The mind…can make a heaven of hell, a hell of heaven.

― John Milton

The mind is certainly its own cosmos. — Alan Lightman

You go to school, study hard, get a degree, and you’re pleased with yourself. But are you wiser? You
get a job, achieve things at the job, gain responsibility, get paid more, move to a better company, gain
even more responsibility, get paid even more, rent an apartment with a parking spot, stop doing your
own laundry, and you buy one of those $9 juices where the stuff settles down to the bottom. But are
you happier?

You do all kinds of life things—you buy groceries, read articles, get haircuts, chew things, take out
the trash, buy a car, brush your teeth, shit, sneeze, shave, stretch, get drunk, put salt on things, have
sex with someone, charge your laptop, jog, empty the dishwasher, walk the dog, buy a couch, close
the curtains, button your shirt, wash your hands, zip your bag, set your alarm, fix your hair, order
lunch, act friendly to someone, watch a movie, drink apple juice, and put a new paper towel roll on
the thing.

But as you do these things day after day and year after year, are you improving as a human in a
meaningful way?

In the last post, I described the way my own path had led me to be an atheist—but how in my
satisfaction with being proudly nonreligious, I never gave serious thought to an active approach to
internal improvement—hindering my own evolution in the process.

This wasn’t just my own naiveté at work. Society at large focuses on shallow things, so it doesn’t
stress the need to take real growth seriously. The major institutions in the spiritual arena—religions—
tend to focus on divinity over people, making salvation the end goal instead of self-improvement. The
industries that do often focus on the human condition—philosophy, psychology, art, literature, self-
help, etc.—lie more on the periphery, with their work often fragmented from each other. All of this
sets up a world that makes it hard to treat internal growth as anything other than a hobby, an extra-
curricular, icing on the life cake.

Considering that the human mind is an ocean of complexity that creates every part of our reality,
working on what’s going on in there seems like it should be a more serious priority. In the same way a
growing business relies on a clear mission with a well thought-out strategy and measurable metrics, a
growing human needs a plan—if we want to meaningfully improve, we need to define a goal,
understand how to get there, become aware of obstacles in the way, and have a strategy to get past
them.

When I dove into this topic, I thought about my own situation and whether I was improving. The
efforts were there—apparent in many of this blog’s post topics—but I had no growth model, no real
plan, no clear mission. Just kind of haphazard attempts at self-improvement in one area or another,
whenever I happened to feel like it. So I’ve attempted to consolidate my scattered efforts,
philosophies, and strategies into a single framework—something solid I can hold onto in the future—
and I’m gonna use this post to do a deep dive into it.

So settle in, grab some coffee, and get your brain out and onto the table in front of you—you’ll want
to have it there to reference as we explore what a weird, complicated object it is.
 Elon musk

Musk was born in 1971 in South Africa. Childhood wasn’t a great time for him—he had a tough
family life and never fit in well at school.2 But, like you often read in the bios of extraordinary
people, he was an avid self-learner early on. His brother Kimbal has said Elon would often read for 10
hours a day—a lot of science fiction and eventually, a lot of non-fiction too. By fourth grade, he was
constantly buried in the Encyclopedia Britannica.

One thing you’ll learn about Musk as you read these posts is that he thinks of humans as computers,
which, in their most literal sense, they are. A human’s hardware is his physical body and brain. His
software is the way he learns to think, his value system, his habits, his personality. And learning, for
Musk, is simply the process of “downloading data and algorithms into your brain.”3 Among his many
frustrations with formal classroom learning is the “ridiculously slow download speed” of sitting in a
classroom while a teacher explains something, and to this day, most of what he knows he’s learned
through reading.

He became consumed with a second fixation at the age of nine when he got his hands on his first
computer, the Commodore VIC-20. It came with five kilobytes of memory and a “how to program”
guide that was intended to take the user six months to complete. Nine-year-old Elon finished it in
three days. At 12, he used his skills to create a video game called Blastar, which he told me was “a
trivial game…but better than Flappy Bird.” But in 1983, it was good enough to be sold to a computer
magazine for $500 ($1,200 in today’s money)—not bad for a 12-year-old.

