All of us have odds to overcome, but those odds are not the enemy. ... 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't much better. He described his childhood as "nonstop horrible."

One day, when he was ten years old, he saw a computer at an elec­tronics store in Johannesburg, South Africa. It was love at first sight. That Commodore VIC-20 had five kilobytes of mem­ory 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.

Could Elon Musk have learned to code without a challenging child­hood? 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's up to us. You can get frustrated with the fact that you're right-handed or left-handed, or you can cultivate ambi­dexterity. You don't get to choose how your story starts, but the ending is up to you.