How do I build a mindset like Elon Musk?

I will elaborate with a few examples to show how these methods actually work. The greatness is in asking the right questions, posing the correct demands, attaching multiple solutions with each other so that they add up and create more value, and tackling problems with fundamental principles.

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• Work ethic:
• Let us get this one out of the way first, because this is what he claims increases the odds of success with anything you do.
• His own words are that if you work twice as hard compared to someone else, and if you did the exact same things, it would take you 6 months to achieve what would take them a year to achieve.
• The claim of fame is, that he works almost 85–100 hours a week. Each hour is packed with the most effective methods. He has some superb people reporting to him, who have already figured out solutions to great problems. If they could not do it, they escalate it to him. He makes the broad and big decisions, and his so called S-team can reach him any time they want.
• What is anytime they want? At his breakdown point, when he had put his entire money into Tesla and SpaceX ~ roughly 100 million dollars, and was paying rent with borrowed money, he had pretty much declared - “Call me any time you want. I don’t care. Its 3 AM, its 4 AM. Let me know what is broken and you cannot fix”. Work must be happening almost round the clock. At the end of the day, you have 24 hours.
• Work super hard: What is super hard ~ consistently about 85–100 hours a week is hard. My inspiration to just about anyone is to do this: Don’t try to be Elon Musk first. Just try to be a better version of you. Whatever you do - whether you love it or not, try to be the best person in your team. Try to be that guy without whom the whole team will cripple. When you have consistently worked super hard for months or years, you would certainly become much better than yourself.

• Focus:
• Ask right questions: His primary job is to not look for answers. His primary job is to ask really tough questions, and create really tall demands. He looks at the world in a much broader sense.

• Usually when people see the world, they see things around them, and they take it for granted. He looks at the world in a much broader picture, and derives conclusions like this:
• We have one earth, we must protect it. Pollution is not the way to go, therefore we must have electric vehicles.
• We should maximize the survival of the species by making it multi-planetary.
• Sun is a really big nuclear reactor that shows up everyday. You can derive energy from it. It would be the cleanest form of energy.
• We must have far better ways of transportation such as Hyperloop, and tunnels.
• Computers are certainly getting faster and stronger. AI can certainly get dangerous if it gets malicious too fast. We must do something about it, and that something is to make humans smarter.
• Look for multiple answers: Every problem statement will have multiple answers, and solutions. He can analyze a lot of them and compare them against each other to conclude which ones are better.
• He wants many others to think this way, and inspires all the people to come up with fundamental solutions to long term bottleneck problems.
• When he figures out that others are not able to solve things, he picks them in his own hands, gives them a seed start, inspiration and a major push, and thus, things are set in motion.
• With this method, he has triggered multiple companies one after the other in which thousands of people are working and producing value.
• Problem solving:
• Fundamental principles: This is one of his key strengths. Basically one de-constructs things down to building blocks down to where each question can be answered with a fundamental principle. A fundamental principle is simply what you study in high-school/engineering physics or chemistry/math. Then, he rearranges those building blocks to construct a better solution. Often such methods eliminate things that are wasteful, and are non-value-adding.
• What works vs doesn’t work: For a great engineer, it is really important to know what works and what doesn’t work. Let us talk about rocket science a little, despite the fact that I am not really one.
• You can read it here: How Rockets Work
• Launching a rocket, then taking it to space, launching a satellite, and then bringing it back to earth is key to success.
• It triggers multiple questions such as:
• How can you create enough thrust to exceed the weight of the rocket?
• What structural materials and propellant combinations should you use?
• How big will the rocket have to be?
• How can you make the rocket go where you want it to?
• How can you bring it back to Earth safely
• Let us try to visualize how he answered the last one.
• Since the rocket follows a trajectory, and has a very high velocity, by the time it reaches the point of return, it does not carry enough fuel for it to re-trace the path. In fact it actually need not retrace it. It takes advantage of gravity to come back to earth. At some altitude the engine starts again, and assists it in landing. The thrust is controlled and the controllers basically balance it in the air. They balance the forces in such a way, that it comes back on earth vertically. This all sounds good, but this triggered another problem:
• Where do we land it?
• Here is where he is really good at looking for alternative solutions: And in this particular case, from the point where it is launched to where it returns, there is no more land remaining. It has to be landed on the surface of ocean. What solution did he come up with?
• Create a very large floating platform, on which the rocket can land. Did it work? Yes?
• What does it achieve? It brings the rocket back to earth and it can then be re-used.
• A reuse simply means, that it can be re-used a 100 times. As soon as it can be used a 100 times, the cost of flight comes down to just the fuel.
• Compare this now with your car! How costly would it be to not be able to re-use the car after you have driven it? That simply will not work. But that kind of how the rockets were working, and that used to incur tremendous cost. Now the cost of flights can be reduced.