Musk never felt much of a connection to South Africa—he didn’t fit in with the jockish, white
Afrikaner culture, and it was a nightmare country for a potential entrepreneur. He saw Silicon Valley
as the Promised Land, and at the age of 17, he left South Africa forever. He started out in Canada,
which was an easier place to immigrate to because his mom is a Canadian citizen, and a few years
later, used a college transfer to the University of Pennsylvania as a way into the US.4

In college, he thought about what he wanted to do with his life, using as his starting point the
question, “What will most affect the future of humanity?” The answer he came up with was a list of
five things: “the internet; sustainable energy; space exploration, in particular the permanent extension
of life beyond Earth; artificial intelligence; and reprogramming the human genetic code.”4

He was iffy about how positive the impact of the latter two would be, and though he was optimistic
about each of the first three, he never considered at the time that he’d ever be involved in space
exploration. That left the internet and sustainable energy as his options. He decided to go with
sustainable energy. After finishing college, he enrolled in a Stanford PhD program to study high
energy density capacitors, a technology aimed at coming up with a more efficient way than traditional
batteries to store energy—which he knew could be key to a sustainable energy future and help
accelerate the advent of an electric car industry.

But two days into the program, he got massive FOMO because it was 1995 and he “couldn’t stand to
just watch the internet go by—[he] wanted to jump in and make it better.”5 So he dropped out and
decided to try the internet instead. His first move was to go try to get a job at the monster of the 1995
internet, Netscape. The tactic he came up with was to walk into the lobby, uninvited, stand there
awkwardly, be too shy to talk to anyone, and walk out.

Musk bounced back from the unimpressive career beginning by teaming up with his brother Kimbal
(who had followed Elon to the US) to start their own company—Zip2. Zip2 was like a primitive
combination of Yelp and Google Maps, far before anything like either of those existed. The goal was
to get businesses to realize that being in the Yellow Pages would become outdated at some point and
that it was a good idea to get themselves into an online directory. The brothers had no money, slept in
the office and showered at the YMCA, and Elon, their lead programmer, sat obsessively at his
computer working around the clock. In 1995, it was hard to convince businesses that the internet was
important—many told them that advertising on the internet sounded like “the dumbest thing they had
ever heard of”6—but eventually, they began to rack up customers and the company grew. It was the
heat of the 90s internet boom, startup companies were being snatched up left and right, and in 1999,
Compaq snatched up Zip2 for $307 million. Musk, who was 27, made off with $22 million.

In what would become a recurring theme for Musk, he finished one venture and immediately dove
into a new, harder, more complex one. If he were following the dot-com millionaire rulebook, he’d
have known that what you’re supposed to do after hitting it big during the 90s boom is either retire off
into the sunset of leisure and angel investing, or if you still have ambition, start a new company with
someone else’s money. But Musk doesn’t tend to follow normal rulebooks, and he plunged three
quarters of his net worth into his new idea, an outrageously bold plan to build essentially an online
bank—replete with checking, savings, and brokerage accounts—called X.com. This seems less insane
now, but in 1999, an internet startup trying to compete with the large banks was unheard of.

In the same building that X.com worked out of was another internet finance company called
Confinity, founded by Peter Thiel and Max Levchin. One of X.com’s many features was an easy
money-transfer service, and later, Confinity would develop a similar service. Both companies began
to notice a strong demand for their money-transfer service, which put the two companies in sudden
furious competition with each other, and they finally decided to just merge into what we know today
as PayPal.

This brought together a lot of egos and conflicting opinions—Musk was now joined by Peter Thiel
and a bunch of other now-super-successful internet guys—and despite the company growing rapidly,
things inside the office did not go smoothly. The conflicts boiled over in late 2000, and when Musk
was on a half fundraising trip / half honeymoon (with his first wife Justine), the anti-Musk crowd
staged a coup and replaced him as CEO with Thiel. Musk handled this surprisingly well, and to this
day, he says he doesn’t agree with that decision but he understands why they did it. He stayed on the
team in a senior role, continued investing in the company, and played an instrumental role in selling
the company to eBay in 2002, for $1.5 billion. Musk, the company’s largest shareholder, walked away
with $180 million (after taxes).5

If there was ever a semblance of the normal life rulebook in Musk’s decision-making, it was at this
point in his life—as a beyond-wealthy 31-year-old in 2002—that he dropped the rulebook into the fire
for good. The subject of what he did over the next 13 years leading up to today is what we’ll
thoroughly explore over the rest of this series. For now, here’s the short story:

In 2002, before the sale of PayPal even went through, Musk started voraciously reading about rocket
technology, and later that year, with $100 million, he started one of the most unthinkable and ill-
advised ventures of all time: a rocket company called SpaceX, whose stated purpose was to
revolutionize the cost of space travel in order to make humans a multi-planetary species by colonizing
Mars with at least a million people over the next century.

