Think Big & Dream Even Bigger

埃隆马斯克 Elon Reeve Musk

All right. I’d like to thank you for leaving ‘crazy person’ out of the description.

So, I thought — I was trying to think what’s the most useful thing that I – what I can say that can actually be helpful and useful to you in the future.

And I thought, perhaps tell the story of how I sort of came to be here. How did these things happen? And maybe there are lessons there. I often find myself wondering, how did this happen.

When I was young, I didn’t really know what I was going to do when I got older. People kept asking me. But then eventually, I thought the idea of inventing things would be really cool.

And the reason I thought that was because I read a quote from Arthur C. Clark which said that “A sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.’ And that’s really true.

If you go back say, 300 years, the things we take for granted today, you’d be burned at stake for.

Being able to fly. That’s crazy. Being able to see over long distances, being able to communicate, having effectively with the Internet as a group mind of sorts, and having access to all the world’s information instantly from almost anywhere on the earth.

This stuff that really would be magic – that would be considered magic in times past.

In fact, I think it actually goes beyond that, because there are many things that we take for granted today that weren’t even imagined in times past, that weren’t even in the realm of magic.

So, it actually goes beyond that. So I thought, well if I can do some of those things – basically if I can advance technology, then that is like magic and that would be really cool.

I always had an existential crisis, because I was trying to figure out ‘what does it all mean?’ Like what’s the purpose of things?

And I came to the conclusion that if we can advance the knowledge of the world, if we can do things that expand the scope and scale of consciousness, then we’re better able to ask the right questions and become more enlightened. And that’s the only way forward.

So, I studied physics and business, because I figured in order to do a lot of these things you need to know how the universe works and you need to know how the economy works.