Yes, you’re busy. But go watch this video right now, anyway:
It’s 48 minutes of encouragement and perspective for entrepreneurs with Elon Musk.
If you’re still reading this, go back and at least watch from 34 minutes onward.
As an entrepreneur, every problem in the company is brought to you, so you end up spending most of your time doing stuff you don’t want to do.
Elon Musk calls it staring into the abyss and eating glass– to continually be on the verge of extinction and have a high tolerance for pain.
It’s a lonely place and something we’re not supposed to talk about. So keep on pretending.
Whether people admit it or not, life is hard.
So be kind to one another.
Elon poured half of his gains from PayPal into SpaceX, being fully comfortable that it might be a complete loss.
And even though he’s been quite successful– commercially to deliver payloads to the International Space Station and send satellites into orbit– he still predicts 13-14 years to even achieve his goal of sending a mission to Mars.
He’s been at it since 2002, so he’s already a dozen years into it.
And he’s got the same trajectory for Tesla, which will also take at least a dozen more years to get to where half of all cars in the US are electric (made by Telsa or not).
It takes 10 years to become an overnight success.
Ask Facebook, Google, or most of the businesses you know, technology-related or not.
The most important causes take a decade to realize.
And for a founder to be willing to eat glass, it better be a cause of that magnitude.
Are you working on something that’s truly worthy of your time?
Is it the kind of mission that inspires others to join in your WHY?
Are you looking to get bought out by some other company or do you want to grow to where you can buy out others?
Alex Houg and I have been working on Content Factory for the past few years, but it’s been an idea incubating for much longer.
We’re long-term believers in changing how students transition from K12 to the workplace and we’re building these connections with businesses.
Khan Academy gives away their online education for free.
They believe knowledge should be free. We concur and go one step further to say that job support should be free, too.
Next year will be 10 years since I left Yahoo! to be an entrepreneur, so my hope is that the time I’ve put in will truly start to pay off.
If failure is the best teacher, then I’m one of her most familiar students.
My hat’s off to anyone who is trying to get their business off the ground, make the next round of payroll, or take their mission to the next level.
