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Think Like Elon Musk | The Book of Elon by Eric Jorgenson | Audiobook

Eric Jorgensen's summary of The Book of Elon explores Elon Musk's mindset: asking how to be useful, pursuing large missions, questioning assumptions, and taking total responsibility.

Key Takeaways

  • Ask daily how you can be useful, and let success follow from genuine impact.
  • Question assumptions and reason from first principles instead of accepting industry norms.
  • Choose large, meaningful missions and treat them as purpose rather than mere business.
  • Take full ownership of problems and fix them directly instead of explaining them away.
  • Build continuous feedback loops to improve decisions every day.

What the video covers

  • Opens by framing Elon Musk's success as stemming from mindset rather than luck or wealth alone.
  • Chapter 1 centers on asking 'how can I be useful today?' as the foundation of Musk's approach.
  • Usefulness is presented as the goal of an organization, with profit following as a result.
  • Musk's measure of usefulness is framed mathematically: people helped multiplied by the help provided to each.
  • Ordinary people can choose to be extraordinary by refusing conventional limits.
  • Chapter 2 describes Musk's post-PayPal decision to pursue large missions such as sustainable energy and making humanity multi-planetary.
  • The narrative covers Musk's serial ventures: Zip2, X.com/PayPal, SpaceX, and Tesla, funded by reinvesting proceeds.
  • Musk's first-principles reasoning is illustrated by questioning rocket material costs and assumptions.
  • Later chapters describe extreme work hours, carrying fear and pressure, and iterative feedback loops.
  • The book emphasizes total personal responsibility for problems rather than deflecting blame.

Answers

Questions about this video

What is the central idea of this video?

The video argues that Elon Musk's success comes from a specific mindset centered on being useful to others. It presents this as the core lesson of Eric Jorgensen's book The Book of Elon.

What question does Elon Musk ask himself every morning according to the video?

He asks how he can be useful today. The video says this question underpins the rest of his approach and his companies.

How does the video describe the relationship between usefulness and profit?

It says profit should be the result of usefulness rather than the goal. Musk's view, as summarized, is that organizations should aim for societal usefulness and money follows when real problems are solved.

