Musk revealed an old password
Musk said, “at one point, my password was ‘ILoveNASA.’ Literally, that was my password.”
Presume it no longer is. Still, that password says a lot about Musk as an entrepreneur and how he thinks. Consider the subtle signaling he gave himself every time he logged in with ‘ILoveNASA.” Do you have a password that gives you a similar reminder about your vision, your mission, or your goals?
For Musk, an entrepreneur who has dreamed of getting to Mars most of his life, space is the ultimate frontier. He shared, “America is a nation of explorers . . . People came here from other parts of the world, chose to give up the known in favor of the unknown. The United States is a distillation of the spirit of exploration.” He explained that NASA is a channel for that spirit and it’s one of the things he loves about the organization. Remember the Challenger crash? Musk does. He says it’s a painful part of the American psyche not because of the astronauts dying, but because their dying represented a death in the spirit of exploration that defines our country.
NASA’s opportunity: getting people in the picture
He also offered how he thinks NASA is failing. You almost wonder if using that password day and day out keyed his mind to processing how to work with NASA even faster.
“It’s important to remember, ‘people in the picture’ if you want to get public support,” he said. “You have to have something that fires people up and gets them really excited.” You can certainly see how Musk activates his philosophy of getting people excited about practical science, like his recent Tesla fan video contest.
Takeaways? Consider how your passwords, safely of course, could be small mental triggers for you in your own entrepreneurial ambitions. And of course, just like your goals, change them regularly. Enjoy the whole conversation with Musk about NASA, how to make space safer and better, and his password, and much more, below.
The opinions expressed here by Inc.com columnists are their own, not those of Inc.com.