Millionaire Spotlight

I am going to try something new tonight, we are going to look at a millionaire and see what pearls of wisdom they can provide us as we strive to grow our home based business, or as we strive to grow personally. I will work to find either a millionaire or billionaire each week and discover where they came from, what might make them tick and what bits of information we can use personally.




This week's millionaire spotlight is on Elon Musk. Elon Musk is not an old man, he was born in 1971 and currently lives in Bel-Air, California. He was born and raised in South Africa, emigrated to Canada in 1989 at the ripe age of 17. While he was growing up in South Africa, he got his first computer at 10 and taught himself how to program. By the age of 12, he had sold his first program, a space game called Blaster.

When in Canada he worked summers cleaning out grain bins and working in the vegetable patch. He also cleaned out boilers and later cut logs with a chainsaw. He started college at Queen's University in Toronto, then moved to the United States after receiving a scholarship to the study business and physics at the University of Pennsylvania. He did receive his undergraduate degree from Wharton and stayed an additional year so that he could complete his second bachelor's degree in physics.

As you can see from this brief bio (and we are not done...) this is very much a driven man. It does not look like he allowed many things to distract him from his vision. After he completed both of his undergraduate degrees, he decided there were three areas that he wanted to get involved with (his "important problems"): Internet, clean energy and space. How many of us had such a clear picture of where we wanted to work?

Elon Musk is the co-founder of PayPal, is currently the Chairman of Solar City and CEO of Telsa Motors and SpaceX. So, even after all these years and no doubt many challenges, he continued to work towards his initial "important problems"; Internet, space and clean energy. Interestingly he is currently listed as Time Magazine's 100 people who most affect the world in 2010. He was also the inspiration for the genius billionaire, Tony Stark (the character in the newest Iron Man movie). He describes himself as a workaholic.



As you can see, Elon Musk really started life not much differently than we did. He just seemed to have a very clear picture of what he wanted to do and did not waver in that path. He continues to work toward resolving his "important problems". His views in business are very useful too. He is willing to take risks, when he was developing rockets for space exploration, he tried to learn as much as possible from prior private sector attempts. In his mind, if nothing else, he was committed to failing in a new way. As you can see, he had no qualms about failing because with each failure, you learn what not to do the next time. Eventually, with enough failures, you will succeed, and Elon Musk was willing to take calculated risks in order to ultimately succeed.



In business we all must realize that there is always a risk of failure. The advantage of failure is that with each failure, you have now learned what will not work and can then try again. If you don't fail, you don't learn. How many times did Thomas Edison try to make a light bulb before he was successful. New innovations would never be possible if people didn't make efforts ad fail at them. Eventually, you get the right formula and become wildly successful. We all need to keep this idea in mind so when faced with a failure, we can get back up, dust ourselves off and continue working towards success.



If you are frustrated with your current financial situation and are looking for a second income source, please feel free to visit our website. We may have something that will interest you and something that may bring additional income into your life. Please feel free to contact us with any questions, we would love to help, even if it is to help point you in a different direction. Our goal is to help you achieve your financial goals, however (legally) you wish to do that.

I would love some feedback on this millionaire spotlight. Is this something you would like to see weekly? Monthly? Never? Is there some other topic you would prefer I periodically review? Let me know...

Until tomorrow...