Elon is the only billionaire who behaves as a billionaire should.
He’s actually cool.
Since he has fuck you money, he actually does whatever the fuck he wants. He’s not beholden to anyone, especially the woke mob who wants to control our thoughts, speech, and actions.
Say what you want about his motivations, but you can’t say he doesn’t have a massive set of stones.
Today is a great day. It feels like the good guys are winning. In celebration, I’m breaking my rule of not using Elon Musk’s name in a blog post headline.
Attempt These Impossible
“When something is important enough, you do it even if the odds are not in your favor.”
Just a week or so ago, all we heard was how impossible it would be for Elon to buy Twitter. “Poison pills.” Twitter wasn’t going to let the company fall into the evil grips of a shitposting billionaire.
Yet, here we are.
Free speech was important enough for him to defy odds and plunge tens of billions of dollars into his pursuit. It was a worthwhile aim. Many of us who are familiar with Elon knew he wasn’t going to just give up after a little resistance.
This is the man, after all, who has a mission of populating a currently inhabitable planet.
At this point, we should probably all stop betting against him. And we should be inspired to bet on ourselves. I always tell people that low odds are better than no odds.
If he can buy Twitter because he felt like it, you can achieve a fraction of his success and have the life of your dreams.
Don’t Diversify
“It’s OK to have your eggs in one basket as long as you control what happens to that basket.”
Re: Elon’s massive stones
I love one story about Elon above all others.
After co-founding PayPal and making off with more than $100 million, he turned around and dumped all of the money into Tesla, SpaceX, and Neuralink.
All of it.
Enough money to last him 50 lifetimes, dumped right back into his new missions without any guarantee of success.
This runs counter to the advice of diversification. If you want to make it big, you have to make big bets.
If you want to become great, you have to aim, focus, and spend tons of time and effort that you’ll never get back without any guarantee that your path will pay off.
You need faith. Once you place your bet, do everything in your power to control the future outcome.
You Can’t Have Success Without Its Evil Twin
“Failure is an option here. If things are not failing, you are not innovating enough.”
Elon has a very dispassionate and detached view when it comes to his projects. He genuinely tinkers.
If a strategy works, it works, great, double down on it. If the strategy doesn’t work, then it doesn’t work, but failure brings one closer to the desired result because it eliminates a path that definitely won’t work.
You have to be willing to break some eggs. You have to be willing to course-correct over time without letting your ego trip you up. That’s all that fear of failure is anyway — your ego saying failure has to mean something about you instead of being nothing more than a failed attempt.
If you consistently make progress toward your long-time goals, eventually you’ll hit pay dirt unless you’re working on the totally wrong thing, which is rare.
You have a pretty good idea of what you want to do with your life, so just do it. I’ve had many small failures along the way but I never quit, which is why I’m successful today.
At All Costs…
“Persistence is very important. You should not give up unless you are forced to give up.”
Aside from being a professional athlete or an A-List entertainer, pretty much any path is available to you. You can learn how to do pretty much anything, too. The lower your natural aptitude, the harder you’ll have to work, but that doesn’t mean you can’t do it.
I’m reminded of another incredibly persistent person, David Goggins. In his book, Can’t Hurt Me, he described how he learned to pass the written tests necessary to join the Navy Seals.
He had severe learning challenges to the point he couldn’t actually understand any of the concepts he needed to study. So, instead, he just used rote memorization and re-read the same texts dozens of times to remember the information he needed, even if he didn’t fully understand it.
I’m reminded of ET the hip-hop preacher, who also has learning disabilities. It took him 12 years to get his undergrad degree because he was that slow of a learner, but he persisted anyway.
An indomitable will is all you need to get what you want. Talent helps, of course, but you have no choice but to work with the cards that the universe dealt you if you want to win.
How to Build a Successful Company
“Starting and growing a business is as much about the innovation, drive and determination of the people who do it as it is about the product they sell.”
When smart venture capitalists are looking to invest in a business, they often focus on investing in the best founders. A good idea alone isn’t enough. If the founder doesn’t have the intangibles needed to make the business successful, then it will probably fail.
If you’re a front-facing owner of a company, even if, especially if it’s just a one-person operation, you need other people to buy into you.
I’ve had several students tell me they joined my programs, not because of the information itself, but because I created them. They want to be near me. I inject my personality into everything I do because I know it’s my biggest competitive advantage.
Often, your personality, your traits, and your qualities are the only things that can help you stand out in saturated fields. Look at Elon who broke into a notoriously difficult to enter car industry and turned it into one of the top car companies in the world and one of the most valuable companies on planet earth.
You’re in the driver’s seat when it comes to building your business. Steer it in the right direction and others will follow.
An Ideological Pandemic
“The woke mind virus is making Netflix unwatchable.”
It’s true, wokeness has run amok and it’s destroying society. It’s a grotesque and ugly ideology — the antithesis of our best traits.
Have you ever come across a super woke person who seems to have good intentions? Or is there always a nefarious, evil, underbelly to their disposition?
It’s an ideology that, in practice, is the exact opposite of its stated goals. It preaches tolerance, yet, if you disagree with the woke orthodoxy, even just slightly, you’re met with a level of nastiness that seems…evil. They claim to combat hate, but their hearts are full of it.
It preaches acceptance, yet is more than willing to villainize anyone who deviates outside of its laws. They’ll get you booted from social media, fired from your job, and sent into digital exile. It’s a religion.
The woke try to suppress speech because their ideas crumble in the face of elementary logic. Look at libs of TikTok, a Twitter account that literally just re-posts videos of woke people being woke. Once their lunacy is brought to light, they can’t stand it.
These people don’t speak for the vulnerable, they crave power. Instead of sharing good ideas that will actually help others, they try to force-feed their nonsensical ideas down your throat. It’s bullshit. Elon called bullshit. And I’m glad.
We Must Protect This at ALL Costs
“Freeh speech is the bedrock of democracy.”
To everyone who’s against Elon’s move to buy Twitter, sayonara.
If you don’t like the platform, build your own. Free speech doesn’t apply to private companies, remember? You have to follow their rules.
God, I admit, I do love throwing their phrases right back at them.
I, like Elon, am a free speech absolutist. I’ve studied history and I realize how unique and special free speech is. I’ve seen what happens to countries that don’t have it. Those who don’t see free speech as a big issue wouldn’t understand how important it was until it was too late.
You should be able to say whatever you want. We need good ideas and bad ideas to collide so we can get to the truth.
Naval Ravikant once said:
“The test of any good system is to build the system and turn it over to your enemies to run for ten years.”.
Welp, looks like it’s our turn now 🙂