If you listen to Neil deGrasse Tyson's interview on Star Talk with Elon Musk you will hear Musk talk about how he ran an experiment to see if he could live on $

If you listen to Neil deGrasse Tyson's interview on Star Talk with Elon Musk you will hear Musk talk about how he ran an experiment to see if he could live on $1 a day, and once he realized that he could do that he decided to take risks and work towards his first startup. I'm going to paraphrase here, but he essentially said "Once I figured out that I wasnt going to starve, I knew I could take risks". Seems like a pretty good anecdote to me.