Against all odds. Congrats @elonmusk and @SpaceX.

A Chairman said to me years ago, that most people are just "visitors of their problems." They see the problems, but "visit them" periodically when frustrated, and never take care of them. "Visiting problems" (and not solving them) contributes to a lot of misery. Be a solver.

I've known @elonmusk for 26 years, and there's lots of noise about him becoming a trillionaire. If one thing defines him, it's that he's NOT driven by money, but instead by solving our world's toughest problems.

Math behind being 10% better every week

The older I get, the more I realize that success at most things isn't about finding the one trick or secret nobody knows about. It's consistently doing the boring, mundane things everyone knows about but is too unfocused/undisciplined to do. Get good at boring.

How to achieve unrealistic goals: Make them specific enough to reverse-engineer. At Teles, we decided to 10x the business in 5 years. Sounded absurd. So we broke it down to one daily number: $8.3 million in sales every day. Once you see it that way, you can work backward. • How many contracts? • How many conversations? • How many appointments? Every morning, our sales managers reported 2 numbers: 1. What got booked yesterday 2. What was committed for today We hit our goal just by doing that. Turn your ambition into a daily number and it becomes possible.

The world is full of losers. The only reason anything good happens is because dreamers work to make reality better.

The lesson I take from the SpaceX IPO is that the only thing stopping us from solving arbitrarily difficult problems is extreme creativity in business models. No amount of tax and spend programs got us reusable rockets and great electric cars. Customer delight is a necessary precondition for success. There seems to be some discussion around whether successful entrepreneurs should give up control of their companies so they can subsidize some philanthropic venture that otherwise has no value prop sufficient to run it as a business where customers voluntarily exchange money for goods and services at a competitive and reasonable price. This misses the point. Transformational products deliver tangible value at 1000x the rate of charities whose value cannot be tested in the market place. Think about the undeniable value of the smart phone, satellite Internet, electric consumer devices, etc etc. I think the transformational moment for SpaceX was when Elon stepped away from the philanthropic Mars greenhouse concept and fixed his resolve on unlocking radically better rockets for humanity. The greenhouse would have been, at best, a neat trick. Falcon and Starship give humanity a durable economic engine to maintain and improve access to space, forever.