Walter Isaacson: evaluation

Transcript context

…I don’t know. I think there’s wisdom to draw from that to first of all, he frankly, makes me feel that way, that there’s a lot of hours in the day. There’s a lot of minutes in the day. There’s no excuse not to get a lot done, and that requires just an extreme focus, an extreme focus and an urgency. I think the fierce urgency that drives him is important, and it’s sometimes genned up, like I say, the fierce urgency of getting to Mars. On a Friday night at the launchpad in Boca Chica at 10:00 PM there are only a few people working ’cause it’s a Friday night, they’re not supposed to launch for another eight months, and he orders a surge. He says, “I want 200 people here by tomorrow working on this pad. We have to have a fierce sense of urgency or we will never get to Mars.” That sense of urgency is also a vibrancy that’s really taking on life fully. To me, that’s the lesson is even the mundane can be full of this just richness, and you just have to really take it in intensely. So like the switching enables that kind of intensity ’cause most of us can’t hold that intensity in any one task for prolonged period of time. Maybe that’s also a lesson.…

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