Why Can Someone Who Is Not Exceptionally Intelligent, Such as Elon Musk, Achieve Such Great Success?
An engineer at just 15, SpaceX (Space Exploration Technologies Corporation) co-founder Jim Cantrell greatly admires people like Elon Musk.
People may always wonder why someone who is not exceptionally intelligent, such as Elon Musk, can achieve such tremendous success.
Below is Jim Cantrell's full account titled: “Working with Elon Musk Made Me Realize: Intelligence Does Not Bring Startup Success—These 3 Things Do.”
Without a doubt, deep down I have always believed intelligence is only a small part of what creates success. Intelligence is a tool that enables success, not the sole determining factor.
I have spent many years as a consultant and adviser to venture capital funds, advised numerous billionaires, and served as a director and adviser to high-tech companies.
I also have six children. These experiences have shown me that success and failure have countless causes. However, successes are all based on an extremely simple formula. Success requires the following three elements:
1. Do what you love. Without passion and love for your work, you can never do everything as well as possible.
2. Do what you can do best. We all have some talent, but spending your entire life doing something you cannot do well will never bring out your natural gifts.
3. Do something that creates value and can be sold in the current or future market. For example, creating a product nobody wants certainly will not make you wealthy or bring you career success.
Bear in mind that neither money nor intelligence is the factor that determines success. But money reflects the real value you are creating. If you combine the 3 factors above in your life, you will be very successful, and money will come naturally.
How does this relate to Elon Musk? When we first met in 2001, Elon Musk knew nothing about rockets or space exploration, but was passionate about them.
In fact, Elon very much wants to “make humans a multiplanetary species” and is willing to spend a large portion of his wealth on it. Intelligent as he is, Elon knows better than anyone that space transportation must be solved first.
Initially, because of cost concerns, he bought existing Russian rockets cheaply. After gaining some understanding of the space market, Elon decided he would rather spend more to solve the problem than ‘throw a fortune into Russia's rocket stockpile.’
SpaceX was founded when Elon Musk envisioned what he could achieve in the future. He firmly believed that if someone like John Garvey, co-founder of my new company Vector, could build a 30-foot rocket with a small team like Space Cowboy, much greater things would be possible with substantial financial investment and an excellent team.
Of course, SpaceX did not succeed from its first day. Clearly, Elon and the team he recruited were passionate about building a low-cost rocket. They clearly had strong technical expertise and an existing market.
However, the reasons for failure arose from external pressures. Many who had succeeded in aerospace believed “nobody can do better than us, especially a group of ‘space cowboys’ like SpaceX.”
Many people also once doubted Elon's motives for founding SpaceX, believing he was dishonest and would never fulfill his promise to take humanity into space.
Those doubts led me to leave SpaceX a year after its founding. I also doubted whether it could succeed with the money it had spent. I was wrong. Elon ultimately succeeded because he never gave up or considered failure. Whenever he encounters obstacles, Elon always remembers 3 simple things that lead to success.
This makes me even more certain that success does not come from intelligence, education or experience.
It is simply a determination never to give up. The most important factor in success is: decisiveness.
“A winner, a champion, embraces challenges. He will keep driving through the mud.
He will do everything he can to stay in control and safely return to the track. During the race, he may make a few small mistakes that put him at a disadvantage. But he certainly never surrenders; he will keep racing to the end, until he wins. That is how winners survive.”
Make your race a special one. Turn the winds of passion into fuel to keep racing and carry it to success.
Collected.
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