Full Transcript — Download SRT & Markdown

00:01
Speaker A
one man five companies a net worth larger than GDP of most countries on earth but here is the question nobody is asking is Elon Musk smarter than everyone else no is he luckier no does he have some secret that nobody else has access to actually yes
00:23
Speaker A
and that secret is sitting in this book not his money not his connections not his genius his mindset the exact way he thinks the exact way he works the exact way he chooses his missions and the exact reason why while most people are dreaming about success
00:45
Speaker A
Elon Musk is building rockets to Mars this is the complete summary of the book of Elon written by Eric Jorgensen the same author who wrote The Almanac of Naval Rabicant read by over 2 million people in this video we are going to give you everything inside this book
01:06
Speaker A
every idea every framework every lesson in simple clear and easy to understand language stay with us because by the end of this video you will think differently work differently and see your own potential in a completely different way
01:25
Speaker A
let us begin Chapter 1 be useful picture a young boy growing up in Pretoria South Africa not wealthy not connected not from a powerful family just a boy who read every book he could find who taught himself to code by the age of 12
01:48
Speaker A
who sold his first video game for $500 before most kids had even thought about money that boy grew up to become the wealthiest person in the history of the world not by chasing wealth not by following a safe path
02:07
Speaker A
but by asking one question every single morning of his life how can I be useful today that question is where this entire book begins and it is where your journey inside Elon Musk's mindset starts right now the question nobody asks
02:27
Speaker A
most people wake up in the morning and ask one of two things how do I make money today or how do I get through today both are survival questions both are focused on the self on what you can get on what the world owes you
02:47
Speaker A
Elon Musk wakes up and asks something completely different in his own words from this book on a day to day basis I wake up in the morning and ask how can I be useful today just that not how do I become famous
03:05
Speaker A
not how do I close the deal not how do I protect what I have how can I be useful and Eric Jorgensen the author who compiled this book says that simple question is the foundation of everything Elon has built
03:23
Speaker A
because when you obsess over usefulness over genuinely helping people and genuinely improving the world success stops being something you chase it becomes something that follows you useful is not the same as profitable here is one of the most important lessons in this entire chapter
03:47
Speaker A
and it is one that most people have completely backwards most people think that the goal of any work is to be profitable make money first everything else second but Elon Musk thinks the other way around he says the goal of any organization should be usefulness to society
04:10
Speaker A
not profit not growth not market share usefulness he says it simply and clearly in this book try to be useful do useful things for your fellow human beings and the world now this does not mean money does not matter
04:30
Speaker A
of course it matters you cannot build rockets or electric cars or global internet networks without massive funding but here is the key difference profit is the result of usefulness not the goal of it when you build something that genuinely makes people's lives better
04:52
Speaker A
when you solve a real problem for real people the money follows almost automatically Elon proved this over and over again Paypal made online payments useful Tesla made electric cars useful Spacex made space travel useful in every single case usefulness came first
05:17
Speaker A
success came second the mathematics of usefulness this is where Eric Jorgensen reveals something beautiful about how Elon think Elon does not just feel his way through decisions about usefulness he calculates it like a physicist like a mathematician he says in this book
05:41
Speaker A
think about it mathematically how many people you helped multiplied by how much help you provided each person on average that is the total utility read that again how many people you help multiplied by how much help you gave each
06:00
Speaker A
one that is your usefulness score that is how Elon measures the value of any product any company any decision and here is something remarkable that he says next building something that makes a big difference to a small number of people
06:19
Speaker A
is just as great as something that makes a small difference to a vast number of people both produce the same total impact both are equally valuable because it is never about scale alone it is about genuine impact it is about asking
06:39
Speaker A
is what I am building actually making someone's life better not theoretically not on paper in reality that question is the compass Elon uses for everything you can choose to be extraordinary one of the most powerful lines in this entire chapter
07:01
Speaker A
is something Elon says about ordinary people he says you can choose to be not ordinary you can choose not to conform to the conventions taught by your parent it is possible for ordinary people to choose to be extraordinary
07:19
Speaker A
read that carefully he is not saying you were born extraordinary he is not saying extraordinary is reserved for people like him he is saying it is a choice a daily choice a choice that starts with the question you ask
07:38
Speaker A
when you open your eyes in the morning most people choose ordinary not because they have to but because they were never told they had any other option they were told to be safe to be realistic to follow the path that was already cleared for them
07:57
Speaker A
but Elon says there is another path one that does not ask what is safe one that asks what is useful what does the world actually need what problem is sitting right in front of me that nobody has solved yet
08:16
Speaker A
and what would happen if I tried a useful life is worth having lived Eric Jorgensen closes this chapter with a line that comes directly from Elon himself simple quiet but deeply powerful a useful life is worth having lived
08:36
Speaker A
not a rich life not a famous life not a comfortable life a useful one think about what that means for your own life when it is all over when you look back at everything you built everything you gave everything you contributed
08:56
Speaker A
