In 1994 Jeff Bezos was watching the Internet explode.
As we watched him say last week in this clip he saw, “If it was growing at 2,300% a year pretty soon it was going to be huge.”
Still, most people had never heard of the Internet.
Nobody knew how it would evolve.
Let alone how any business would use it to make money.
Elon Musk is concerned for our future.
And he wants to avoid feeling depressed about it.
He wants to wake up in the morning excited for the future, so he wakes up to build the future he’s excited for.
It’s NOT complicated.
In fact it’s very simple, even if the future he’s excited for demands a colony on Mars.
This is one thing that surprised me when I began researching Elon.
Because I didn’t know what was driving him I lacked an appreciation for the scale of his thinking.
I’d seen him as going after important, ambitious goals, rather than a leader focused on the future of our species as he’s talking about here:
You see he’s talking about something simple, how you feel waking up every day, and then “tying” this to his view of our depressing future—
I think it’s important to have a future that is inspiring and appealing. I just think that there have to be reasons that you get up in the morning. Like why do you want to live? What inspires you? What do you love about the future? If the future doesn’t include being out there amongst the stars and we’re not a multi-planetary species, I find that incredibly depressing.
This type of clip is common for Elon where often he goes “meta,” tying his goals to a grand mission and purpose.
Here’s the other side.
It’s ALWAYS obvious in hindsight.
With perfect 20/20 backward vision you could easily make your absolute best decisions.
And if you could turn back time, you might make plenty of different choices.
But foresight is entirely different, isn’t it?
Here you have less than perfect information.
You’re in the realm of uncertainty, risk, downside, fear, failure, loss, etc.
But also excitement, possibility, adventure, and potentially HUGE opportunity.
This is one of my favorite clips of Jeff Bezos:
It’s short yet it takes you back to where all this started for him.
Back to the mid-90s where he’s at MIT describing the exciting growth he was seeing online, Jeff says—
“If it was growing at 2,300% a year, pretty soon it was going to be huge.”
Of course in hindsight leaving his job to go after this opportunity seems a no-brainer, but keep in mind that the first question Jeff says he got from the 60 investors he first met was—
“What’s the Internet?”
Since he was a kid Jeff had imagined building things, he was drawn to the adventure and rewards of being an entrepreneur.
Yet it still could have been an extremely hard decision for him.
Jeff Bezos did something crazy.
Years before the Internet was mainstream he decided to go after it.
Unlike a college kid with nothing to lose, he had a lot to lose.
He had a good, stable job on Wall Street.
Recently married with a new home, he had reasons to be risk averse.
But imagining what the Internet could be, he wanted to avoid looking back in regret.
You’ll see him talk about it in this short video clip.
It’s a classic from 2001 where he’s talking about leaving Wall Street to start Amazon.
See, the thing is, of course now some 27 years after founding Amazon, and becoming the richest man in the world, it looks like an obvious decision.
But going back to when he was making it, the decision was anything but obvious.
What his boss said to him well captures it.
Many of us are fascinated by BIG winners.
Often we want to celebrate them.
Be fans.
Put them on a pedestal.
Point to them for this or that reason.
I like to model them for one SELFISH reason.
The first leader I modeled publicly and wrote a book on got me in trouble.
Because that leader was Donald Trump!
I never intended to get caught up in the political dumpster fire.
My ONLY intent was to break down his winning influence.
So others like you (and me) can take over the world too 🙂
See, that’s what I care about in modeling other people’s winning.
I could care less talking about that person and what they’ve achieved.
My focus is on getting clear on how they win, so you can do it too.
It’s the same with Elon Musk.