About 30 people started the job that week.

By the third day, only five were left. By Friday, just three remained.

One of them was 18-year-old Elon Musk from South Africa.

Most people know Musk for rockets, billion-dollar companies and plans to reach Mars.

But there is a backstory most people rarely see.

Behind the fame and titles is a man who doesn't just survive difficult situations. He walks toward them.

Arriving in Canada With Just C$2,500

In June 1989, at 17, Musk arrived in Montreal with about C$2,500.

Part of the money came from his mother, Maye, who had cashed out a stock account she opened years earlier with money from a beauty contest she had won.

His plan was to stay with his mother's uncle. But while Elon was on the plane, his uncle moved to Minnesota.

His first plan was already gone before he landed.

He didn't turn back. He checked into a youth hostel and shared a room with five strangers.

A week later, he bought a $100 Greyhound pass that allowed him to travel anywhere in Canada for six months.

He headed to a wheat farm in Saskatchewan, more than 1,700 miles away, to find Mark Teulon, a second cousin he had never met.

Along the way, the bus driver unloaded his suitcase, which contained his clothes and traveler's checks.

All he had left was a backpack full of books.

When he reached a town near the farm, he used the change in his pocket to make one phone call.

"Hey, it's Elon, your cousin from South Africa."

They took him in.

He cleaned grain bins, helped build a barn and turned 18 there. His birthday cake had one simple message written in chocolate icing:

"Happy Birthday Elon."

After that, Musk moved to Vancouver.

At the employment office, most jobs paid about $5 an hour. But one job paid $18 — You have to clean the boilers inside a lumber mill.

Elon took it.

He put on a hazmat suit and squeezed through a tunnel he could barely fit inside.

Once inside, he shoveled out steaming-hot sand and sludge. Then he pushed it back through the same narrow opening he had crawled through.

About 30 people started that job.

Twenty-seven walked away. He didn't.

That week wasn't just a story about bad luck he managed to survive.

He faced a choice between an easy job and a brutal one. He chose the brutal one.

And every time something went wrong on that trip, whether it was his uncle moving away, losing his suitcase or running low on money, he kept moving forward.

The young man who crawled into a steaming-hot boiler for $18 an hour is now trying to send people to Mars.

The scale is different, but the instinct is the same: When something is so difficult that most people quit, that's where he wants to be. #Elonmusk