will you be able to say that your presence here made things better that you added more than you took that the world even in some small way was improved because you were in it that is the standard Elon Musk holds himself to
09:13
Speaker A
not his bank account not his fame not his legacy in headlines his usefulness and that standard is available to every single person watching this right now you do not need rockets you do not need billions you just need to ask the same question Elon asks every morning
09:37
Speaker A
how can I be useful today start there and see what follows this was Chapter 1 of The Book of Elon by Eric Jorgensen Chapter 2 is next and it is where we go even bigger we are going to talk about why Elon chose missions so large
09:59
Speaker A
that most people thought he had lost his mind Mars Clean Energy artificial intelligence and why the size of your mission determines the size of your life Chapter 2 is coming next Chapter 2 fight for the future it was the year 2001
10:20
Speaker A
Elon Musk had just sold Paypal he had hundreds of millions of dollars sitting in his bank account he was 30 years old most people in that position would have stopped bought a yacht retired to a beach enjoyed the rewards of what they had already built
10:39
Speaker A
but Elon did something different he sat down and started thinking about the future not his future not his family's future the future of humanity and what he saw when he looked forward scared him not because of personal failure
10:58
Speaker A
not because of any threat to himself but because he could see very clearly that the human race was on a fragile path and he decided that he was going to do something about it that decision changed the world
11:13
Speaker A
and this chapter is about exactly why he made it the shower that changed everything Eric Jorgensen shares something in this chapter that most people never hear about Elon he says that back in college long before the billions long before Tesla or Spacex
11:33
Speaker A
Elon used to spend time just thinking thinking about the future thinking about what areas would have the biggest impact on humanity as a whole in his own words from this book in college I would wonder about the future
11:50
Speaker A
and what areas were really going to have an important impact on the future of humanity as a whole this wasn't for a paper just what I thought about in the shower not for grades not for a professor not for any reward at all
12:06
Speaker A
just because he genuinely cared about where things were going and from those quiet showers in a college dorm Elon came up with five areas that he believed would shape the future of the human race the internet the transition to sustainable energy
12:25
Speaker A
space exploration and extending life to multiple planet artificial intelligence and the rewriting of genetics five areas that young Elon with no money and no company decided were worth dedicating a life to and then he spent the next 30 years actually doing it
12:45
Speaker A
this was never about business here is something that Eric Jorgensen is very clear about in this chapter Elon Musk's companies are not business ventures dressed up as missions they are genuine missions Spacex was never just a rocket company trying to make profit
13:05
Speaker A
it was Elon's answer to the question of whether humanity could survive long enough to become a multiplanetary species Tesla was never just an electric car company chasing market share it was Elon's answer to the question of whether humanity
13:23
Speaker A
could transition away from fossil fuels before irreversible damage was done he says in this book I wanna make sure there is a good future for humanity we are on a path to understanding the nature of the universe the meaning of life why are we here
13:42
Speaker A
how did we get here these are not marketing statements these are not mission statements written by a PR department these are the actual questions driving the actual decisions of the most productive builder alive on earth today and here is what makes that so important
14:02
Speaker A
when your mission is that big when you are fighting for something that matters at a civilization scale you cannot afford to quit you cannot afford to take the easy path you cannot afford to settle for good enough because the stakes are too high
14:20
Speaker A
and that pressure that weight of purpose turns ordinary effort into extraordinary results why most people play small now here is something that this chapter reveals quietly something most people never stop to examine most people choose small missions not because they are small people
14:43
Speaker A
but because they were never told that they were allowed to choose something bigger they were taught to be realistic to set achievable goals to manage expectations to build a stable career to not reach too far and so they spend their lives
15:00
Speaker A
optimizing for things that do not really matter to them a slightly better salary a slightly bigger house a slightly more impressive title none of which fills the deeper need the need for a mission the need to feel that their work matters
15:18
Speaker A
that their effort is going towards something real Elon says in this book if it seems like the obvious thing to do I am not sure why you would do anything else to him working on problems that affect the future of humanity is not heroic
15:35
Speaker A
it is just obvious of course you work on the things that matter most of course you point your energy at the biggest problems of course you fight for a future that is worth arriving at the question is why everyone else is not doing the same
15:53
Speaker A
looking at life as a branching path one of the most powerful ideas in this chapter is how Elon thinks about the future itself he does not see the future as something fixed he does not believe that what happens next is already decided
16:11
Speaker A
he says in this book I look at the future from the standpoint of probabilities it is a branching stream of probabilities and actions we can take now affect those probabilities every choice you make today every action you take or do not take
16:29
Speaker A
changes the probability of a specific future arriving and Elon makes his choices based entirely on that understanding he asks which actions will accelerate something good which actions will slow down something dangerous what can I introduce today that changes the direction of what is coming
16:52
Speaker A
that is not the thinking of someone building a company that is the thinking of someone fighting for the world they want their children to inherit and it is a way of thinking that is available to all of us
17:06
Speaker A