Then, in 2004, as that “project” was just getting going, Musk decided to multi-task by launching the
second-most unthinkable and ill-advised venture of all time: an electric car company called Tesla,
whose stated purpose was to revolutionize the worldwide car industry by significantly accelerating the
advent of a mostly-electric-car world—in order to bring humanity on a huge leap toward a sustainable
energy future. Musk funded this one personally as well, pouring in $70 million, despite the tiny fact
that the last time a US car startup succeeded was Chrysler in 1925, and the last time someone started a
successful electric car startup was never.

And since why the fuck not, a couple years later, in 2006, he threw in $10 million to found, with his
cousins, another company, called SolarCity, whose goal was to revolutionize energy production by
creating a large, distributed utility that would install solar panel systems on millions of people’s
homes, dramatically reducing their consumption of fossil fuel-generated electricity and ultimately
“accelerating mass adoption of sustainable energy.”7

If you were observing all of this in those four years following the PayPal sale, you’d think it was a sad
story. A delusional internet millionaire, comically in over his head with a slew of impossible projects,
doing everything he could to squander his fortune.

By 2008, this seemed to be playing out, to the letter. SpaceX had figured out how to build rockets, just
not rockets that actually worked—it had attempted three launches so far and all three had blown up
before reaching orbit. In order to bring in any serious outside investment or payload contracts, SpaceX
had to show that they could successfully launch a rocket—but Musk said he had funds left for one and
only one more launch. If the fourth launch also failed, SpaceX would be done.

Meanwhile, up in the Bay Area, Tesla was also in the shit. They had yet to deliver their first car—the
Tesla Roadster—to the market, which didn’t look good to the outside world. Silicon Valley gossip
blog Valleywag made the Tesla Roadster its #1 tech company fail of 2007. This would have been
more okay if the global economy hadn’t suddenly crashed, hitting the automotive industry the
absolute hardest and sucking dry any flow of investments into car companies, especially new and
unproven ones. And Tesla was running out of money fast. During this double implosion of his career,
the one thing that held stable and strong in Musk’s life was his marriage of eight years, if by stable
and strong you mean falling apart entirely in a soul-crushing, messy divorce.

But here’s the thing—Musk is not a fool, and he hadn’t built bad companies. He had built very, very
good companies. It’s just that creating a reliable rocket is unfathomably difficult, as is launching a
startup car company, and because no one wanted to invest in what seemed to the outside world like
overambitious and probably-doomed ventures—especially during a recession—Musk had to rely on
his own personal funds. PayPal made him rich, but not rich enough to keep these companies afloat for
very long on his own. Without outside money, both SpaceX and Tesla had a short runway. So it’s not
that SpaceX and Tesla were bad—it’s that they needed more time to succeed, and they were out of
time.

And then, in the most dire hour, everything turned around.

First, in September of 2008, SpaceX launched their fourth rocket—and their last one if it didn’t
successfully put a payload into orbit—and it succeeded. Perfectly.

That was enough for NASA to say “fuck it, let’s give this Musk guy a try,” and it took a gamble,
offering SpaceX a $1.6 billion contract to carry out 12 launches for the agency. Runway extended.
SpaceX saved.

The next day, on Christmas Eve 2008, when Musk scrounged up the last money he could manage to
keep Tesla going, Tesla’s investors reluctantly agreed to match his investment. Runway extended.
Five months later, things began looking up, and another critical investment came in—$50 million
from Daimler. Tesla saved. While 2008 hardly marked the end of the bumps in the road for Musk, the
overarching story of the next seven years would be the soaring, earthshaking success of Elon Musk
and his companies.

Since their first three failed launches, SpaceX has launched 20 times—all successes. NASA is now a
regular client, and one of many, since the innovations at SpaceX have allowed companies to launch
things to space for the lowest cost in history. Within those 20 launches have been all kinds of “firsts”
for a commercial rocket company—to this day, the four entities in history who have managed to
launch a spacecraft into orbit and successfully return it to Earth are the US, Russia, China—and
SpaceX. SpaceX is currently testing their new spacecraft, which will bring humans to space, and
they’re busy at work on the much larger rocket that will be able to bring 100 people to Mars at once.
A recent investment by Google and Fidelity has valued the company at $12 billion.

Tesla’s Model S has become a smashing success, blowing away the automotive industry with the
highest ever Consumer Reports rating of a 99/100, and the highest safety rating in history from the
National Highway Safety Administration, a 5.4/5. Now they’re getting closer and closer to releasing
their true disruptor—the much more affordable Model 3—and the company’s market cap is just under
$30 billion. They’re also becoming the world’s most formidable battery company, currently working
on their giant Nevada “Gigafactory,” which will more than double the world’s total annual production
of lithium-ion batteries.