• Figure out alternative solutions: This is where great team work and ferocious work ethics come into picture. Anything that looks impossible to others not only look feasible to him, but possible, and simple. It is often said by people in his teams, that when they put together their thoughts and come up with some plans that tell them it would take six months to achieve something, Elon wants it in a week. It is well known that people work super hard under him. They work 80–90 hours, all seven days in a week. That is by no means easy for a large teams, but hey! you don’t go to Mars by eating softies.

• Decision making: It is famously said, that it takes him very little time to decide on something. He is always on the top of his emails and replying very quickly. In a lot of large companies, often a lot of time is wasted because sub-ordinates are only waiting for seniors to make decisions. This is absolutely not the case with Elon Musk. He has admitted, he is constantly replying to mails. Now don’t forget that the mails he gets are from some top notch people in the world who are experts in their fields.
• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sp....
• Gwynne Shotwell (President and COO) Tom Mueller (CTO of Propulsion) are some really accomplished people reporting to him. They can run SpaceX without him probably.
• Similarly, JB Straubel is CTO of Tesla motors.
• Focus on signal vs noise: Elon Musk has said this in multiple interviews, and what it simply means is that before one focuses on noise, they must focus on the signal. For example, Tesla motors considers marketing to be only noise. They want to put every dollar spent only on making the product better, and not on marketing. Now this is certainly not true for great companies in the world, and a lot of them do use marketing, but in his opinion, marketing is only noise. That differentiates a man of engineering mindset from a man of sales mindset.
• Elon Musk has famously said, that: The path to the CEO's office should not be through the CFO's office, and it should not be through the marketing department. It needs to be through engineering and design.
  Elon Musk Quotes

 

• Look for long term effect: You can probably see the long term thinking in the conceptualization of Hyperloop and the Boring company. Boring company means that the cost of tunneling must come down from a billion dollars a mile to about 250 million dollars. That is a 4X reduction in the cost. And Elon Musk wants to optimize this by three to four methods. 

• Look for lowermost cost: Engineers should always look towards lowering the cost of anything and everything. That is one of the key rules of engineering. And asking fundamental questions is important. A classic examples is where he asks about batteries. It the bill of material of the batteries costs X dollars, how can the batteries cost 10X dollars? That simply means, that the methods to rearrange the molecules is not optimum, and engineering should answer those questions.
• Look for a better design: When Tesla Model S was being designed, Tesla had employed some serious engineering efforts towards reducing the air drag loss. This is typically done by modeling fluid dynamics calculations around a car body. They continued to optimize the car body, but Elon was not happy with the door handles. He really wanted to optimize this, so that the drag due to the handles was minimized. This delayed the designing time, prototypes, and needed multiple changes so much so that even the product launch was delayed, but this is the mark of a true hard headed engineer chasing perfection.
• In simple words, if you chase perfection, you reach excellence.

• Look for aesthetics: In his words, making something look good is certainly harder, but it is not ten times harder. Many other geniuses have admitted this. Bill Gates has said - If you cannot make it good, at least make it look good. Steve Jobs was world famous for Apple’s great aesthetics.
• Learning skill:
• Learn from books: It is said that he reads everything from books, and grasps the concepts very deeply until he has memorized them, and he can talk at length about those concepts with world experts. This capability is certainly phenomenal, but not unprecedented. A lot of scientists share this capability. He just overly does this and is very greedy about it. A lot of people are actually good at this, and my inspiration to engineers is that you should join a library around you, and you should get a few books every week. Read them from cover page to cover page a few times, and get new books. Keep doing this, and you would improve. Many other billionaires have mentioned this method. Warren Buffet, Bill Gates, and many others resort to books all the time.
• Learn from others: Elon gets to work with some of the best people in the world. Just to mention, people like Gwynne Shotwell (President and COO) Tom Mueller (CTO of Propulsion), JB Straubel, Jim Cantrell (when he started), and many other world famous people. It is said that he asks them some seriously hard questions, and absorbs knowledge from them very quickly. This is a very good way to learn. When you learn from others, it eliminates an enormous amount of time of making mistakes and learning. People often say - learn from mistakes. That is great, but why even learn from your mistakes when you can learn from other’s mistakes?
• De-construct concepts: The method of semantic tree works by basically dividing everything into branches so that you can define the whole problem statement like a tree. It has a trunk, large branches, small branches and leaves and so on. Basically you should always start from the trunk, and then build your way to leaves.

 

credit:Rohit Malshe