remember the future Eric Jorgensen closes this chapter with three simple words that come directly from Elon remember the future not remember the past not manage the present remember the future what does that mean it means carry the image of the world you want to exist with you
17:28
Speaker A
every day in every decision let it guide what you fight for let it determine what you refuse to give up on let it be the reason you get back up every time something knocks you down because the future is not something that just happens
17:46
Speaker A
it is something that someone has to fight for and according to Elon Musk that someone could be you Chapter 3 obsessed for success in 1995 a 24 year old man arrived in California he had a small amount of money
18:06
Speaker A
no connections no job lined up he applied to do a PhD at Stanford University he got in and then two days later he dropped out because he had an obsession he could not stop thinking about the internet about what it could become
18:25
Speaker A
about the problems it could solve about the businesses that could be built inside this new digital world the obsession was so consuming so completely alive inside him that sitting in a classroom felt like a waste of the most important years
18:43
Speaker A
of the most important decade in the history of technology so he left Stanford and started a company called zip 2 then sold it then started x.com which became Paypal then sold that too and took every dollar and poured it into rockets and electric cars
19:04
Speaker A
two industries that every expert in the world said were impossible two industries that the obsession simply would not let him ignore that man was Elon Musk and this chapter is about the one quality that made all of it possible
19:21
Speaker A
not intelligence not luck obsession what obsession actually looks like most people hear the word obsession and think of something unhealthy something unbalanced something to be managed or treated but Eric Jorgensen presents a completely different picture in this chapter
19:42
Speaker A
he shows what productive obsession looks like in real life and it looks like this you are not working because you have to you are working because you literally cannot stop the problem lives in your head when you are eating
19:58
Speaker A
when you are driving when you are supposed to be sleeping Elon says it plainly in this book if you like what you are doing you think about it even when you are not working it is something your mind is drawn to
20:12
Speaker A
if you do not like it it is much harder to make yourself work that is the difference between someone who is interested in their work and someone who is obsessed with it interested people work when they schedule it
20:27
Speaker A
obsessed people work whenever the thought arrives and thoughts arrive constantly in the shower on a walk at 3 in the morning because the problem has moved inside them it is no longer just a task on a list it is a living breathing thing that demands to be solved
20:49
Speaker A
Paypal Tesla Spacex the obsession behind each one let us look at what obsession actually produced across Elon's career when Elon was building what would become Paypal he was not thinking about how to build a profitable payments company he was obsessed with one specific problem
21:11
Speaker A
why is it so hard to move money online that question consumed him completely he worked around it he thought around it he built around it until the answer emerged and that answer changed how the entire world handles digital money
21:30
Speaker A
then came Tesla every major car manufacturer said electric vehicles were not viable not yet maybe in 30 years but Elon was obsessed with a different question why are we still burning fossil fuels when the technology to move beyond them already exists
21:50
Speaker A
that obsession drove him through years of near bankruptcy through production failures through public ridicule through moments where the entire company was within days of collapse he did not survive those moments on logic he survived them on obsession because when you are obsessed
22:11
Speaker A
quitting is simply not a real option your mind will not let you then Spacex NASA had given up on affordable space travel the entire aerospace industry had accepted that rockets were disposable and expensive Elon was obsessed with a different question
22:31
Speaker A
why can we not reuse a rocket why does reaching space have to cost hundreds of millions of dollars every single time that obsession produced the first orbital class rocket that successfully returned and landed itself three times in the same year
22:50
Speaker A
every time the obsession produced something that interest alone could never have delivered obsession versus distraction here is where this chapter becomes directly relevant to your own life because most people are not obsessed with anything not because they lack the capacity for it
23:11
Speaker A
but because they never gave themselves permission to be they spread their attention across too many things a little of this a little of that some scrolling some news some entertainment some work some planning some worrying and the result is a life that moves in many directions at once
23:36
Speaker A
and therefore does not go very far in any direction Elon says something very direct about this in the book he says try to find an overlap of your talents and what you are interested in you may have skill in something but do not like doing it
23:53
Speaker A
try to find work that is a good combination of things you are inherently good at but also like doing this is the formula for obsession skill plus genuine love not skill alone not passion alone both together when something uses what you are naturally good at
24:13
Speaker A
and also makes you feel fully alive your brain does not resist it it runs toward it and that running is what obsession looks like from the inside being obsessive is a good thing here is something Elon says in this chapter
24:30
Speaker A
that most people have never been told he says successful entrepreneurs come in all sizes shapes and flavors I am not sure there is any one particular trait that makes them however if there is one to focus on it would be to have an obsessive nature
24:48
Speaker A
about the quality of the product in this context being obsessive compulsive is a good thing read that again obsessive compulsive is a good thing not something to suppress not something to medicate away a competitive advantage because the person who cannot stop thinking about making something better
25:11
Speaker A
will always eventually make it better while the person who is merely interested we'll settle for good enough and good enough never changes the world take the pain this chapter ends with one of the most honest lines in the entire book
25:29
Speaker A
