We all limit ourselves.
Cap our potential.
It’s safe.
Comfortable.
We all get that with little risk there is little reward.
Yet, still, we often take too little risk to achieve what you TRULY want.
I used to be this way.
It’s one thing training this program on Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos did for me.
It helped me put all my cards on the table.
To risk it ALL, rather than looking back having not.
You must be measured in your risk taking, of course.
But also you must stop your dreams being murdered by your false perception of risk.
And here’s the thing.
Just one small change in how you perceive risk can make ALL the difference.
e.g. Is it more risky to build rockets that blow up?
Or to remain a single-planet species waiting for an eventual extinction-level event?
Hmm.
Here’s 28 quotes from Principle 6. Take [Unreasonable] Risk from this trillion dollar program on rocketing to the top like Musk and Bezos.
1. “If you want to have more invention, you need to do more experiments, per week, per month, per year, per decade. It’s that simple. You cannot invent without experimenting. And here’s the other thing about experiments. Lots of them fail. If you know it’s going to work in advance, it is not an experiment. ” — Jeff Bezos
2. “Starting a car company is idiotic and an electric car company is idiocy squared.” — Elon Musk
3. “I had one of the most difficult choices I have ever faced in life was in 2008. And I think I had maybe $30 or $40 million left in 2008, I had two choices. I could put it all into one company and then the other company would definitely die or split it between the two companies. But if I split it up between two companies, they both might die.” — Elon Musk
4. “And so that long tail distribution of those possible outcomes is what makes experimenting worthwhile. And so when you’re balancing the risks, you say the most I can lose is the cost of the experiment. And the value of the invention could be uncapped.” — Jeff Bezos
5. “When you put your blood sweat and tears into creating something, it’s like a child. And so it’s like am I gonna let one starve to death? I can’t bring myself to do it. So I split the money between the two. Which really thank goodness, they both came through.” — Elon Musk
6. “If Bezos wanted to be a true owner and entrepreneur, with significant equity in his creation and the potential to achieve the same kind of financial rewards that businessmen like pizza magnate Frank Meeks did, he had to leave his lucrative and comfortable home on Wall Street.” — The Everything Store
7. “When people ask me why I started a rocket company, I say, I was trying to learn how to turn a large fortune into a small one.” — Elon Musk
(Hahahahahahaha, so often he cracks me up)
8. “It’s the analogy in baseball, everyone knows that if you swing for the fences, you’re going to hit more home runs. But you’re also going to strike out more. And in baseball, the most runs you can score when you’re up at the plate is four, your upside is capped. It’s long tailed in business… That upside isn’t really capped. Every once in a while in business, you step up to the plate, you swing as hard as you can, and you get 1,000 runs.” — Jeff Bezos
9. “South Africa was not a happy-go-lucky place, and that has an impact on you. We saw some really rough stuff. It was part of an atypical upbringing—just this insane set of experiences that changes how you view risk. You don’t grow up thinking getting a job is the hard part. That’s not interesting enough.” — Kimbal Musk
10. “On a personal level, it’s one thing if you’ve got, you know, a mortgage to pay and family to support and that if you were to deviate from your job then well how you’re going to feed your family and pay the rent. Okay, that’s understandable. But let’s say you’re young, and you’re just coming out of college or coming out of high school, what do you risk?” — Elon Musk
11. “Whenever a company becomes entrenched in ‘doing it the way it’s always been done,’ leadership and the rank-and-file will resist taking risks—and new trends often look risky. In this environment, an employee might believe any type of failure could torpedo their career. For many, it’s just not worth it. And thus, begins the process of becoming a Day 2 company.” — Jeff Bezos
(Boom, Jeff dropping the hammer, because in his mind there’s nothing worse than being that Day 2 loser, tired, slow company.)
