Five For Your Hive: Mandate From Heaven

Mandate From Heaven, SpaceX, Career Advise, Literary Prizes, What You Are Doing is of Real Importance

Mandate From Heaven

In her book Founders at Work: Stories of Startups’ Early Days, Jessica Livingston set out to see if there was some special quality all thirty-two founders she interviewed had. She discovered a pattern: In the beginning they were all unsure of what they were doing, their companies started by accident, the individuals possessed high levels of determination, many were rejected early on by venture capitalists, they had an ability to adapt to the changing environments. There was one, particularly, that strike me as key: they were not in for the money. They love money, for sure, but it was not the key driver to reach unprecedented levels of achievement. “Successful startup founders typically get rich from the process,” Livingston reports, “but the ones I interviewed weren’t in it just for the money.” There’s something bigger than that. Something intrinsic. For one, “They had a lot of pride in craftsmanship” where, the embodiment of skill, artistry and the dedication to a vision bigger than themselves was at the very core of their mission. They are driven by an ambition, not just to introduce something new into the world, but to transform it entirely, thereby altering the trajectory of human progress. And although these founders get rich in the process, many of them have gone on to new projects, choosing to use their wealth to keep building more things. The individual’s mission—the mandate from heaven—is deem more important than the outcome of the business, craft or innovation.

It Had to be About Pursuing Great Dreams

At a gathering of PayPal Alumni in Las Vegas in the early 2000s, one of the alums, Mark Woolway, asked Musk what he planned to do next. He had just received a paycheck of $250 million from PayPal’s acquisition by eBay. What would someone with such generational wealth do with that money, one would wonder. “I’m going to colonise Mars,” he said, “my mission in life is to make mankind a multiplanetary civilisation.” The audacity was unmatched. What made him say that? What made him think he was capable of exploring uncharted territory beyond the stratosphere, bringing humanity with him on a giant spaceship? Three reasons. First, technology progress, according to Musk, has always been taken for granted. While people think that it’s a natural evolution of life, Musk felt that it was not inevitable. Landing on the moon was just the icing on the cake—he needed to show what ‘technological-progress’ truly meant, that was to reach beyond the moon, further than what we already know. Second, “colonizing other planets would,” he says, “help ensure the survival of human civilisation and consciousness in case something happened to our fragile planet,” like being destroyed by a massive asteroid or climate change or nuclear war. Third, and the most inspirational of all, was that a call to adventure—to conquer Mars—is what could inspire future generations to aim for breakthroughs. People need inspiration. They need to know that big dreams can be achieved. But Musk acknowledges that this is no easy task. “To have a base on Mars would be incredibly difficult,” Musk says, “and people will probably die along the way…but it will be incredibly inspiring, and we must have inspiring things in the world.” As Walter Isaacson writes in his recent biography, “life cannot be merely about solving problems…it had to be about pursuing great dreams,” and for SpaceX, its an embodiment of vision and passion that “can get us up in the morning”. Musk was convinced that his endeavour—to make life multiplanetary—was a mandate from heaven to alter the fate of our species.

Career Advise

Paul Graham once gave really good career advise which I think about every now and then. “One sign that you’re suited for some kind of work,” he writes, “is when you like even the parts that other people find tedious.” The most boring parts of the job, the thing most people will spend their lives avoiding, you enjoy doing it. When people stare at you in judgment, you’re not bothered by it, because deep down you are convinced that what you’re doing is your calling, your purpose of existence.

There Are More Important Things

This was what novelist Raymond Chandler said about winning the Nobel Prize: “Do I wish to be a great writer? Do I wish to win the Nobel Prize? Not if it takes much hard work. What the hell, they give the Nobel Prize to too many second-raters for me to get excited about it. Besides, I’d have to go to Sweden and dress up and make a speech. Is the Nobel Prize worth all that? Hell, no!” Novelist Nelson Algren shared a similar sentiment, expressed uniquely: He won the National Institute of Arts and Letters Award of Merit Medal in 1974, but bailed on the ceremony and was found drunk with a woman at a bar before “throwing his medal away”. So one thing seems obvious here, Haruki Murakami writes, is that “there are more important things to a true writer than literary prizes”, and that is a conviction that what they wrote had real meaning, and the readers understood what that meaning was. “The most important thing,” Murakami says, “is good readers”, the people who “dip into their pockets to buy my books.” Not prizes or awards or critical praise. The great writers are ones that soak into the craft of writing, not for the fame or money—not for the outcome of the craft—but for the ultimate enjoyment of the reader that pushes the writer to continue his mission.

What You Are Doing is of Real Importance

Sci-fi author Ursula Le Guin once wrote, “What you need is the conviction that what you are doing is of real importance and really worth doing, and you have to do it, and that conviction creates the sacred space around you.” These words have been on my mind since the day I read it, and it has been driving me to continue to pursue my dreams. Its my mandate from heaven. But it doesn’t just have to be for me. For you, too. I urge you to carry on your mission, your calling. Your responsibility is to live it out accordingly to how you envision it.