"Ambition and willing to take a risk is not a rare thing."
It is a bit more nuanced than that. When a 3 lb terrier starts barking and growling at you, you have one reaction, when a 175 lb rottweiler does the same you have a different reaction. Those situations are, on their surface, exactly the same. You are being threatened by a dog. But the realities of the two situations are very different because what is at stake. The terrier can be kicked across the room, the rottweiler will likely kill you. It is really impossible to know how you are going to respond until you're actually in the situation.
Perhaps not surprisingly, for a lot of people there are things worse than dying. And for many of the people I've known letting down people who are depending on them ranks pretty high on that list.
Musk is very different from "most" people. We know this because he has been in the fire and we've seen the result. Look at the stories of the fall of the twin towers on 9/11. Most people paniced and froze, a small number of people took action and evacuated.
At the critical stress level, when your limbic system cannot take it any more, it takes over. Some people become rabbits, some people become tigers, and the really weird thing is that I don't think you can really have any idea which way you'll go until you experience it. You can believe you will do one thing or another, but you don't really know. Scott McNealy shared with me that all you could do as a leader was to put people into really stressful situations, to see where they broke, and then note which side of the coin they fell on. It is why the armed forces put new recruits in to actual life threatening situations, to watch them panic and evaluate their response.
I don't know Elon, but if he is as characterized in interviews and by third party accounts, I don't think he altruistic so much as he is driven. The most amazing person I have ever met in person who is truly driven was Dean Kamen at one of the FIRST competitions in San Jose. It seemed like he could live to be 150 and still not get done all of the things he was driven to do before he passes. It isn't about altruism and it isn't about wealth, it is all about getting the important thing done. What ever that is. And someone who is driven AND functional in the face of extreme stress, is, in my experience, a rare individual.
It is a bit more nuanced than that. When a 3 lb terrier starts barking and growling at you, you have one reaction, when a 175 lb rottweiler does the same you have a different reaction. Those situations are, on their surface, exactly the same. You are being threatened by a dog. But the realities of the two situations are very different because what is at stake. The terrier can be kicked across the room, the rottweiler will likely kill you. It is really impossible to know how you are going to respond until you're actually in the situation.
Perhaps not surprisingly, for a lot of people there are things worse than dying. And for many of the people I've known letting down people who are depending on them ranks pretty high on that list.
Musk is very different from "most" people. We know this because he has been in the fire and we've seen the result. Look at the stories of the fall of the twin towers on 9/11. Most people paniced and froze, a small number of people took action and evacuated.
At the critical stress level, when your limbic system cannot take it any more, it takes over. Some people become rabbits, some people become tigers, and the really weird thing is that I don't think you can really have any idea which way you'll go until you experience it. You can believe you will do one thing or another, but you don't really know. Scott McNealy shared with me that all you could do as a leader was to put people into really stressful situations, to see where they broke, and then note which side of the coin they fell on. It is why the armed forces put new recruits in to actual life threatening situations, to watch them panic and evaluate their response.
I don't know Elon, but if he is as characterized in interviews and by third party accounts, I don't think he altruistic so much as he is driven. The most amazing person I have ever met in person who is truly driven was Dean Kamen at one of the FIRST competitions in San Jose. It seemed like he could live to be 150 and still not get done all of the things he was driven to do before he passes. It isn't about altruism and it isn't about wealth, it is all about getting the important thing done. What ever that is. And someone who is driven AND functional in the face of extreme stress, is, in my experience, a rare individual.