And second, this does not always turn out well. That competitive fire can be channeled in both constructive and self-destructive ways, and childhood trauma almost certainly has negative effects on the life course on average. But we’re not talking about the average: we’re talking about who winds up on the extreme right tail, the 0.0001 percent. It’s usually going to be people who are either irrationally risk-loving out of a sense of having nothing to lose, extraordinarily mission driven out of a sense of wanting to prove people wrong—or both, as in the case of Musk.
