{"id":37557,"date":"2021-03-26T14:24:00","date_gmt":"2021-03-26T14:24:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.christianitytoday.com\/pastors\/preaching\/sermon-illustrations\/challenges-that-gave-elon-musk-his-passion\/"},"modified":"2021-03-26T14:24:00","modified_gmt":"2026-01-23T19:06:29","slug":"challenges-that-gave-elon-musk-his-passion","status":"publish","type":"sermon-illustrations","link":"https:\/\/www.christianitytoday.com\/pastors\/preaching\/sermon-illustrations\/challenges-that-gave-elon-musk-his-passion\/","title":{"rendered":"The Challenges that Gave Elon Musk His Passion"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>All of us have odds to overcome, but those odds are not the enemy. &#8230; By his own admission, Elon Musk had a difficult childhood. He was bullied during high school, spending time in the hospital after getting pushed down the stairs and beaten until he blacked out. His home life wasn&#39;t much better. He described his childhood as &quot;nonstop horrible.&quot;<\/p>\n\n<p>One day, when he was ten years old, he saw a computer at an elec&shy;tronics store in Johannesburg, South Africa. It was love at first sight. That Commodore VIC-20 had five kilobytes of mem&shy;ory and came with a workbook on the BASIC programming language. That language was supposed to take six months to acquire, but Musk learned it after three sleepless nights.<\/p>\n\n<p>Could Elon Musk have learned to code without a challenging child&shy;hood? You bet. But he might not have pursued coding with the same kind of passion. Everything we experience is a two-sided coin. It can make us or break us, and that&#39;s up to us. You can get frustrated with the fact that you&#39;re right-handed or left-handed, or you can cultivate ambi&shy;dexterity. You don&#39;t get to choose how your story starts, but the ending is up to you.<\/p>","protected":false},"author":30,"featured_media":0,"template":"","tax_ctp_audience":[],"tax_ctp_authors":[],"tax_ctp_categories":[165],"tax_ctp_format":[171],"tax_ctp_illustration_types":[405,411],"tax_ctp_multimedia":[],"tax_ctp_point_editor":[433],"tax_publications":[140],"tax_ctp_tags":[3367,3371,3374,3389,3555,3569,3572,3749,3779,3780,3865,4554,4580,4602,4629,4630,4632,4821,5191,5193,5238],"tax_ctp_topics":[384,396,403],"class_list":["post-37557","sermon-illustrations","type-sermon-illustrations","status-publish","hentry","tax_publications-ct-pastors","tax_ctp_tags-abuse","tax_ctp_tags-accomplishments","tax_ctp_tags-achievement","tax_ctp_tags-adversity","tax_ctp_tags-challenges","tax_ctp_tags-children","tax_ctp_tags-choice","tax_ctp_tags-dedication","tax_ctp_tags-difficult-people","tax_ctp_tags-difficulty","tax_ctp_tags-endurance","tax_ctp_tags-obstacles","tax_ctp_tags-overcoming","tax_ctp_tags-passion","tax_ctp_tags-perseverance","tax_ctp_tags-persistence","tax_ctp_tags-personal-growth","tax_ctp_tags-responsibility","tax_ctp_tags-trial","tax_ctp_tags-trouble","tax_ctp_tags-violence"],"acf":{"scripture_references":[{"first_verse":null,"add_second_verse":false,"second_verse":null},{"first_verse":null,"add_second_verse":false,"second_verse":null},{"first_verse":null,"add_second_verse":false,"second_verse":null},{"first_verse":null,"add_second_verse":false,"second_verse":null},{"first_verse":null,"add_second_verse":false,"second_verse":null},{"first_verse":null,"add_second_verse":false,"second_verse":null},{"first_verse":null,"add_second_verse":false,"second_verse":null},{"first_verse":null,"add_second_verse":false,"second_verse":null},{"first_verse":null,"add_second_verse":false,"second_verse":null},{"first_verse":null,"add_second_verse":false,"second_verse":null},{"first_verse":null,"add_second_verse":false,"second_verse":null},{"first_verse":null,"add_second_verse":false,"second_verse":null},{"first_verse":null,"add_second_verse":false,"second_verse":null}]},"yoast_head":"<!-- This site is optimized with the Yoast SEO plugin v22.9 - https:\/\/yoast.com\/wordpress\/plugins\/seo\/ -->\n<title>The Challenges that Gave Elon Musk His Passion - CT Pastors<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.christianitytoday.com\/pastors\/preaching\/sermon-illustrations\/challenges-that-gave-elon-musk-his-passion\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"The Challenges that Gave Elon Musk His Passion - CT Pastors\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"All of us have odds to overcome, but those odds are not the enemy. &#8230; By his own admission, Elon Musk had a difficult childhood. 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