Elon Musk shares some business tips and motivation.
Animated Summary by FightMediocrity
Key Takeaways
1. Work Super Hard Work hard every waking hour, particularly if you’re starting a company.
- When starting out, The Elon would work 7 days a week, all the time. Website up during the day, coding at night.
- Sleeping on the couch, showering at the YMCA.
- Simple math, but if someone is working 50 hours and you’re working 100 hours, you’ll get twice as much done.
2. Attract Great People either join a group that is amazing that you really respect, or if you’re building a company you need to gather great people.
- All a company is, is a group of people that have gathered together to create a product or service, so depending on how talented or hard working that group is, and the degree to which they’re focused cohesively in a good direction, that will determine the success of the company.
3. Focus on Signal Over Noise a lot of companies get confused. They spend money on things that don’t actually make the product better.
- For example, Tesla never spent any money on advertising, they put all money into R & D, and manufacturing and design to try and make the car as good as possible.
- Keep thinking about, are these efforts that people are expending, are they resulting in a better product or service? If they’re not, stop those efforts.
4. Don’t Just Follow the Trend it’s good to think in terms of the physics approach of first principles, which is rather than reasoning by analogy, you boil things down to the most fundamental truths you can imagine, and you reason up from there.
- This is a good way to figure out if something really makes sense or is it just what everybody else is doing?
- It’s hard to think that way, you can’t just think that way about everything, takes a lot of effort, but if you’re trying to do something new, it’s the best way to think.
- That framework was developed by physicists to figure out counterintuitive things like quantum mechanics so it’s really a powerful method.
5. Take Risks Now is the time to take risks.
- As you get older, your obligations increase, and once you have a family you start taking risks not just for yourself, but for your family as well.
- It gets much harder to do things that might not work out. Take risks now. Do something bold.