Free Bold by Peter H. Diamandis

conservative by design. When a particular adaptation works, the basic design is repeated again and again. Flow most certainly works. As a result, our brains are hardwired for the experience. We are all designed for optimal performance—it’s abuilt-in feature of being human.

CHAPTER FIVE
The Secrets of Going Big
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Born Above the Line of Super-Credibility
    â€œI watched the news today and I saw something sooooo . . . awesome,” says Jon Stewart, host of Comedy Central’s Daily Show . 1 It’s April 24, 2012, and Stewart is, well, a little excited. His eyebrows dart, his nostrils flare, he’s about to blow. A newsreel begins to roll. We see an anchorman in a suit, hands folded, cucumber calm: “This may seem like science fiction,” he says, “but today a group of space pioneers announced plans to mine asteroids for precious minerals.” Cut back to Stewart, in a tizzy, shouting, “Space pioneers going to mine asteroids for precious materials! BOOM! BOOM! YES! Stu-Beef is all in. Do you know how rarely the news in 2012 looks and sounds like you thought news would look and sound in 2012?”
    What Stewart was boom-booming about was Planetary Resources, Inc., 2 the asteroid-mining company I cofounded with Eric Anderson in 2009 and announced in 2012. Clearly, asteroid mining is a crazy science-fiction idea, bold on every level. To start this kind of company with any real hope of success and—equally difficult—to present it to the public in a plausible fashion requires a different kind of approach. Over the years, I’ve developed a series of strategies for tackling thesekinds of challenges, none more important than birthing projects above the line of super-credibility.
    As will become clearer later, getting above that line requires a deep passion. Mine emerged in 1969. I was only eight years old when Apollo 11 landed on the moon, and I decided then and there that going into space was what I wanted to do with my life. I was in my early twenties when I realized NASA was never going to get me there. Constrained by government spending and frightened by the risk of failure, the space agency had become a military-industrial jobs program unlikely to return to the Moon or push onward to Mars. It was clear to me, if we were going to boldly go, it was going to have to be without the help of government.
    Thus I devoted the next thirty years to starting private ventures that I thought would open the space frontier. In addition to my work with the International Space University, these included three efforts to jump-start a space-tourism economy: the XPRIZE, Zero-G, and Space Adventures Limited.
    It was thru the founding of Space Adventures 3 that I teamed up with Eric Anderson, my future partner in Planetary Resources. Back in 1995, Anderson, a recent University of Virginia aerospace graduate, joined me as an intern to help develop a company to leverage the vast assets of the once-powerful Soviet space program, now hungry for hard currency and willing to offer anyone with enough cash a ride into space. Within a year, Anderson worked his way up from intern to vice-president to president of Space Adventures (later CEO). Over the next fifteen years, he took the company to over $600 million in cumulative revenues—and if you’ve ever tried to sell a $50 million seat into orbit or a $150 million ride around the Moon, you’ll respect the achievement.
    Others, impatient for this same dream, took a different approach. On October 4, 2004, when aviation legend Burt Rutan won the $10 million Ansari XPRIZE with SpaceShipOne, Sir Richard Branson swooped in to license the winning technology, committing a quarter of a billion dollars to develop Virgin Galactic’s SpaceShipTwo—thecommercial follow-up to SpaceShipOne. 4 Next, Amazon founder Jeff Bezos committed over $100 million toward a secretive launch vehicle company called Blue Origin. 5 Perhaps most impressive was