Have you ever looked up to your role model so much that you were ready to leave your identity behind and completely emulate that person?
Elon Musk
I sure wanted to emulate this guy. I read countless articles about him and Ashlee Vancee's inspiring book about his life, and what I came to understand is that much of what he does is admirable but an awful lot of it would not be attractive to most of us. Everybody talks about his great highs but not much about his terrible lows or the relentless stress he undergoes. And yet, I admire him the most because of his inability to conceive failure. He breaks things down to basic fundamentals and rebuilds things from scratch and he has stated that if that doesn't defy laws of physics, he is prepared to do it.
We see Elon's grit in every field that he has tried to revolutionize - Zip2(Sales), Paypal(Banking), SpaceX(Space Exploration), Tesla (Automobiles), Boring(Transportation) and lately Neuralink(Artificial Intelligence). His dreams to make this world a better place and push the frontiers of humanity is what inspires thousands of people like me. Musk has built his core strategies around being a magnificent integrator of things and he applies it to every field of work he pursues.
Here are the few lessons, I've learned from having read a lot about him:
Approach things in a probabilistic manner. Accept that every attempt has a good chance of failure, and yet put in your best efforts to achieve your goals.
Break things down to fundamentals and re-build things.
Read as much as you can and find ways to make use of what you read.
If you're not failing enough, you're not innovating enough.
Your greatest asset shouldn't be your company/your money, it should be yourself.
Everybody is scared of risks but the key is to mitigate them the best way possible.
Zoom out and try to provide solutions to the problems you're trying to tackle with new perspectives.
Constantly seek critical feedback.
Of course, luck has played a huge role in his path to success but the turmoil he faced in 2008 with both Tesla and SpaceX at the verge of bankruptcy and going through a divorce at the same time shows how much resilience he had built throughout his life. There is so much that we can earn from this guy to try and apply it in our lives, irrespective of whether or not we want to achieve great heights. He, according to me, is the greatest living entrepreneur with a charisma of having Reality Distortion Field just like Steve Jobs.