Have you ever failed? Of course you have! We all have. But, how many of us keep failing and not stop? How many of us don’t give up when failing becomes an ordeal? Well, not too many, I’m sure. But, there are inspirations all around us, who do things the other way around!
Meet Elon Musk, a South African-born Canadian-American business tycoon, investor, engineer and inventor. He is also known as the real life ‘Iron Man’. But, life hadn’t been as easy for him as it was for Tony Stark (aka Iron Man) from the Marvel Comics. This real life superhero failed terribly numerous times, got his life on stake, lost his jobs, crashed his car and many more. But, in spite of all this, he had been one success ahead of his failures.
Here’s one thing that he says: “If something is important enough, you should do it, even if the probable outcome is failure!”
The list of his failures is long, but not at all something to skip. So, let’s take a look at his journey of ‘successful failures’:
1. Elon Musk was rejected for a job at Netscape. He submitted his resume, but no one ever responded.
2. Elon Musk went ahead and started Zip2, a web software company, which he sold to Compaq for $307 million. But later, he was demoted from the position of CEO to a CTO by the board because they thought he was not competent enough to be CEO.
3. Elon then met Greg Kouri, who became the co-founder of PayPal with him. Paypal was termed as one of the 10 worst business ideas in 1999.
4. Elon was fired from Paypal because he preferred Microsoft to Unix. He was flying to Australia when he was fired.
5. The last vacation Elon Musk took, he contracted a lethal form of cerebral Malaria.
6. He lost his first son to Sudden Infant Death Syndrome (SIDS) in 2002.
7. He envisioned a colony on Mars way back in 2001. But Russians refused to sell their rockets to him. So he decided to make his own.
8. Elon Musk, by his own admittance, terms 2008 as the worst year of his life. Tesla and SpaceX were both going to go bankrupt, with him.
(Facts Source: Wikipedia)
But things got better from there. The next launches from Tesla did go well and orders started coming in for the company. Soon, Tesla diversified into Musk’s definitive goal – affordable clean means of transportation. His latest models can be bought by the middle class and is just as efficient as the luxury model.
His other company, SpaceX started launching cargoes to the International Space Station successfully and making reusable rockets a real thing.
Life is hard, it is even harder for the ones trying to do something big and ambitious. The ones who will always be remembered are those who aren’t afraid of failing again and again until they succeed, eventually!