12. “How do I get the nimbleness? I want to be able to absorb a punch because of my scale, and I want to be able to dodge a punch because of my nimbleness? Well, the way you stay nimble is by making decisions fast, and at a 20 person startup company, the decision making speed is so quick. And that’s why they’re so nimble.” — Jeff Bezos
13. “To me, Amazon is a story of a brilliant founder who personally drove the vision. There are almost no better examples perhaps Apple but people forget that most people believed Amazon was doomed because it would not scale at a cost structure that would work. It kept piling up losses. It lost hundreds of millions of dollars. But Jeff was very garrulous, very smart. He’s a classical technical founder of a business who understands every detail and cares about it more than anyone.” — Eric Schmidt
14. “We can think of SpaceX and Tesla as being these tremendously risky things. But I think Elon was going to make them work no matter what. He’s willing to suffer some personal costs so I think that makes his odds pretty good.” — Larry Page
15. “The odds of me coming into the rocket business not knowing anything about rockets, not having ever built anything. I mean, I would have to be insane if I thought the odds were in my favor. Why I even began, when something is important enough you do it even though it’s not in your favor.” — Elon Musk
16. “So the reason for Tesla was not because I thought that there was some huge opportunity in electric cars, or that I thought it was some rank ordered best way to get a return on investment or something like that. In fact, I think starting a car company, particularly electric car company would have to rank as one of the dumbest things you could possibly do on that scale.” — Elon Musk
(Hahahahahahaha)
17. “So, and I told them that I thought there was a 70% chance that they would lose their whole investment, which was a few hundred thousand dollars. And they did it anyway. And I thought I was giving myself triple the normal odds, because look at the odds of a startup company succeeding at all, it’s only about 10%.” — Jeff Bezos
18. “When we started Tesla, I thought maybe our chance of success was 10%. Well, I mean, I can tell you my original plan was I thought, okay, I had like $180 million from my portion of the sale of PayPal. And I thought, you know, if I invest half of that, in creating these companies, then I still have the other half and should be fine. Yeah, but of course that’s not how it worked out. We used up all that, you know, you’ve invested $100 million, they still need more money. And then there was the big recession of 2008 and 2009. And in the end, I had to invest everything. And I was borrowing money from friends to pay the rent, on the edge of actually, and I didn’t even own a house.” — Elon Musk
(Hahahahahahaha)
19. “I’ll spend my last dollar on these companies.” — Elon Musk
(Boom, ALL in)
20. “So it’s kind of like we built this lemonade stand 20 years ago. The lemonade stand has become very profitable over time. But we also decided to use our skills and the assets that we’ve acquired over time to open a hamburger stand and a hotdog stand, and so on. So we’re investing in new initiatives.” — Jeff Bezos
21. “That’s the other thing. When we make mistakes, and we’ve made doozies, like the fire phone, and many other things that just didn’t work out, I can, I could look, we don’t have enough time for me to list all of our failed experiments. But the big winners pay for thousands of failed experiments.” — Jeff Bezos
22. “There’s kind of like a pretty substantial bifurcation in our sort of future if we’re either out there among stars on multiple planets or if we’re confined to Earth until some obviously eventual extinction event.” — Elon Musk
23. “However, there is a balance between innovation and risk. Yes, how do you balance those two? Well, here’s what I would say is that the winners when you’re doing these experiments, winners pay for thousands of losers.” — Jeff Bezos
24. “Starting SpaceX, I thought the odds of success were less than 10%. And I just accepted that, actually, probably, I would just lose, lose everything. But that maybe we would make some progress. If we could just move the ball forward. Even if we died, maybe some other company could pick up the baton and move and keep moving it forward. So that we still do some good. Yeah, say with Tesla, I thought the odds of a car company succeeding were extremely low.” — Elon Musk
25. “And so if you believe on that first day while you’re writing the business plan that there’s a 70% chance that the whole thing will fail and you know, then that kind of relieves the pressure of self doubt. I mean, it’s sort of like I don’t have any doubt about whether we’re going to fail that’s the likely outcome. And it just is and to pretend that it’s not will lead you to do strange and you know, unnatural things.” — Jeff Bezos
26. “You have to use heart and intuition, there has to be risk taking, you have instinct, all these good decisions half of it that way. You do it with a group, you do it with great humility. Because by the way, getting it wrong isn’t that bad.” — Jeff Bezos
27. “And so I think my advice, if somebody wants to start a company is they should bear in mind that the most likely outcome is that it’s not going to work. And they should reconcile themselves to that strong possibility, and they should only do it if they feel that they’re really compelled to do it. You know?” — Elon Musk
28. “What you do with those early investment dollars, you know, so if you have $300,000 and then you have a million dollars, what you do with early precious capital resources is you go about systematically trying to eliminate risk.” — Jeff Bezos