Gabriella Draney

I used to think I needed $100 million to be happy. Everything I did was in service of that goal. I bet on myself. I built an 8-figure company. The crazy part is that it worked. Until it didn't. I sold my company for a life-changing amount of money. It wasn't a hundred million, but it was a damn good start. For most of my life, I was like a greyhound chasing a rabbit. But like the greyhound, once I caught it, I didn't know what to do with myself. The day the wire hit my account was the best day of my life. And the feeling faded faster than I ever imagined. A few weeks later, I woke up and realized I was still the same person. So I bought a failing company. I needed to prove to myself that my first exit wasn't luck. It was an unmitigated disaster. Two years after my exit, I was losing $100,000 a month on a turnaround that was never going to work, and there were days I didn't even want to get out of bed to face the ever-tightening noose. I knew there was no way out. My external life looked successful, but inside, I was drowning. I took the L. When the dust settled, I had lost $1.5 million inside of 18 months. And it was the best thing that ever happened to me. In losing what I thought was wealth, I found something that money could never buy. The loss forced me to see through the bargain I had made with reality. For my entire life, I had made my peace conditional on external success. As long as I had a goal to chase, I was okay not being okay. In that moment, surveying the wreckage of my life, I realized that external conditions can never give you the thing you want. It can only come from within. Money might make your life easier, but it will not deliver the thing you are actually after. True wealth is the ability to stop running long enough to notice that you are already here, in this moment, with everything you actually need to feel alive. The feeling I spent my whole life chasing, it turns out, is available for free, right now, in this very moment. It is not contingent on any external condition. If you are on your way up right now, keep building. The building is a worthy endeavor. But you don't have to wait for the destination to be happy. Because the destination never comes. It's right in front of you, like your eyelash - so close you can't see it. I am rich now. But the richness isn't in my accounts. The richness is in the noticing.

SpaceX created the first fully reusable rocket stage and, much more importantly, made the reuse economically viable. Making life multiplanetary is fundamentally a cost per ton to Mars problem. It currently costs about a billion dollars per ton of useful payload to the surface of Mars. That needs to be improved to $100k/ton to build a self-sustaining city there, so the technology needs to be 10,000 times better. Extremely difficult, but not impossible.