elon Musk: Tesla, SpaceX and the Quest for a Fantastic Future. I couldn’t wait to buy it and I don’t usually buy books from Kindle. But for this book I made an exception.
I first learned about Elon Musk from Bloomberg in a speaking engagement I was doing for a university in one of the provinces of the Philippines. i watched about how he was catapulted in to millionaire-dom and how struggled with the ups and downs of his two companies.
As an entrepreneur and a visionary at heart, I was captivated to know more. I have met very few people in my life who understood how it is to really be an entrepreneur – to have that unlimited passion to the point of obsession about ideation and bringing that idea to life.
I bought the book for a little over $12 and I’ve just been devouring it like crazy. While the regular notion of ‘jack of all trades, master of none’ is generally frowned upon by leadership personalities. You’ll notice that what made Elon Musk what he is today is his ability to just try and shoot for significant improvement in a series of relevant skills: reading, writing, programming, hardware, rocket science, electrical engineering, economics, and so on and so forth.
You may argue that these skills are relevant because of his businesses, but has it ever occurred to us that he developed these skills even before starting up his two companies? During that time the relevance of these skills with each other is approaching the point of nil.
What’s amazing about Elon Musk is his relentless passion to get stuff done. He won’t sleep, won’t eat, won’t make peace with his peers – until his vision comes to some point of satisfactory fulfillment.
I must admit that I could relate with some of his personal traits such as the obsession over finishing things, the desire to create, the ability to cast vision for recruiting the best people for the job, the obvious wiring of logic over emotion or empathy, the charisma of a strong leader, and so on.
I think there’s an overlap somewhere between a good, strong tech entrepreneur in terms of skill set and character.
One thing that I would never concede to though, is a failed marriage and a broken family. I will not put my work over that however obsessed I may be with my vision.
I think that family is of utmost importance and is the possible continuity of your vision after you have passed away from this world.
I’m learning a lot from this e-book and for the first time, I’m really happy about Kindle. Without which I may need to wait for months before I get a hand on a hardcopy of Elon Musk’s latest biography.