Have you ever had to get through a bad situation? If so, then you probably had to use perseverance to help you. Perseverance is the skill that lets you see anything and everything as a problem that you can overcome. Everyone has some degree of perseverance, but when I think of perseverance and people with perseverance, I imagine one person, in particular, the man who is trying to have us travel space as we would travel around the world. Yes, that is Elon Musk.

Perseverance is arguably the most important skill a person can have. If you don’t even have a small sliver of perseverance you would stop as soon as you find the smallest problem. For example, if your pencil broke or the tip fell out you would have no idea what to do next even though it is as simple as getting up and using a sharpener.

So look at Elon. If he didn't have or use perseverance we wouldn’t have many companies like SpaceX, Tesla or, even PayPal, along with some smaller companies like the boring company, Neuro Vergil, Deep mind, Open AI, or Zip2. Elon was born into a very wealthy family, and he showed a high interest in technology for the first ten years of his young life. By the age of 12, he was writing code and publishing his first video games. This might be because of the fact that his father was an engineer.

In his early days, Elon lived in Pretoria, South Africa. He spent most of his school years in South Africa, but when he turned 17 he moved to Canada where his mother is from. He studied at the University of Canada during his college days. While he was in college he pursued a double major in physics and in business. Although he was excelling in both, he definitely preferred physics. He studied at the University of Pretoria, and at age 17 he moved to Canada after he had acquired his Canadian citizenship through his Canadian mother and studied at Queen's University for the rest of his undergrad years. He also studied for his bachelor's degree in science of physics at the University of Pennsylvania.

Elon’s first big struggle was when he created PayPal; he worked tirelessly on it. Even with all of that work PayPal was voted as the worst tech idea of the year by Forbes. This sent him many setbacks, like when he applied for a job at the popular Tech company Netscape; not only did his application go unanswered, but he was completely ignored during his in-person visit to the company. This setback might have changed his life if he got accepted. He might have been working a desk job for the rest of his life and not become the entrepreneur he is today. Although this wouldn't have stopped him from becoming successful, it just might have given him a feeling of accomplishment enough to the point that he  might have not made some of his most successful tech companies.

In the early 2000s, Elon sold PayPal to eBay after it took off. In 2002, he founded SpaceX. He is now its CEO and chief. But SpaceX has to get its funding from somewhere since it is a private exploration company.

And this is where Tesla comes in, easily Musk´s biggest and most profitable company. In 2022, Tesla was valued at over one trillion dollars. But a lesser-known fact about Tesla is that it wasn’t actually Elon that founded it. It was actually Martin Eberhard and Marc Tarpenning; Musk actually only bought it in February of 2004. But before Tesla became profitable, it was falling hard, and that was the initial reason for the original owners to sell it.

Musk found a way to make Tesla profitable. It took lots of hard work, even resorting to putting in several shifts averaging about 15-16 hours a day. Sometimes they even had to sleep on the hard factory floor for days at a time. But in the end, it was all worth it because now it is a multi-trillion dollar company. This is arguably one of his most successful companies ever and to come.

No matter how you look at it, perseverance is a great skill to have; the more you have the more you can achieve. It can shape your life to be like the person you aspire to be; no matter where you are in life or how old you are, you can use perseverance. In bad times or good times there is always a place where you can persevere, and with perseverance, you can achieve great things.

 

 

 

 

-Aditshiva Y.