Rick Rubin, one of the most famous music producers of all time, on the Huberman Lab podcast said: “Understanding how you feel without second-guessing yourself is probably the single most important thing to practice as an artist or a skill set to develop as an artist. To know how you feel and own your feelings. The reason that I chose to be an artist is to demonstrate this is how I see it. If I undermine my taste for some commercial idea, it defeats the whole purpose of doing it. And this is not what this process is about. This process is I am doing me and I am showing who I am, and you can like or not, but either way this is still how I see it.”
In this respect, the entrepreneur and the musician are very similar. You could say that their best representatives demonstrate an almost uncanny trust in themselves, or rather in that voice inside that pushes them to act in a certain way. This is most evident in moments when the opinion of the whole society is set against the founder’s idea or a piece of music that breaks the popular pattern. Today it is thought that Elon Musk might become the world’s first trillionaire, but watch the 2011 documentary Revenge of the Electric Car, where Elon, as CEO of the startup Tesla Motors, attempts to bring about a tectonic shift in the auto industry. However, with the release of its first roadster, the company is haunted by one failure after another. All the money from the sale of PayPal has been invested in Tesla, and it is now facing bankruptcy. It hurts to see how exhausted, depressed, and discouraged Ilon is. Where does he draw faith in the rightness of his path at this moment, when both circumstances and market experts and the public are skeptical or against his idea?
I have been studying the phenomenon of entrepreneurship for a very long time, and I am fascinated almost hypnotically by the personalities of the founders. Why? Probably because the pulse of authentic life is felt more clearly in them. Again, why? The nature of their activity burns out all the extraneous, artificial and superfluous by fire. To use the terminology of Buddhists, there is more Tathātā (Suchness) in entrepreneurs. Again, why? The answer lies in Rick Rubin’s insights — they simply cannot do otherwise, for that would be a betrayal of themselves, or rather, of the Force that drives them forward.
Yours sincerely,
-Alexander
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