Elon says my way of dealing with mental problems is to make sure you really care about what you are doing and take the pain not avoid the pain not manage the pain take it because when you are obsessed with something that genuinely matters to you
25:48
Speaker A
the pain is part of the process the failures are data the setbacks are chapters in a story you are still writing and the obsession is the thing that keeps you writing no matter how hard the chapter gets that is the difference between people who dream about changing things
26:09
Speaker A
and people like Elon Musk who actually do this was Chapter 3 of The Book of Elon by Eric Jorgensen Chapter 4 is next and it is the chapter that reveals the thinking tool Elon uses to solve problems that everyone else thinks are impossible
26:28
Speaker A
it is called First principles thinking and once you understand it you will never look at a problem the same way again Chapter 4 is coming Chapter 4 First principles thinking imagine you are an engineer you have been told that building a rocket costs $200 million
26:50
Speaker A
everyone in the industry agrees on this number every company every expert every textbook $200 million and you accept it because that is what it has always cost that is what everyone else is paying that is just the reality of the situation
27:11
Speaker A
now imagine a different engineer same problem same rocket but this engineer does not accept the number he does not start with what it has always cost he starts with a different question entirely what is a rocket actually made of aluminum
27:30
Speaker A
titanium copper carbon fiber he goes further what do those raw materials actually cost right now on the open market he adds it up and he discovers something that changes everything the raw materials needed to build a rocket cost less than 2% of what rockets were actually being sold for
27:54
Speaker A
less than 2% which meant that somewhere between the raw materials and the finished rocket an enormous amount of money was being wasted not because rockets had to be expensive but because nobody had ever stopped to ask whether they had to be
28:13
Speaker A
that engineer was Elon Musk and the thinking tool he used to discover this is called first principles thinking and it is the subject of this entire chapter what first principles actually means Eric Jorgensen explains this concept with great care and clarity
28:33
Speaker A
in this chapter first principles thinking comes from physics it is the method that physicists use to discover things that defy common sense things like quantum mechanics things that seem impossible until you strip away every Assumption and start reasoning from the ground up
28:53
Speaker A
Elon says directly in this book when you wanna do something new you have to apply the physics approach you build your reasoning from the ground up you do not start with what other people believe you do not start with what has been done before
29:11
Speaker A
you start with what is fundamentally provably undeniably true and then you reason upward from there and see what you arrive at analogical thinking the way most people think before we go deeper into first principles we need to understand the opposite of it
29:31
Speaker A
Elon calls it reasoning by analogy and he says it is the default way most people think reasoning by analogy means you do something because it is similar to something else because someone else did it that way because it has always been done that way
29:50
Speaker A
you copy the pattern you follow the convention you accept the Assumption without testing it and in everyday life this is completely fine Elon says so himself in most of life we should reason by analogy otherwise mentally you would not be able to get through the day
30:10
Speaker A
but for important things for new things for things that have never been done before analogical thinking becomes a prison it keeps you inside the boundaries of what already exists it whispers in your ear this is how expensive rockets are
30:29
Speaker A
this is how long batteries take this is how much it cost and because everyone around you is whispering the same thing you believe it without ever asking but is it actually true the rocket cost example let us go back to the rocket story
30:48
Speaker A
because this is the clearest example in the entire chapter when Elon started Spacex in 2002 everyone in the aerospace industry had accepted one truth rockets are expensive they always have been they always will be that was the analogy
31:08
Speaker A
that was the Assumption that was the wall nobody questioned but Elon asked what are rockets actually made of aluminum titanium copper carbon fiber what do those materials actually cost on the raw market he ran the numbers and he found that the raw material cost of building a rocket
31:32
Speaker A
was only 1 to 2% of what rockets were actually selling for he explains in this book if I had analyzed it by analogy what are other rocket companies doing what do their rockets cost that would not illustrate what the true potential is
31:49
Speaker A
but by going back to first principles by asking what does the rocket actually cost to build from raw atoms he could see something no one else was seeing there was an enormous gap between what rockets were costing and what they needed to cost
32:08
Speaker A
and in that gap Spacex was born the idiot index here is one of the most powerful ideas Elon introduces in this chapter he calls it the idiot index it is simple take any finished product find out what the raw materials cost to make it
32:28
Speaker A
then compare that number to what the finished product actually cost if the ratio is very high if the finished product costs 50 or 100 times more than its raw materials there is a problem the design is too complex
32:45
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the manufacturing is too inefficient someone somewhere is not thinking clearly Elon gives a real example from Spacex one part of the rocket the half nozzle jacket was priced at $13,000 but it was made of only $200 worth of steel
33:05
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that is a ratio of 65 to 1 that is a very high idiot index and Elon says I expect all my engineers to know all the best and worst parts in their systems as judged by the idiot index at all times
33:22
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because a high idiot index means there is room for improvement it means the Assumption of high cost is not rooted in reality it is rooted in convention and convention can always be broken if you are willing to think from first principles
33:41
