Just finished reading this great interview with Elon Musk in Wired, after somehow missing it when it was first published. Wired’s Chris Anderson:
“All entrepreneurs have an aptitude for risk, but more important than that is their capacity for self-delusion. Indeed, psychological investigations have found that entrepreneurs aren’t more risk-tolerant than non-entrepreneurs. They just have an extraordinary ability to believe in their own visions, so much so that they think what they’re embarking on isn’t really that risky. They’re wrong, of course, but without the ability to be so wrong—to willfully ignore all those naysayers and all that evidence to the contrary—no one would possess the necessary audacity to start something radically new.”
If my generation’s hero was Steve Jobs, my son’s will be Elon Musk. It’s difficult to overstate how profound an impact Elon has had already. My son plays Kerbal Space Program all the time. On the way to school, he counts electric cars. I can’t think of a better person to aspire to — someone with not just one big, ambitious idea, but several projects from cars to solar to space to transit, each with the scope to leave quite a dent in the universe.
