That's Magic Thinking. Just because you want something doesn't mean it's going to come true. There are thousands of other entrepreneurs you've never heard of, who were also highly motivated but it didn't work out for them. (That's why you've never heard of them.)
To explain the relative success of SpaceX and Tesla by Elon Musk "wanting success" is a fallacy. You should instead reason by first principles (as Musk himself recommends for entrepreneurs to do) and analyze what they did in the past couple of years, what worked and didn't work, what factors were involved, and how that led to where they are today.
I read that as 'I'm throwing all that I've got, time, resources, anything towards achieving my goal'. That's no guarantee for success but it works a lot better than doing nothing at all.
In order to win you have to first enter the games. Most people that are claiming this is 'magic thinking', survivor bias or generally down on achievement have never actually done any of this, let alone entered the game.
I spent 3+ years on my startup without being able to secure funding, getting by, fully commited [1]. I wanted to succeed really bad, but made too many mistakes from the get go and ran out of time/money eventually. To reflect on the topic of discussion, when evaluating why my startup failed (or another one succeeded), whether the founders wanted it bad enough is not a good core metric, which is what the grandparent claims.
Heal your wounds, save some dough and same player shoots again.
You have to play a lot of chess games before you start winning. Start-ups are no different, the learning curve is quite steep but if you persevere at some point it will start to pay off. If your first start-up takes off in a couple of weeks or months that's the exception not the rule.
Establishing any kind of business normally takes about three years so you have to plan for that.
Don't give up. I just saw this 2 days ago at a talk given by Venu Anuganti (the url was on the final slide, he didn't actually vocalize it though). Seeing something for the first time twice in two days in startup land could be a fluke, or it could be a trend.
You may be on the brink of success. In fact, I'm going to download and compile this right now.
oh man, is my face red :(. I'm still your new watcher on github though ... :)
I just moved back to the 2.6.0 tag. works.
This looks like a scalable database. I don't know if it was a for-profit company that you just open-sourced at the end or what.
All I know is that I don't see what I'm using. This is about a day worth of authorship on your part. Literally.
1. Write something to help a noob like me find out what I'm doing.
2. Give some (it can be silly and contrived) but useful example to bootstrap the user.
In programming you are fundamentally building something abstract that lacks concrete reality. The key to success, I've found, is giving it that concrete reality through coherent narratives, consistent verbiage, probably more.
I made it very carefully; being light hearted, poking fun at myself, trying to balance what people would think of it, being overall positive. I was trying to strike a really delicate balance in basically an advertising-to-geeks campaign.
Well, I think it worked pretty well. The project has 203 followers, which is my most successful by far.
I've found that this stuff matters a lot. Man does it ever. Backbone, underscore, and socket.io are probably popular not only because they have functional code (there's a lot of functional code out there) but because they have pretty websites (pretty is a POV word, but I think most people would agree those three sites follow aesthetic rules of thumb or modern web design ideas).
The readership of my blog entries went up phenomenally when I spent about 2 hours on my CSS. I spend 2-3 weeks on my longer articles ... that's 100+ hours, per article, it seems ludicrous that 2 hours on layout could lead to a larger gain than an extra 20 hours on citations and research.
But let me tell you right now, that is irrefutably true if you hadn't done it at all yet.
I think jQuery was so successful (and probably PHP too) because their documentation is so easy to navigate. No, it's not that it was so well written (Python is better written), but because google picked it up well and it was a cinch to navigate, and it worked.
Can someone far more successful than me weigh in on this, I hate to see people doing solid work and not getting acknowledged; that's enormously frustrating.
You can slice and dice the success of Tesla and SpaceX in all sorts of ways: analyze the external factors, the market, their employee compensation stratagies, the competitive environment, and so on, and you will probably find several interesting factors which were a contributor to their success.
But to ignore the visionary leadership and determination of Musk as a core factor to this success on the basis of other "motivated" entrepreneurs failing would be, I think, unwise. One of the defining charateristics of many of the leaders who have shaped our present is that they are/were resolute in some belief, even in the face of setbacks. Others with firm determination having failed isn't an antithesis - I'm not claiming this represents the only factor for success in business, but rather that in the case of Tesla and SpaceX this attitude that achieving their lofty goals was possibe, was a core driver in theirs.
Agreed on both fronts. I wouldn't argue that being a determined visionary is a recipe for success, rather merely that it's a key ingredient for BIG successes and challenging problems.
Edit: can't proofread, apparently. Changed "an" to "a"
Also is known as troop morale, you may hace all the best team with the best plan and execution, if you leave your morale to drift down, your team is not going to hold it for you(they are looking at you for inspiration).
In combat, troops have surrendered to weaker enemies just because they just gave up. The same happens with bussinesess. You must hold that "magic thinking" way up because if you dont, all that perfect assets you posses(at leat on paper) are not going to perform at their best(if at all).
We are talking of human teams here, not circuits.
If you need a thesis for why, 4 year later, SpaceX and Tesla are seeing the succes they are, this attitude might be at its' core.