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There's a little more to the ISU story, and we'll get there in a moment, but first I wanted to pause and consider a second lesson that we learned on our way to founding that university: the critical importance of staging your bold ideas. In the six months before that founding conference, when Bob, Todd, and I were drilling down into space school particulars, what we were really doing was breaking our vision into executable, bite-size chunks, what psychologists call subgoals.

Subgoals bring dual benefits. The first is the alignment of risk with reward. Few projects ever receive all the funding they need at the beginning. Usually, capital comes in stages as entrepreneurs find new ways to mitigate risk. Instead of one lump sum, money arrives in discrete waves: seed capital, crowdsourced capital, angel capital, super-angel capital, strategic partners, series A venture, series B venture, and sometimes even a public offering. More and more investment comes as each increment proves the capability of the management team and the veracity of the vision.

The second benefit to subgoals is psychological. In the last chapter, we met Gary Latham and Edwin Locke and learned that there's hidden leverage in setting big goals. But we also learned that this is true only when certain “if-then” conditions are satisfied. Commitment—meaning the alignment of values and goals—was merely the first of these. Equally important is confidence.

“Big goals only increase motivation,” explains Latham,
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“when the person setting those goals is confident in their ability to achieve them. This means breaking big goals apart into achievable subgoals.”

It's for these reasons that in the six months leading up to the ISU Founding Conference, we broke down our moonshot into five executable steps:

1. Hold a conference at MIT to study the idea of ISU.

2. Borrow the campus of MIT to hold a nine-week ISU summer session and invite a hundred graduate students
to participate.

3. Repeat the same summer program in additional countries to prove out the concept and build a global community.

4. Establish a permanent terrestrial campus.

5. Establish an orbital space campus on the International Space Station.

While steps four and five—our moonshot goals—were aimed at capturing our supporters' hearts, steps 1, 2, and 3, being much more incremental (thus believable) were aimed at their minds. And it worked. After receiving this first bit of support, we went from building our team to holding our feasibility conference to launching our first summer session.

The session was magical, gathering a hundred and four graduate students from twenty-one countries. Sure, it was totally bootstrapped—our campus borrowed, our faculty on loan (made up of the professors Bob, Todd and I recruited and borrowed from our respective alma maters). Yet it was still a complete success

Then we did it again, changing only the location (so we could create engagement in wider and wider communities). During that second summer, ISU borrowed the Université Louis Pasteur campus in Strasbourg, France. Then we were off to Toronto, Canada, in 1990, Toulouse, France, in 1991, and Kitakyushu, Japan, in 1992.

After the university had five years and about 550 alumni under its belt, we finally decided to try and parlay our assets into step 4 of our vision—a permanent terrestrial campus. One small problem: We had no tangible assets. As a fully virtual university with no campus, no cash, and a borrowed faculty—our only assets were our brand, our alumni, and our vision. Thus it was time to make stone soup.
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A long time ago, in a tiny medieval village, a farmer spots three soldiers on the edge of town. Knowing what would likely happen next,
he runs into the marketplace shouting a warning: “Quick, close the doors, lock the windows! There are soldiers coming and they'll take away all our food.”

The soldiers are in fact hungry. When they enter the village, they start knocking on doors, asking for food. The first villager tells them the cupboard is bare. At the next, the second villager tells them the same. The next door isn't even opened.

Finally one of the starving soldiers says, “I have an idea—let's make stone soup.”
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With that, he strides over and knocks on yet another door. “Excuse me,” he says to the villager, “do you have a cauldron and some firewood? We would like to make some stone soup.”

The villager, thinking there's no risk to her, says, “Soup from stones? This I've got to see. Sure, I'll help.” So she gives them a cauldron and some firewood while another soldier gets some water. They bring the water to a boil and place three large stones in the pot. News spreads around the town and the villagers begin to gather. “Soup from stones,” they say. “This we have to see.”

So the soldiers are standing around the fire and the villagers are standing around the soldiers.

“I had no idea you can make soup from stones,” says one villager.

“Sure can,” replies the soldier.

Eventually, tired of standing around, another villager asks, “Can I help?”

“Perhaps,” says a soldier, “if you had a few potatoes, that would make the stone soup even better.”

So the villager quickly fetches some potatoes and adds them to the pot of simmering stones.

Another asks, “How can I help?”

“Well, a couple of carrots would sure make the soup even better.”

So the villager contributes some carrots. Soon others are adding poultry, barley, garlic, and leeks. After a while one of the soldiers calls out, “It's done,” and shares the soup with everyone. The villagers are heard saying, “Soup from stones! It tastes fantastic. I had no idea.”

That story of stone soup comes from an old folktale that eventually became a children's book. I heard it in college and it's never left me. In fact, I've come to think of making stone soup as the only way an entrepreneur can succeed. The stones are, of course, your big bold ideas; the contributions of the villagers, the capital, resource, and intellectual support offered by investors and strategic partners. Everyone who adds a small amount to your stone soup is in fact helping to make your dreams come true.

What makes stone soup work is passion. People love passion. People love to contribute to passion. And you can't fake it. The human bullshit detector is great at spotting the inauthentic article. The used car salesman, the carnival barker, and the disingenuous politician always rub us wrong.

Sure, I'm probably not telling you something you don't already know. But passion is a trickier subject than most assume. For starters, there are versions of passion that are extremely unhelpful to entrepreneurs, such as what John Hagel III, the cofounder of Deloitte's Center for the Edge, calls the passion of the true believer. “In Silicon Valley we have many examples of the true believer,” says Hagel.
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“These are great entrepreneurs [who] are truly passionate about a very specific path and are notoriously not open to alternative views or approaches. Their passion is enduring and it does focus, but it can also be blind—leading the entrepreneur to reject critical input that does not match their preconceived views.”

