This article is an excerpt from The Crazy Innovators by Jimmy Soni, bibliography by The FoundersThe copyright belongs to the original author.
"Questions are harder than answers, and if you can describe the problem properly, then you can easily find the answer. Elon Musk.Elon Musk's career entrepreneurial adventure began in college. In the late 80s of the 20th century, he and his younger brother Kimball immigrated to Canada from South Africa and studied at Queen's University in Kingston, Ontario.
At one point, Elon Musk read an article about Dr. Peter Nicholson, an executive at the Bank of Nova Scotia. Nicholson was educated in the fields of physics and operations research and applied his scientific talents to the fields of politics, policy, and finance. He was elected to the Nova Scotia MP and served as Deputy Director of Policy in the Office of the Prime Minister of Canada. In his different professions, Nicholson has worked on a range of issues, including punched card computer problems and Canadian fishing company rights-sharing agreements.
Musk was interested, so he contacted the author of the article, who gave him Nicholson's ** number. Musk immediately dialed **. Nicholson recalled: "I think, I can say that Musk was the only person who suddenly hit me and asked me for a job. Musk was so impressed by his boldness that he agreed to meet up with Musk and Kimball for dinner.
They ate and discussed "philosophy, economics, and the way the world works," and Musk confirmed what he had drawn from the article, saying that Nicholson was "super smart......with a well-developed mind". They asked about internships, and Nicholson said he had a position on his small team at Scotiabank. Musk felt that Nicholson's interest in science was as much as he did, so he chose the position. Nicholson took him under his command as his only intern.
Peter Nicholson also received the honor, and he will be one of the few bosses of Elon Musk.
For Musk, then a 19-year-old intern, [the re-bank internship] was an opportunity to look at finance from the top down, and he showed potential early on. "He was very intelligent and very curious," Nicholson recalled, "and he was already a very, very forward-thinking thinker." Outside of work, Nicholson and Musk "spend a lot of time discussing puzzles, physics, the meaning of life, and the nature of the universe." Even then, Nicholson recalled, one of Musk's interests stood out: "What he really loved was space." ”
Then, for Musk, the internship at Scotiabank proved "how bad the bank is." The fear of the unknown has cost them billions of dollars. In the later founded Xcom and PayPal, he took the experience as evidence that the bank could be defeated. Musk concluded: "If banks are so bad at innovating, then any company that enters the financial sector should not worry that banks will beat themselves because banks will not innovate." ”
When Musk left Scotiabank, he didn't have a good view of the bank, but he gained a lifelong friend and mentor, Peter Nicholson. He even followed in Nicholson's footsteps and combined science and business in his studies. Musk transferred from Queen's to the University of Pennsylvania to pursue a double major in physics and finance.
Musk loves physics in class, but he worries about actually working in physics after graduation. "I think I could get bogged down in the bureaucracy of the collider agency," he said, "and then the collider might be revoked like a superconducting supercollider, and that would be bad." "But what choice does he have?Many Wharton students are cashing in signing bonuses for becoming new employees at banks and consulting firms. He went to the same unit and did the same job. These traditional routes are even less appealing to him than they are to languish in the hierarchy of the hapless collider mechanism.
Ultimately, Musk chose a path that has historically been popular with undergraduates: graduate school. He applied to and was accepted into the Materials Science and Engineering program at Stanford University.
Dr. Elon Musk. That's the ticket to the future, isn't it?Musk knows he's not a good fit for corporate life, but even after being accepted into Stanford's prestigious program, he's considering options outside of academia.
The summer after graduating from college, Musk worked two internships in Silicon Valley at the same time. During the day, he works at the Pinnacle Research Institute, a company that researches space-based**, advanced surveillance systems, and alternative fuels for automobiles**. In the evening, he arrives at Rocket Science Games, a lively video game startup. His supervisor, Mark Gregor, said: "Musk is the 'disc flipper' that comes in at night when the game software is rendering. ”
At that time, the Internet fever had just begun, and the people who founded Yahoo and Amazon were only a few years older than Musk, and certainly not smarter than him. But starting a business is still risky, especially since he has already received an acceptance letter from Stanford graduate school. So, Musk found a compromise and applied for a job at Netscape, the hottest online company at the time.
Musk did not receive a response from Netscape, but he was not rejected outright either. So he decided to be brave enough to go to Netscape's office and walk around the hall. Maybe there, who he can talk to and get something out of it. It didn't work either. "I was too shy to talk to anyone," he later told Kevin Ross, founder of Digig, "so I was standing in the hall and feeling embarrassed." I just stood there and wanted to see if anyone could talk to, and then I was too scared to talk to anyone, so I left. ”
After eliminating Netscape, he struggled with whether to go to graduate school or start an Internet company. "I'm thinking, what's going to have the biggest impact on the future?What problems do we need to solve?He said. While at the University of Pennsylvania, he listed areas that would have an impact on the not-too-distant future: the internet, space exploration, and sustainable energy. But for these areas that will "influence the future", how should Elon Musk choose?
Shortly after I entered graduate school, "I was going to be watching the Internet go into an incredibly rapid growth for the next few years, which was really hard to accept, so I really wanted to do something about it." He applied to Stanford University for a deferment of enrollment and began his studies in January 1996 instead of September 1995.
Although Musk is considered one of the top adventurers in business today, Musk in 1995 was full of ambivalence about giving up graduate school. "I wasn't born an adventurer," he said a few years later in an interview with the Pennsylvania Gazette, "and I still had scholarships and grants that I would lose if I gave them up." After receiving his request for an extension, Musk's department contact at Stanford reportedly told him, "Okay, give it a try, but I bet we'll see you in 3 months." ”
Then, here you go,