When it comes to tech industry you might hear the words ‘revolutionize’ and ‘innovation’ more than you hear it in any other field. The Silicon Valley is filled with inspiring stories of people with somewhat similar pattern of starting life in poor area with little to no resources and working their way up from grass-root level to creating multi-million dollar companies and becoming tech giants. Among these such stories is story of a boy who started his life, in South Africa, dreaming about electric cars and space travel from early age. If you have interest in tech industry you might have guessed the name correctly; Elon Musk.

Born in family of four, Elon was a son of a Canadian model and a South African electro-mechanical engineer. His interests towards computers and reading were few of the major reasons he was bullied in school. Instead of sharing interests with children of his age, he was mostly found in library reading encyclopedias. His aptitude lead him to completion of Bachelor of Science in physics and Bachelor of Science in Economics. At age of 24 he started his PhD in applied physics from Stanford but his passion made him left his education only after two days.

Seeing USA as a center of innovation, Musk tried to migrate from his home town but the whole process was complicated and completing the paper work took two years. Once he and his brother Kimbal were able to become USA citizens they started working towards making an internet based software. It was early 2000s and services such as internet were just starting to become accessible to common man. Having physics background, Musk did not have any formal programming training and this situation made him to learn to code all by himself. The path of this two-man based internet software company was not smooth. Both Elon and Kimbal have to rent a single room which acted as both office and bedroom for two. Luck was on their side and they were able to raise funds from a group of angel investors. This was start of Elon’s journey towards production of fastest electric car; Tesla Roadster.

Currently Musk is running several companies; Tesla, SolarCity, SpaceX, The Boring Company, Neuralink, Hyperloop and OpenAI. The journey was, simply put, impossible. If you were to visit the official websites of these companies and skim through the vision of these companies you can clearly see that these companies are focusing on making impossible things possible and they are consistently amending the definition of impossible. But what makes all this possible? How these companies are achieving what was once only a dream and a thought? Is it because these companies have a lot of STEM (science, technology, engineering and mathematics) graduates working at them? Or is it because these companies are backed by huge research dedicated investments? Well these might be some of the variables in the complete equation of success but there are still some constants which should be taken into account in order to make everything work in unison.

Whenever any person starts his journey towards a goal there will always be obstacles in his path. In some cases the situation is so grave that there is not even a path to begin with. And as you keep making your goals big, the obstacles become bigger as well. This phenomenon is governed by a silent rule of nature. In order to perform daily tasks, a person needs certain set of skills. These skills might vary slightly with the lifestyle a person is living. When anyone tries to jump out of his comfort zone and start chasing his dream, the nature tests his spirit by throwing obstructions in his path. This is to test his resilience and to equip him with the set of skills are required to reach there. For any task to complete, a firm mindset and specific skillset are necessary. Those who keep fighting eventually learn all this during their journey.

Same is case with Elon Musk and any other successful person who was once a struggling entrepreneur. No matter which success story you pick from history, it will have same pattern; beginning from a thought or an idea, starting of journey with nothing but a resolute will to complete it, making mistakes and learning from them (acquiring the required skillset) and ultimately reaching your goal. Reading form the life of Musk, our take is the right mindset which he had all his life. Having a thought or an idea is not an uncommon phenomenon but not everyone is able to extract that idea into physical world and now you know why.