The Sunday Mail
Hunt for Greatness
Milton Kamwendo
Design thinking drives change, improvement and life’s experiences. You are only boxed if you refuse to think and create solutions.
Do not get caught up with making a living that you forget to design a life. When you work with designers you know that there is always scope to create new solutions, approaches, look at things differently, create something new and embrace limitations as opportunities.
All problems are design and innovation challenges. Constraints are catalysts for breakthrough thinking.
Crises are improvement challenges and there is always a scope to think differently and do things better.
Boredom is the luxury that cannot be afforded by anyone pursuing greatness and seized with designing their lives. You are either problem-minded or design-minded.
Design for greatness or complain for malignant mediocrity. He was born on 28 June 1971, in Pretoria, South Africa and is now doing things that are so big, so bold and so great.
The world is open for him, and it was not always so. It is not where you are born that matters most but what you are born to do. It is not the limitations of your birth place and circumstances that matter, but what you choose to major on.
It is the quality of your spirit, your willingness to design your life and apply design to every area of your life that makes the material difference. He thinks big, goes for big problems that others have been admiring for a long time and doing nothing about. Stop admiring your challenges and see the opportunities they carry. Life rewards thinkers and solution creators. He has been rewarded for his designs, faith, vision and hard work in incredible ways. He was the oldest of three children and spent his childhood in South Africa.
At age 9 he got his first computer, the Commodore VIC-20 and it immediately grabbed his attention and interest. He got interested in coding and started to learn it by himself.
At the age of 12, he earned $500 by selling a computer game Blastar that he had designed and created.
He was out to design his life and no constraints would stand on his way or stop him. Personal poverty could not stop him.
Bumpy roads do not mean that the journey has stopped and there is no way forward. Embrace constraints, hug your problems and thank God for your challenges.
Constraints on the design path do not mean that there is no scope to create new things.
The bigger the challenges the more inspiring the design challenge. The early years of his life were bumpy and rough. He left South Africa for Canada, intending to finally find his way to the United States. He worked on menial jobs until he was able to get into University.
He studied at Ontario University, Canada for two years before getting a scholarship to study at the University of Pennsylvania where he graduated with B.S. in physics and subsequently a B.S. in Economics from The Wharton School.
He was passionate about physics and about the art of business. Like all designers he was willing to see through different prisms and work for solutions and not survival.
Always determined to design his life and make things simple and better he put energy into his dreams.
He dedicated himself to design solutions for the big problems that other people run away from. His desire is to make a difference for a lot of people. His focus is designing solutions for interplanetary living, clean energy, mobility and transport.
His thinking about cars is so different and he is changing an industry that looked mature and overcrowded. Like any good design-thinker he challenges his constraints, defines his alternative reality and makes bold claims that sound insane at first glance.
He commits to bring his thoughts to life through massive action.
True to his design-mindset he works in iterations.
That is a powerful design principle. You keep making things better and iterating your designs and solutions. He is working to conquer the planet Mars and make it habitable.
He is working to make travel in space cheap, affordable and commonplace. He thinks that his electric car will take over the world and already it is getting noticed and being bought by many. He is solving congestion problems in the biggest cities in the United States through his tunnelling company, Boring. Such is life when you choose to apply design thinking and go beyond the limits that other people set for you. Refuse to let other people determine how far you can think, how high you can go and how far you can shoot for greatness. He sees beyond the boxes that other people place along the way and is bold enough to think for himself and create with passion. This is design thinking – being bold enough to create and go beyond the limits of the past. He plays by very different rules and does that quite successfully. This is the story of a design thinker, Mr. Elon Musk. It is never too late to live life by design and not by mere default. It is never too late to start thinking in new boxes. Adopt a new attitude: design a life and live by design. Design your day, your month and your year. Start by redesigning the space around you.
Mr. Elon Musk, by applying design thinking to solve problems, has created three companies with a market capitalisation of more than $1 billion and that is a feat. These are PayPal, SpaceX, and Tesla Motors. He understands social media and uses twitter in the new way that every modern CEO/Leader should be doing. His distinctive personality traits are design-thinking, perseverance, critical thinking, accurate self-analysis and hard work. He is hands on, works hard and thinks big. He personally participants in the designs of his Tesla cars and Space Crafts, working between 80-100 hours per week.
Elevate what you are designing and working hard on. In addition to these companies that he helped create, he is also chairman of SolarCity and is also involved in developing a high-speed transportation system known as Hyperloop. Recently he created a new Social Media platform that is taking the world by storm, ClubHouse. Elon Musk designs and invests in the projects that he believes can change our world. He is not out to get a meal for today, drive an impressive car, impress young children or just send kids to school. He wants to change the world and make it a better place.
Design the opportunities that you seek and be willing to think differently. You can be more than you are showing and do more than you have done before. Stop looking at your village like its the ceiling of greatness. Demand more of yourself and give more to others and intentionally design greatness.
Elon Musk is a designer, entrepreneur, inventor, innovator, and engineer. Musk personally participates in designing of electric cars and spaceships. Challenge yourself to go beyond yesterday’s hurdle and feat. Keep iterating and improving on the last model.
Never arrive, keep elevating the bar.
While others are still in conversations about going to the moon for a possible holiday trip, Mr. Musk’s obsession has been going to Mars and expanding the choices for humans to live on both earth and Mars. For Musk, Mars offers some possibilities that humans can tap and make habitable. He has nuclear-bomb ideas to transform the ecology of Mars to be habitable. He is searching for new geographies and new possibilities.
That is wild thinking and design thinking being applied.
Get tired of pedestrian complaining, mundane conversations and uninspired dreams of survival. Terminate fellowships of always reliving past hurts and seeking sympathy.
Stop trying to shrink the future to fit into the shoes of the past. Try big bold design thinking and bold solutions that leap us all forward. You cannot have a mere survival strategy. You cannot just apply intense thinking to catching up. Thinking small and doing small things will tire you and slow you. Refusing to believe in your dreams and designs you will just tailing other people’s shadows. Aim to leapfrog and create new space and opportunities that are beyond little competition games. Stop crowding around mediocrity.
Take bold steps and apply design thinking to every area of your life. Keep seeking to make things better, and provide solutions to problems that matter. The aim of design is always practical and useable solutions. Seek balance and structure. Look at the big picture, study the context and create solutions with fanatical zeal. Do not be disappointed because the first version does not seem to be achieving your goals. Keep iterating and chipping at it and improving. Do not be stuck to the world you know, go beyond boundaries and borrow from other worlds, other disciplines and other contexts. Make bold expressions of your dreams. Brace for constraints and embrace the challenges you face. Be willing to step forth, do what you have never done. Always learning and refining. You are set for greatness when you apply design-thinking disciplines.
Committed to your greatness.
Milton Kamwendo is a leading international transformational and motivational speaker, author, and a virtual, hybrid and in-person workshop facilitator. He is a cutting-edge strategy, team-building and organisation development facilitator and consultant. His life purpose is to inspire and promote greatness. He can be reached at: [email protected] and His website is: www.miltonkamwendo.com.
