The strategy that Elon Musk and Steve Jobs shared to be successful

feel that time is against. That was the premise with which Steve Jobs tried to achieve success by any means, also applied by the tycoon Elon Muskthe richest man in the world today.

Musk created PayPal, is behind the most important electric car firm Tesla, dreams of taking man to Mars through SpaceX and seeks to be very close to information through Twitter, the last big company he acquired.

When Time magazine named him Person of the Year in 2021, he described it this way: “This is the man who aspires to save our planet and get us a new one to inhabit: clown, genius, master of industry, visionary, industrialist, showman, scoundrel; a wacky hybrid of Thomas Edison, PT Barnum, Andrew Carnegie and Watchmen’s Doctor Manhattan, the brooding, blue-skinned god-man who invents electric cars and travels to Mars”.

And in almost everything, he is very right. But beyond Musk’s productivity to be in charge of several companies at the same time, dividing his days into five-minute slots, one of the keys to understanding how he gets everything he wants goes beyond power and money: mortality, that coincidence that he has with Jobs, the genius of Apple.

Mortality, the real key to the success of Musk and Jobs

As he recalls a report published on the website of Business Insiderquoting Time, “after a severe bout of malaria nearly killed him in 2001, he seemed to feel the urge to make more of his time on Earth.”

Robert Zubrin, a friend of Musk’s for 20 years, agrees that the feeling of mortality lies behind the achievements from the billionaire: “Genius is a word often associated with Musk; wisdom, no. But there is a sense in which Musk, in my opinion, is very wise, and it is that he understands that he does not have a ‘forever’”.

On the other hand, it must be remembered that Steve Jobs died of pancreatic cancer, but the diagnosis of the disease did not prevent him from continuing to create: “Even before he was diagnosed with the pancreatic cancer that ultimately killed him, those who knew Jobs said he lived his life with an apparent sense of urgency, seeming to instinctively know it wouldn’t be long.”.

Jobs brought the world Macs, iPhones and forever changed the technology industry with breakthrough innovations. The concept of mortality was also very present in his life since he was diagnosed with cancer, but through an approach in which he used it as a revulsion.

In his famous speech at Stanford University, United States, in 2005, six years before he died, he said: “Death is the fate we all share. No one has escaped from it. And so it has to be, because death is possibly the best invention of life. It is the change agent of life: remove the old to make room for the new”.

“Remembering that I am going to die soon is the most important tool I have ever found to help me make the big decisions in my life. and avoid the trap of thinking you have something to lose”.

In this way, feeling that one day everything is over was what inspired Steve Jobs to achieve all his goals. That, deep down, is also the flag of Elon Musk.