Jimmy Soni explains how reading about Elon Musk, Max Levchin, Peter Thiel, and Reid Hoffman can teach you courage. Vicarious experience through others' stories accelerates learning faster than waiting for your own failures.
In one of Ryan Holiday's most recent books, Courage Is Calling, he talks about how courage is sometimes attained by experiencing what other people experienced. Like they give you the permission to realize what's possible.
Yeah.
And so when you read about somebody like an Elon or a Max or a Peter or a Reid, just being a normal human being and to see what they've accomplished by sprinting in the direction of failure over and over and over and over and over again so that they can learn faster. Yeah, it's fascinating. Experience is not always the best teacher.
Other people's experience The other part about it that I think is powerful with this story is, it would be one thing if PayPal was the only thing that these people had succeeded at, but they actually took everything they learned from PayPal and did it again and again and again, and they invested in other people. So it wasn't like it was sort of one and done. People can win a lottery ticket, it doesn't mean you have any special skill at winning the lottery. This is a particular skill at making things in the world. The other part about it that's interesting that a lot of people miss is they didn't just make things in the world of technology. These people are most famous for things like, let's say, LinkedIn, right? Or SpaceX. Those are just 2 examples. But what you would miss is one of the people who are— who's a part of this group, Ken Howery, just served as an ambassador. David Sacks, his first thing that he did after PayPal was he produced a film in Hollywood. Reid Hoffman's written 3 books, maybe 4. There's a person in the middle of this story who became Silicon Valley's most famous magician. So you have people who aren't just creating in one domain, they're creating in many different domains.
