Look fear straight in the eye and it will disappear.
The nature of fear is that people don’t look at it.
Look at it directly and it will be gone.63
Q: How do you think about making a decision when everyone tells you it is a crazy idea?
First of all, I feel fear. It’s not as though I have the absence of fear. I feel it quite strongly. But when something is important enough and you believe in it enough, you do it in spite of fear.
You shouldn’t think, “I feel fear about this and therefore I shouldn’t do it.” It’s normal to feel fear. If you don’t feel fear, you definitely have something mentally wrong. Just feel it and let the importance of your mission drive you to do it anyway.
I also think fatalism is helpful to some degree. If you accept the true probabilities, it diminishes fear. When starting SpaceX, I thought the odds of success were less than 10 percent and I accepted I would probably lose everything. But maybe we would make some progress. If we could just move the ball forward—even if we died—maybe some other company could pick it up and keep moving and our work would still have done good.64
We should not be afraid of doing something just because some amount of tragedy is likely to occur.
If our forefathers had taken that approach, the United States wouldn’t exist.65
Q: How do you persevere through these hard challenges? Where do you find the strength?
That’s not how I think. I think: “This is simply something important. It must get done. We will keep doing it or die trying.” I don’t need a source of strength for that. Quitting is not in my nature. I don’t care about optimism or pessimism. Fuck that. We’re going to get it done.66
I definitely emboldened over time.67