Hagel and colleagues have made quite a study of passion,
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coming to define the version that best serves individuals and organizations as the passion of the explorer. “These are people who see a domain,” he continues, “but not the path. The fact that the path is not clearly defined is what excites them and motivates them. . . . It also makes them alert to a variety of inputs that can help them to better understand the domain and discover more promising paths. . . . [Thus] they are constantly balancing the need to move forward with the need in the moment to reflect on their experiences.”

This is the same kind of passion that makes stone soup. Passionate
people are deeply creative in seeking out and pulling in the resources they need to pursue their passion, but it goes further than that. “People who pursue their passions inevitably create beacons that attract others who share their vision,” says Hagel. “Few of these beacons are consciously created; they are by-products of pursuing one's passion. Passionate people share their creations widely, leaving tracks for others to find them.”

And this is exactly what happened with ISU. In 1992, as we sought to establish our permanent terrestrial campus, we put out an RFP (request for proposals) that basically said, “Hi there, we're ISU. We have this concept for a permanent campus. We've held five summer programs in five different cities, and this is our vision for what we want to create and where we want to go. Please tell us how much cash endowment, buildings, and operational money you will give us to bring our vision to your city.”

Had we gotten no response at all, I would not have been surprised. But that wasn't the case. Within six months, we received seven proposals ranging from $20 million to $50 million in funding, buildings, faculty, equipment, and even the promise of accreditation. In short, everything we needed to implement the next phase of ISU.

So how far can the right combination of super-credibility, staged goals, and passion take you? In our case, pretty far. In the end, the city of Strasbourg, France, won the bid. They went on to build us a beautiful $50 million campus in Parc d'innovation. Today many of the heads of the world's space agencies are ISU alumni. And while we haven't yet built our orbital extension, we're definitely betting that once asteroid mining becomes the norm, our space-based campus won't be far behind.

During the earliest days of ISU, I shared an office with Todd Hawley, who as a joke put a copy of Murphy's Law on the wall. That depressing
advice—“If anything can go wrong, it will”—stared at me every day. It also started to get under my skin. There's an old saying in business: You're the average of the five people you spend the most time with. The same is true for ideas. As was pointed out in the last chapter, mindset matters. Thus, a week into Murphy's mental assault, I went to the whiteboard behind my desk and wrote: “If anything can go wrong, fix it! (To hell with Murphy!)” Then above the quote I wrote, “Peter's Law.”

Over the years that followed I started collecting more laws—principles and truisms that have guided me in times of difficulty and opportunity. Most of these are my fundamental rules to live by, my go-to principles when the proverbial shit hits the fan. In the rest of this section, we'll take a closer look, but before we get to my ideas, we first need to address something far more important: your ideas.

The maxims presented below are the ones that have worked for me, but that's no guarantee they'll work for you. So come up with your own. Borrow from anyone you like. The point isn't to produce pretty pictures covered with inspirational quotes. The point is to trust your history. Plumb your past to plot your future. Start collecting mind hacks by examining your own life and seeing what strategies
consistently
worked along the way. Turn those strategies into your laws.

Why is this so important? Because fear is hell on decision making. As threat levels begin to rise, the brain starts limiting our options. The fight-or-flight response is the extreme version of this story. When we are confronting mortal terror, our choices are literally limited to three: fight, flight, or freeze. But the same thing starts to happen with lesser fears. As Emory University neuroeconomist Gregory Berns wrote in an article for the
New York Times
:
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“Fear prompts retreat. It is the antipode of progress.” And that's why it's important to write down your own laws. You're essentially creating an external hard drive for when your internal hard drive is guaranteed to crash.

At the end of this chapter, you'll find a full list of my laws, but first here are a few favorites, with some story and explanation to back them up and hopefully make them more useful. Steal from me, borrow from
others, modify at will, but most important, take action and create a list of your own.

I've seen variations on this quote attributed to everyone from Abraham Lincoln to Peter Drucker—which certainly makes it enduring. And for good reason. The future is not preordained. It unfolds as a result of action—the choices you make and the risks you take. At a very fundamental level, this is exactly what it means to be an entrepreneur. Have a vision for tomorrow, pull yourself toward it. I wanted a future that included private commercial space flight, so I launched the XPRIZE. I saw asteroid mining as a viable reality, so I cofounded Planetary Resources.

We humans are hardwired for challenge. This is why flow—the state of optimal human performance—shows up only outside of our comfort zone, when we are pushing limits and using skills to the utmost. Want proof? How about the significant correlation between early retirement and death. According to a 2005 report in the British Medical Journal, people who retire at fifty-five are 89 percent more likely to die in the ten years after retirement than those who retire at sixty-five. We need to be alive to stay alive, simple as that.

When someone says no, it's often because they're not empowered to say yes. In many organizations, the only person who can say yes is the one atop the food chain. When I was in graduate school, I was desperate
for a ride on NASA's zero-gravity (parabolic flight) airplane. I tried everything to get aboard (including volunteering as a medical guinea pig), but could never get permission. So I took things to the next level, partnering with two friends to start a commercial company (Zero-G) to offer this same service.

But getting permission to start this service took a while—eleven years, to be exact. Over the next decade, we battled an army of FAA lawyers who all insisted that large-scale commercial zero-g operations were not possible under the federal aviation regulations, despite the fact that NASA had been operating parabolic flights for over thirty years. They kept demanding that I show them where in the regulations it says an airplane is allowed to fly parabolic arcs. I had only one answer: “Show me where it says I can't.” Quite simply, none of these midlevel bureaucrats had the power to say yes. Finally, a decade later, my request made it all the way up to the FAA administrator, Marion Blakey, an amazing woman who had the right answer: “Of course you should be able to do this—let's figure out how.”