Do you try to do too much and get intoxicated with your past success? You might be a stupid genius like Elon Musk–a person who is brilliant in certain limited domains and inept or even emotionally immature in others. If so, prepare for bad days–or consider how to put the brakes on your imagination and ambition, just a touch.
We all have bad days. On Apr. 20, Elon Musk’s much-touted $3 billion new SpaceX rocket became a fireball over the Gulf of Mexico three minutes into its first flight. Musk’s company labeled the explosion a “rapid unscheduled disassembly.” Sure, as Musk, Space X, and NASA insist, something was learned about the failures of the stages to separate and the engines to function, as we can learn from most setbacks. But whatever you label it, it was a costly failure they’d have preferred avoiding.
