Elon Musk’s Resume of Failures proves that your failures aren’t big enough | Hacker News Reader

Elon Musk’s Resume of Failures proves that your failures aren’t big enough

blog.kickresume.com

28 pointsTo_soo11 comments

This article's point is a giant instance of survival bias. How many people went bankrupt when they were ousted as CEO of their own company, and because of that couldn't financially start second, third, fourth companies?

There's also this quote from the article:

> Elon Musk’s story proves that once you’ve mastered the art of failing, success becomes the only way you can go.

That seems like the "post hoc ergo propter hoc" fallacy: "after this, therefore because of this". Perhaps he got incredibly lucky after failing for a while. Perhaps he was incredibly unlucky while failing?

To truly master the art of failing, you'd have to end up dead

He's said he wants to die on Mars. He's working towards it; give him time.

He may have been ousted from PayPal, but that didn't change the fact that he was a primary share-holder and made hundreds of millions of dollars when it was sold out. Besides the money it also opened up the door for him to move on to bigger and better things. I doubt there are may people aside from Elon Musk who would consider that "failure".

Are you saying that either the author of the infographic, or Musk considers the sale of PayPal a failure?

If I had millions of dollars to land on in the event of failure, sure I'd take bigger risks.

If the consequences of failure is being homeless, well no, I think I may take the safer route.

Yes, clearly all of the poor, homeless people without healthcare just haven't failed enough yet. Why don't they just try harder? It's so easy to be a billionaire!

How do you get a McLaren from a failed job-interview at netscape? You need money to be able to affort failure..

This article should be taken as motivation one. That even greatest Elon had "bad" times. But those bad times weren't that bad comparing to regular people failures, as he maintained millions on his bank account even at those times. Once he was close to lose almost all, when Tesla needed investment and there was literally nobody who wanted to invest into it. So Elon gambled almost all his fortune to save Tesla. This means only one thing, he don't care about pilling money that much. He is driven by something else.

obligatory xkcd https://xkcd.com/1827/

Not talking specifically about Elon Musk, but if you have enough coin to put in the arcade machine, eventually you will win, and you will be able to say "look, you just have to practice again and again" [and to have the financial mean to have an other "continue" at the entrepreneurship game]

low quality content designed to be scanned in 23 seconds while waiting for the elevator.

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