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how to apply this to your own life here is where this chapter becomes directly useful to every single person watching think about one area of your life one problem you have accepted as too expensive too difficult too time consuming
33:59
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too risky now ask yourself is that belief based on first principles or is it based on analogy is it based on what you have observed or is it based on what everyone around you keeps repeating what are the raw materials of this problem
34:19
Speaker A
what is it actually made of what would it actually cost if you started from scratch if you stripped away every Assumption and built your thinking from the ground up you might discover what Elon discovered that the gap between the assumed cost
34:37
Speaker A
and the real cost is far wider than anyone told you that the problem is far more solvable than you were LED to believe and that the only thing truly standing in your way was a borrowed Assumption one you never questioned
34:54
Speaker A
one you just accepted because everyone else had Chapter 5 work like hell let me ask you something honest how many hours a week do you actually work forty maybe 50 maybe on a really intense week 60 now let me tell you what Elon Musk thinks about that number
35:16
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he says in this book nobody ever changed the world on 40 hours a week that is not an opinion that is his lived experience for 15 years across two companies that were both simultaneously on the edge of death
35:33
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Elon Musk worked 80 to 100 hours every single week not once not during a crisis every week as his baseline as his normal and in this chapter Eric Jorgensen takes us into exactly what that looked like why Elon worked that way what it cost him and what it produced
35:56
Speaker A
the simple mathematics of effort Elon does not romanticize his work ethic he does not talk about it like a personality trait or a gift he talks about it like mathematics and the math is straightforward he says in this book do the simple math
36:16
Speaker A
somebody else is working 50 hours a week and you are working 100 you will get twice as much done in a year and he goes further if other people are putting in 40 hour weeks and you are putting in 100
36:31
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what takes them a year you will achieve in 4 months that is not motivation that is arithmetic the person who works more hours on the same problem with the same intelligence will simply solve it faster they will accumulate more experience
36:49
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make more mistakes learn from more failures and get further in less time Elon built Paypal Tesla and Spacex simultaneously all in the span of a single human lifetime and when you divide that output by the number of hours he worked
37:08
Speaker A
the math starts to make sense not because he was superhuman because he was simply working while others were resting from 2007 to 2022 15 years of pain here is where this chapter becomes deeply honest in a way that most books about successful people never are
37:30
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Elon does not pretend that working like hell was painless he says directly in this book from 2007 until 2022 was non stop pain 15 years not a hard quarter not a difficult year 15 consecutive years of what he describes as non stop pain
37:52
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during that time Tesla almost died multiple times Spacex almost ran out of money before a single successful launch he was going through a divorce he was managing thousands of employees across multiple companies he was sleeping on factory floors
38:11
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showing up when there was nothing left to show up with he describes it like this there was a gun to my head to make Tesla work pull a rabbit out of your hat then pull another rabbit a stream of rabbits flying through the air
38:26
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if the next rabbit does not come out you are dead think about that image not the glamour of success not the cover of a magazine a gun to the head rabbits that had to keep coming or everything was over
38:42
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that is the real story behind the world's most successful entrepreneur not ease not luck 15 years of grinding forward through a kind of pressure most people will never experience intensity matters not just hours this chapter reveals something important
39:02
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about how Elon thinks about work he does not just talk about the number of hours he talks about the quality of those hours the intensity he says he is wired for war not wired for comfort not wired for balance
39:19
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for war and that word is important because war demands your complete attention there is no half effort in a war you cannot be checking your phone while also fighting for survival you cannot be casually moving between tasks while the company you built is bleeding out
39:40
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Elon approaches work the way a soldier approaches a battlefield total presence total commitment every available mental and physical resource pointed at the same target Eric Jorgenson shows that this intensity more than the raw hours is what separated Elon's output from everyone else's
40:02
Speaker A
because an hour of true intensity is worth more than a day of distracted half effort and Elon brought intensity to every single hour that is why the math compounded so dramatically over time rest and distraction Elon's different relationship
40:22
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now here is something that surprises most people about this chapter Elon does not say that rest is useless he does not say that you should never stop he actually admits in this book something quite vulnerable he says I think there is some merit to not being too intense
40:44
Speaker A
enjoying the moment a bit occasionally stopping to smell the roses would probably be a good idea he tells a story about building the Falcon 1 rocket they were working on a beautiful island in the middle of the Pacific Ocean
41:00
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Kwajalein Atoll surrounded by one of the most stunning natural landscapes on earth and Elon says not once during that entire time did I pause and have a drink on the beach he reflects on that now with some regret
41:18
Speaker A
