Ayush spoke about Elon Musk: How the Billionaire CEO of SpaceX and Tesla is Shaping our Future by Ashlee Vance. This book tells the story of the South African American entrepreneur who sold PayPal for $1.5 billion and the innovator who creates SpaceX and Tesla. Vance pus Musk on the same footing as inventors and industrialists like Thomas Edison, Henry Ford, Howard Hughes, and Steve Jobs.  Early on Musk knew that there were three things that would change the world – the internet, sustainability and space travel.  After he sold PayPal, he invested all his energy in the very niche area of space travel, his only competitors being individual governments. He is known for his far-reaching plans, risk-taking mentality and unfortunate twitter handle. Reading about him, Ayush was troubled by a thought: To be successful do you need to be mean to others as you want to get things done? Think Ph.D. advisors, Amazon workers in their warehouses and mothers-in-law!

Some answers included:  It is well-researched that many successful bosses have psychopathic characteristics; if you are a boss, people don’t have to like you; society has been constructed in such a way that it is aggressive characteristics that lead to success; empathy doesn’t translate into niceness if you are the boss  and could be purely utilitarian in motive.

The conclusion? People adopt this kind of behavior as a template of success; so they behaving arrogantly with their employees though they lack an innovator’s insight because they think that this guarantees success. However, being a badass success ultimately requires certain merits that not all bosses have.

Kirthika spoke about a book called My Voice Will Go With You edited by Sidney Rosen. The book focuses on Milton H. Erickson,  the most influential hypnotherapist of our time. He used humor and storytelling to help people see situations differently. This book is a compilation of around a hundred tales and Dr. Rosen’s commentaries.

More books in Part 5.