Elon Musk and the Taking of Bold Decisions.

Elon Musk has been on the news of late for all the good reasons. At last, he could be glad to have been named the richest man on earth albeit some time. It is a title just but a handful end up to hold in their entire life. As per the latest figures, he already crossed the 200 billion dollars mark.

A couple of days ago, he had dethroned Jeff Bezos of the prestigious title of the World Riches Man before he lost to him again. But the main story lies in the history of the man himself. Even the reporting spoke a lot about the man himself and where he was born.

Given the fact that he was born in South Africa, that makes him of African decent even if the mother is Canadian and the was father white South African citizen. By that privilege, he holds multiple citizenship. He is a South African, a Canadian as well as US citizen.

Info about the citizenship indicate that he is a South African and a Canadian from 1971 but only got his US citizenship in the year 2002. And it is the US that he has had the greatest impact in and from. I guess the mantra that in America anyone can dream and achieve their dreams there was deeply engraved in Musk’s blood and skin from the word go.

What he has always done is dream just like the philosophy talks about and he didn’t stop there. He went ahead and took the bold step to take the bold decision of living out those dreams. Remember what we couldn’t imagine has been achieved by this man Elon Musk.

He is a man who hasn’t feared to dream. I remember having a heated discussion about the viability of having electric cars on our roads and we couldn’t imagine vehicles without gas. How on earth can that even be possible. At the back of our minds, it wasn’t feasible.

I even laugh when I remember about it and realize that back then we didn’t even produce a gallon of the gas we needed to power the gas vehicles with. In fact, in high school, when I visualized some self-sustaining systems in my physics and chemistry class work, I was seen as an idiot in disguise.

I remember trying to design a small system to tackle the issue of gas emissions from cars for my science project and I was told right from the beginning that it was impossible. I tried something else which I only managed to convince the jury up to district level.

It simply means that repeating ‘it is impossible’ to a young mind kills their motivation and that is how I ended giving up on all of those daring rendezvous. At my age now, I simply regret why I had to give up that soon. Instead, it is now that I am realizing that if people tell you it is impossible, it should be the reason to push on even the harder.

I remember giant automobile companies looking at Tesla Motors and thinking, “what is is this new cool kid has sniffed to think that he could take on giants as us?” It was one big mistake they are regretting. The cool kid was determined to proof them wrong that at times innovations win really big.

At the very beginning, things were tough for Musk and instead of letting go as many of us would, he even took a bolder decision to gamble with all resources that he could set his hands on. In simple terms he gambled with his life literally. In the Movie Startup about McDonalds, Michael Keaton who plays Ray Kroc takes a decision to mortgage his home for the McDonalds cause.

His wife gets so agitated but he stands with the decision. The same would happen with Elon and I guess he took his motivation from the Kroc’s move and pulled an equivalent and as we see now, it has brought a lot of dividends.

The same could happen with Space X. Since time immemorial, it was government funded agencies that could explore space. If it was not NASA, then it was some government project in Russia, Germany or China. And then one man comes and decides to take shots as well.

With unimaginable technologies of reusable capsules to make space exploration cheaper and space travel to and from space almost achievable, he dares it. A lot of people thought that that must be madness. But it looks so real today than ever before.

The same can be said of the Hyperloop project as well as Solar City. And one thing I pick from all those daring moves is that sometimes it needs the guts of one man in order to make others belief that after all not everything is impossible.

Perhaps all we need is the person who takes the first move. Just like sheep, we need a leader who first steps in the water and drinks before we can put our fear aside and thrust into the river as well for a taste of the water that somehow looks like magic. And when we get a taste of it, we realize that it is what we so much desired. What we needed so much.

To put things into perspective Elon Musk is the CEO, the CTO, and Chief Design Officer at Space X. He is the face and the force behind all that takes place at Space X. It thus tells us another thing, what the power of one bold decision is. Never underestimate the power of one bold decision.

So whatever stage of our lives we are, I would love to encourage us to take bold decisions. Maybe your gig is not in business or entrepreneurship but in spiritual matters, social work, innovation, politics or whatever aspect of life, it is time we tried taking the bold decisions.

Once taken, don’t look back or even regret it. Bold decisions are supposed to be bold and remain bold. It is better to die trying to save yourself than simply sit there and loose all hope and die foolishly. In the trying to help yourself, you’ll realize later that it was the best thing you did.

End.