XPrize CEO talks boldness, breakthroughs
What's the key to making an impact on the world? Be bold, according to XPrize CEO Peter Diamandis.
"Anyone who's truly passionate, driven by a massively transformative purpose can go and make a change in the world," Diamandis said Tuesday on "CBS This Morning."
It's a theme Diamandis touts in a new book he co-authored with Steven Kotler called "Bold: How to Go Big, Create Wealth and Impact the World," published by Simon & Schuster, a division of CBS. He said it's a how-to manual for entrepreneurs who want to access technology and use tools like crowdfunding and incentive competitions to make a difference. However, you "don't need to be a technologist" to accomplish this, he said.
"My goal is the inspiration that, a thousand years ago, it was only the kings and queens who could do anything on a national, regional level. A hundred years ago, it was the robber barons, the industrialists. Today it's all of us," he said.
It requires not only passion and drive, but also a need for a mindset he calls "moonshot thinking."
"The day before anything is truly a breakthrough, it's a crazy idea. Right? So where are we trying crazy ideas?" Diamandis asked.
Diamandis tries to enable this mindset through his XPrize Foundation, a nonprofit organization that holds various innovative competitions with large cash prizes. Teams from all over the world have the opportunity to win as much as $30 million by tackling challenges like the Google Lunar XPrize, where they compete to land a privately funded robot on the moon.
"It incentivizes people around the world to take action and to take risky approaches and to try things that weren't tried before," Diamandis said.
While Diamandis' said his calling since childhood has been space flight, he went to Harvard medical school to "make [his] parents happy." Throughout his education, he didn't stop promoting space projects.
"I gave up on NASA being the way that was going to get me there privately, and that has driven me," Diamandis said.
His drive has inspired people across the world.
"It's really about having humanity be able to explore space cheaper, faster, where it's not just a couple governments; it's a lot of people," Diamandis said.
He's also convinced people like Google CEO Larry Page, Tesla CEO Elon Musk and Huffington Post editor-in-chief Arianna Huffington to be on the XPrize Foundation board of trustees, and others like Google co-founder Sergey Brin and executive chairman Eric Schmidt are all backers of the Google Lunar XPrize.