In August 2008 SpaceX lost a rocket carrying three satellites two minutes after launch. This was the third failed launch in a row, following failed launches in March 2006 and March 2007 1. This is the type of failure that kills the morale of a team and causes companies to pivot to something with a better success rate.
SpaceX and its CEO Elon Musk managed to persevere through large scale failures because they could see that they were improving and getting better at doing the things they wanted to be good at. Failure didn’t distract them because they realized they were on a path to mastery and because they were motivated by the small victories that showed they were slowly getting better at doing the things they wanted to be good at.
This is the motivation that comes from the path to mastery. Not the high status respect garnering mastery that we all day dream about, but the hard won challenging mastery that comes from following a path that makes you better at the things you want to be good at. This path may not be for everyone but its worth considering and it can take you far.
SpaceX became the first private company to reach the International Space Station.
The type of ground breaking mastery required to take an amount of capital on the order of one NASA launch and turn it into a company that designs rockets and launches commercial missions to the International Space Station requires a team motivated by their path towards mastery. The motivation that comes from this path is made possible by increasing your skills over time while simultaneously increasing the difficulty of the tasks you accomplish. Committing to this journey and following a path that makes you good at the things you want to be good at encourages you to improve your skills and taking on bigger challenges. Bigger challenges like building commercial rockets on a budget.
When you work on challenges that meet your skill level you experience what is called flow. Flow is the state of mind described by Daniel Pink in Drive: the surprising truth about what motivates us. Flow creates a positive feedback loop which motivates us to improve our skills and take on new challenges giving rise to more flow. Choosing to take a path that makes you good at the things you want to be good at gets you into that positive feedback loop and helps you get back in when you fall off.
Flow is also discussed by Nobel Prize winning economist Daniel Kahneman in his book Thinking, Fast and Slow. He praises flow as the way to “neatly separates the two forms of effort: concentration on the task and the deliberate control of attention”. By counteracting the ego depletion necessary to deliberately control your attention, flow helps you do the little things that you need to do to build yourself up to the point where you can positively affect the world around you.
To create these types of results for yourself you need to commit to a path. This path may be found through building a profitable startup, breaking a sports record or helping your family members respect each other. These are all paths that require mastery of certain skills. You should choose the path that lets you get good at whatever you want to be good at. You already know what you want to be good at but you haven’t considered it as a path because you don’t see how you are going to get good. If you would have started earlier you would already be good at it but for now there is still time.
Once you’ve started on a path to get good at what you want to be good at you can check if you are on the right path by being introspective and testing your fundamental hypotheses - your most important assumptions about how stuff works. Whole books have been written about testing fundamental assumptions such as The Lean Startup by Eric Reis which focuses on testing the fundamental assumptions of your startup business such as its value proposition and growth plan. The same process can be applied to test the fundamental assumptions on your path.
To harness the benefits of flow and apply your talents effectively commit to a path that gives you the experience needed to get good at whatever you want to be good at. That path will at times require you to cope with major failures such as those encountered by the SpaceX team. And you aren’t even guaranteed to be as successful as the SpaceX team has been but realize that “your economic security does not lie in your job; it lies in your own power to produce –to think, to learn, to create, to adapt. That’s true financial independence. It’s not having wealth; it’s having the power to produce wealth. It’s intrinsic.” (Stephen Covey, The Seven Habits of Highly Successful People)
The most effective path to success is the path that makes you the person you want to be. Choose the path that makes you think, makes you learn, makes you create, makes you adapt and commit to the path that makes you better at what you want to be good at. As I continue on my path I will be writing essays inspired by the books I read, the people I meet and the experiences I encounter.
-David Olesch