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A Review of Drive
A Review of Drive
A Review of Drive
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BILLIONAIRES
STEVEN KOTLER
CONTRIBUTOR
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FEBRUARY 04, 2015
Until very recently, taking on grand challenges was off-limits for most people.
Historically, going big meant huge capital outlays and multi-decade bets.
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Richard Branson
Image credit: Richard Branson via Instagram
Just about everything Sir Richard Branson has done has involved taking
brazen risks. But he also runs his Virgin Group empire like a competitive
ecosystem, letting some companies live, others die and always ceaselessly
experimenting.
He is quick to rapidly iterate his ideas and quicker to shut down a failure.
While Branson is known to have started tons of companies, he has also shed
ones that didn’t work for him.
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“It looks like entrepreneurs have a high tolerance for risk," he told my co-
author Peter H. Diamandis in an interview for our just-published book, Bold.
"But, having said that, one of the most important phrases in my life is 'protect
the downside.’ It should be one of the most important phrases in any
businessperson’s life.”
It was a "big, bold move going into the airline business," Branson said of his
launch of Virgin Airlines after initially starting Virgin Records. But Boeing
allowed for him to "give the plane back after 12 months."
"That meant I could put my toe in the water, I could see whether people liked
the airline," he said. "But if it didn’t work out, it wasn’t going to bring
everything else crashing down."
Added Branson: "I’d be able to look my record company bosses in the eye
and we’d still be friends because they’d still have jobs."
"Protecting the downside is critical," Branson said. "Make bold moves but
make sure to have a way out if things go wrong.”
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Jeff Bezos
Image credit: James Duncan Davidson | Flickr
The Amazon CEO also understands that the only way to really succeed is via
experimentation. He knows that this approach will occasionally produce
spectacular mistakes. "Failure comes part and parcel with invention. It’s not
optional," he wrote in a 2014 Amazon shareholder letter
Staff at his company "believe in failing early and iterating until we get it right,"
Bezos added.
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"When this process works, it means our failures are relatively small in size," he
wrote. "Most experiments can start small."
Elon Musk
Image credit: Heisenberg Media | Flickr
Nothing is more important than passion and purpose for Elon Musk, who also
heads up Space Exploration Technologies and SolarCity.
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“I didn’t go into the rocket business, the car business or the solar business
thinking this is a great opportunity," Musk told me in an interview.
This was to illustrate Page's focus on 10x thinking, which Teller has referred to
as making something 10 times better.
For Page, the answer for him and Googlers always sits at the intersection of
long-term planning and customer-centric thinking.
"We always try to concentrate on the long term," Page told me in an interview.
"When we first looked at YouTube, people said, ‘Oh, you guys are never
going to make money with that, but you bought it for $1.4 billion. You’re totally
crazy.'"
"We were reasonably crazy, but it was a good bet," Page said, noting
YouTube's revenue growth.
Added Page: "Our philosophy is that the things that people use often are
really important to them and we think that over time, you can make money
from those things.”
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This is why Virgin Atlantic offers free seat-back TVs, onboard massages, a
glass-bottomed plane and stand-up comedians.
"It’s about getting every little detail right. It is running your airline like you
would an upscale restaurant -- the kind where the owner is there every day,"
he added.
"Virgin Atlantic started out with one plane," Branson said. "On paper, we
should not have survived. But because we were customer-centric, people
went out of their way to fly us.”
“Outcomes are usually not deterministic,” Musk told Kevin Rose in a 2011
interview. "They’re probabilistic."
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Added Musk: "The popular definition of insanity -- doing the same thing over
and over and expecting a different result -- that’s only true in a highly
deterministic situation.
"If you have a probabilistic situation, which most situations are, then if you do
the same thing twice, it can be quite reasonable to expect a different result,"
he concluded.
7. Be a rational optimist.
Larry Page
Image credit: Niall Kennedy | Flickr
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Page observed that this meant his company's "job is really to make the
world better" and that the world needs "more people working on this. We
need to have more ambitious goals."
Said Page: "The world has enough resources to provide a good quality of
life for everyone. We have enough raw materials. We need to get better
organized and move a lot faster."
"That’s usually what people don’t do," Musk said. "They don’t adjust course
fast enough and adapt to the reality of the situation."
Often, he says, people do things because "others are doing them” or they
spot a trend. They see "everyone moving in one direction and decide that’s
the best direction to go."
At times "this is correct, but sometimes this will take you right off a cliff,"
Musk said.
Related: The Billionaires Who Gained and Lost the Most Money in 2014
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SEE ALSO
MOST PROFITABLE SMALL
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BUSINESSES
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