Recently, I watched an interesting interview on 60 Minutes of SpaceX founder and CEO Ian Musk. He’s a 40ish entrepreneur who founded PayPal and then sold it to eBay. He rolled that money into his current company which is founded on his passion to travel into space.
Now this guy is an interesting character. Obviously he’s pretty smart and has business savvy. The one thing that impressed me though was that he basically went full speed into something he knew very little about. When Scott Pelley asked him how he learned about building rockets, he said there were three things:
- “I read a lot of books”
- “I talked to a lot people”
- “I built a great team”
The craziest thing is that he’s being dismissed by the original geezers who went up into space like John Glenn and also competitors who are far more experienced and yet he’s the one who’s already delivered a load of cargo up to the international space station.
Crazy, yet inspirational. If one motivated individual can read a lot of books on a subject, talk to a lot of people, build a great team and then build a rocket and get a 1.8 billion dollar contract to make future trips, imagine what we could do in solving rather ordinary problems?
All of us have equal access to books, smart people, and hopefully some smart and motivated folks to assemble into a team. Young entrepreneurs are making this happen all the time. Those who say it can’t be done are being replaced by those who are doing it.
Why not you?
Why not me?
Why not us?