Elon Musk: Accept the Probability of Defeat

Elon Musk – Accept Your Fear

Innovator and billionaire Elon Musk says that you can diminish your fears by accepting the likelihood of defeat, but believing in something passionately enough to do it anyway.

Transcript:

“I think I feel fear quite strongly. So it’s not as though I just have the absence of fear, I feel it quite strongly. But there are just times when something is important enough, you believe in it enough, that you do it in spite of fear. In starting SpaceX, I thought the odds of success were less than 10%, and I just accepted that actually, probably, I would just lose everything.

“But that maybe 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 keep moving it forward; so that would still do some good. Yeah, same with Tesla. I thought the odds of a car company succeeding were extremely low. If you just accept the probabilities, then that diminishes fear.

“Like people shouldn’t think ‘Well I feel fear about this, and therefore I shouldn’t do it.’ It’s normal to feel fear. Like you’d have to … there’d have to be something mentally wrong if you didn’t feel fear.”