SolarCity, which went public in 2012, now has a market cap of just under $6 billion and has become
the largest installer of solar panels in the US. They’re now building the country’s largest solar panel-
manufacturing factory in Buffalo, and they’ll likely be entering into a partnership with Tesla to
package their product with Tesla’s new home battery, the Powerwall. And since that’s not enough, in
his spare time, Musk is pushing the development a whole new mode of transport—the Hyperloop.

In a couple of years, when their newest factories are complete, Musk’s three companies will employ
over 30,000 people. After nearly going broke in 2008 and telling a friend that he and his wife may
have to “move into his wife’s parents’ basement,”8 Musk’s current net worth clocks in at $12.9
billion.

All of this has made Musk somewhat of a living legend. In building a successful automotive startup
and its worldwide network of Supercharger stations, Musk has been compared to visionary
industrialists like Henry Ford and John D. Rockefeller. The pioneering work of SpaceX on rocket
technology has led to comparisons to Howard Hughes, and many have drawn parallels between Musk
and Thomas Edison because of the advancements in engineering Musk has been able to achieve
across industries. Perhaps most often, he’s compared to Steve Jobs, for his remarkable ability to
disrupt giant, long-stagnant industries with things customers didn’t even know they wanted. Some
believe he’ll be remembered in a class of his own. Tech writer and Musk biographer Ashlee Vance
has suggested that what Musk is building “has the potential to be much grander than anything Hughes
or Jobs produced. Musk has taken industries like aerospace and automotive that America seemed to
have given up on and recast them as something new and fantastic.”9

Gender equality
World Neighbors helps communities change social patterns. Before World Neighbors enters a
community, women typically have poor prospects in nearly all aspects of civil, economic, political
and social life. They have a much heavier workload than men, yet they have little to no access to
money or other resources. Often, they have no right to own the property they live on, even if their
husbands die. In many places, women are not even permitted to be alone outside of the family
compound. Most women have not gone to school and are illiterate. They have very little input into
household decisions and do not have a voice in the community organization. Their health, particularly
in regard to childbearing, suffers from neglect. And in some places girls are subjected to the painful
and damaging practice of female genital mutilation.

Women are regarded as property in many countries. When a man’s family pays a dowry to the
woman’s family, the woman commonly is treated as an indentured servant to repay the dowry. In
places where the dowry is paid to the man’s family, the woman’s family may be extorted if the
husband’s family later decides that his hand in marriage is worth more than the original dowry that
was given. If the increased dowry is not paid, the woman may face the risk of violence or death.
Changing these destructive social patterns is critical, and it requires both men and women to be
involved.

WORLD NEIGHBORS’ APPROACH TO IMPROVING GENDER EQUITY IN COMMUNITIES

INITIALLY FOCUSES ON CREATING SPACES FOR WOMEN TO BE HEARD BY:

1. Helping communities to understand the practical benefits that would result from women’s equitable
participation in family and community decision-making; and,

2. Conducting activities targeted at advancing the skills and confidence of women to a level at which
they are able to effectively participate in family and community discussions, decision-making and
leadership.

When a woman has a stake in household income generation, she helps make better decisions for
family finances, as well as decisions which can lead to improvements in the nutrition and education of
their children. Savings and credit groups help women start household businesses, learn important
income generation skills and create economic change that ultimately impacts entire communities.
World Neighbors empowers women to start savings and credit groups that give low-interest loans to
help a woman start her own business or purchase tools or livestock to meet family needs.

With World Neighbors’ guidance and education, a community makes the decision to begin a savings
and credit group, and an initial group of community leaders – often women – invest the seed money to
start a savings and credit group. They contribute a minimum amount of money to a joint account to
increase the capacity of the group to offer loans to its members. Once the account is large enough,
group members apply for the loans they need to jumpstart their businesses or help grow their family’s
farms. By the time World Neighbors leaves a community, the women we first met are
unrecognizable. These women, now literate, share household decision-making power with their
husbands. By imparting their perspectives, they improve their families’ educations and economic
situations. They have the skills to generate income through a small business or a trade and are free to
go to the market and beyond. The money the women earn has increased their status in their homes and
communities. It has also given them the power to demand health care, including contraceptives. Now
these women organize themselves and their communities to advocate for rights and for the
enforcement of laws that protect them from abuse and injustice.