Part II
Ultra Hardcore Work
To those who quietly help advance the causes we mutually believe in, knowing advancing the cause is the only reward: thank you.186
What It Takes
If conventional thinking makes your mission impossible, then unconventional thinking is necessary.187
I am CEO of these companies because I feel I’m responsible for them, not because it’s the best thing for my quality of life.188
I want to emphasize that sometimes—in fact, most of the time—I get way too much credit or attention for what I do. I’m just the visible element. The reason these companies are successful is because we have extremely talented people at all levels making it happen.189
I didn’t expect to be CEO of these big companies. It just sort of happened that way.190 It was never my intent to run Tesla. Running two companies is quite a burden. Sometimes when people think of being a CEO, they imagine granting themselves lots of vacation and doing fun things. It doesn’t work that way. What you actually get as CEO is a distillation of the worst things going on in the company.191
Particularly, if you’re the CEO, you work on all the worst problems in the company. There’s no point in spending time on things that are going right, so you only spend time on things that are going wrong. Specifically, the things other people can’t fix. The most pernicious and painful problems.192
Q: How do you manage through failure?
Managing through big failures is painful and difficult. It feels terrible. The company looks at me to rally them, so I do. But I feel terrible. Failure is a punch in the gut. Even when you’ve got a lot of smart people working super hard to minimize the probability of failure, it’s still there. And it’s quite significant.193
Given the options, I prefer to learn from success.194