We’re basically turning sunlight, water, and CO2 into storable, transportable fuels — we call ‘solar fuels’ — to address the other two-thirds of our … - Peter Diamandis

Passion and purpose scale — always have, always will. Every movement, every revolution, is proof of this fact. Plus, doing anything big and bold is difficult, and at two in the morning for the fifth night in a row, when you need to keep going, you're only going to fuel yourself from deep within. You're not going to push ahead when it's someone else's mission. It needs to be yours.

The science shows that . . . typical twentieth-century carrot-and-stick motivators — things we consider somehow a "natural" part of human enterprise — can sometimes work. But they're effective in only a surprisingly narrow band of circumstances. The science shows that "if-then" rewards . . . are not only ineffective in many situations, but can also crush the high-level, creative, conceptual abilities that are central to current and future economic and social progress. The science shows that the secret to high performance isn't our biological drive (our survival needs) or our reward-and-punishment drive, but our third drive — our deep-seated desire to direct our own lives, to extend and expand our abilities, and to fill our life with purpose.

How Musk chooses which streams to explore depends on the relationship between those probabilities and the importance of his objective. “Even if the probability for success is fairly low, if the objective is really important, it’s still worth doing. Conversely, if the objective is less important, then the probability needs to be much greater. How I decide which projects to take on depends on probability multiplied by the importance of the objective.