there is always someone, someone who loves you as no one else ever will, who watches you everywhere, every moment, and never truly leaves you. Deep down, you know it. That is why you willingly ruin yourself, waiting for that one soul to forgive you, to stop you, to accept you. You wound yourself only because you wish to wound the one who loves you most. You want to punish him for creating you. you don't accept his craft. you don't refuse it either. you're just in love. In love with your own torments.

Elon Musk got rejected by Netscape. He walked into the lobby, was too shy to talk to anyone, and walked out. Never got the job. At his first company Zip2, the board demoted him. Twice. They refused to let him be CEO. He got fired from PayPal as CEO while flying to his own honeymoon. The board voted him out mid air. He almost died of malaria in 2000. Ten days in intensive care. Lost 45 pounds. A day from death. His first child died at 10 weeks old. His first rocket exploded. Falcon 1, flight one. Burned on the pad. His second rocket exploded. His third rocket exploded. The last of his money was nearly gone. Tesla nearly went bankrupt in 2008. The closest he ever came to a nervous breakdown. Both companies almost died on the same Christmas Eve. He was sued by investors. Mocked by the people who built cars before him. His childhood heroes, the astronauts who inspired him, testified against his company to Congress. The Cybertruck window shattered on live stage in front of the world. He overpaid for Twitter by his own admission and watched its value collapse. He was beaten unconscious as a child and thrown down a flight of stairs. He has said he goes to sleep alone and it kills him. He failed in public, over and over, for thirty years. He is the richest man in the history of the world. The difference was never the absence of failure. It was the refusal to stop after it.

Character is easy to fake when a man has no options. Poverty can look like humility. Fear can look like discipline. Social weakness can look like morality. Wait until he has money, access, sexual options, and the freedom to sin without consequence. Abundance does not corrupt nearly as often as it reveals.

Someone who never disturbs you, confuses you, angers you, saddens you, or makes you question yourself is a poor ideal to follow. Comforting illusions are easy to find; they demand nothing from you. Seek the person who makes you confront your own stupidity, not the one who constantly reassures you of your intelligence. The greatest teachers do not inflate your ego, they expose its limits. They don't tell you how intelligent and right you are, they tell you how stupid you are. They make your more stupid. That's all. The journey is about being more stupid and everything else is a lie. Because there is no truth. You keep seeking truth, that's a big illusion. Knowledge is one of the biggest illusion, it captures high potential people.