he says I realize I should have had a drink with the team on the beach that would have been fine this is a side of Elon that most people never see not the machine not the productivity robot a human being who pushed so hard for so long
41:38
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that he missed the moment he was standing in and he knows it and he says so this is not a contradiction of everything else in this chapter it is the most honest part of it because Elon is not telling you to destroy yourself
41:56
Speaker A
he is telling you to work with everything you have and also to not miss the life that is happening around the world both things are true both things matter you need a rage demon one of the most unusual lines in this entire book
42:14
Speaker A
appears in this chapter Elon says you need to have some kind of rage demon in your skull that drives you not motivation not discipline a rage demon something inside you that refuses to accept the current state of things
42:33
Speaker A
something that will not let you settle something that when the work is hard and the results are slow and the doubts are loud keeps driving you forward anyway for Elon that rage demon was the mission the knowledge that if Spacex failed
42:52
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humanity might not become multiplanetary for a very long time the knowledge that if Tesla failed the shift to sustainable energy would be set back by decade those stakes were the fuel not money not fame not ego the weight of what would be lost if he stopped
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that is what drives 100 hour week not willpower purpose this was Chapter 5 of The Book of Elon by Eric Jorgensen Chapter 6 is coming next and it is the chapter that most people who want to build something great
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need the most it is about fear about the moments when everything looked impossible when bankruptcy was days away when failure was the most likely outcome and what Elon did when he was standing right in the middle of it
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Chapter 6 is next Chapter 6 feel the fear do it anyway it was December 2008 one of the darkest months in Elon Musk's life Spacex had just experienced its third consecutive rocket failure three rockets three launches three crashes the company had enough money for exactly one more
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attempt 1 if the fourth rocket failed Spacex was finished gone everything Elon had poured into it every dollar from Paypal every hour of work every dream of making humanity multiplanetary would be over at the exact same time Tesla was running out of money
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not slowly fast the global financial crisis had hit investors were pulling back the company that Elon believed could change the entire car industry was days away from closing its doors forever two companies both dying at the same time
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now let me ask you something what would you do in that moment with everything on the line with failure staring directly into your face most people would walk away most people would call it an honest attempt collect what was left and move on
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but Elon Musk did something different he felt the fear and he kept going anyway that decision is the entire subject of this chapter Elon feels fear just like you do here is one of the most important things Eric Jorgensen reveals in this chapter
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it completely destroys a myth that most people carry about successful people the myth is this successful people are fearless they do not feel what the rest of us feel they have some special kind of courage that ordinary people simply do not have
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Elon destroys this idea entirely he says directly in this book first of all I feel fear it is not as though I have the absence of fear I feel it quite strongly quite strongly the man who took two companies to the edge of extinction
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simultaneously the man who bet everything he had on industries everyone said were impossible he felt fear quite strongly not a little not occasionally quite strongly the difference between Elon and most people is not the absence of fear it is what he does in the presence of it
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he continues but when something is important enough and you believe in it enough you do it in spite of fear in spite of not after it disappears not once it feels safe in spite of it while it is still there while it is still loud
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while it is still telling you that this is a terrible idea you go anyway what Elon thought when he started Spacex this is the part that should stop you completely when Elon was starting Spacex before a single rocket was built
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before a single test was run he already knew the odds were against him he says in this book when starting Spacex I thought the odds of success were less than 10% less than 10% and he accepted it he accepted that he would probably lose
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he accepted that everything he was about to invest his time his money his reputation would very likely be gone and then he says something that reveals exactly how he was thinking but maybe we would make some progress if we could just move the ball forward
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even if we died maybe some other company could pick it up and keep moving and our work would still have done good think about that for a moment he was not thinking about his own success he was thinking about moving the mission forward
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even if he did not survive it even if the company collapsed even if he lost everything if the work moved humanity one step closer to becoming multiplanetary that was enough that was worth the fear that was worth the risk Tesla and Spacex both nearly gone
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let us go back to December 2008 because this is where the courage in this chapter becomes real and not just theoretical Spacex had three failed launches one shot left Elon made the decision to fund that fourth launch with money he did not really have
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with hope that was almost gone the fourth rocket launched and for the first time it worked Spacex survived but Tesla was still dying Elon took the last of his personal money what he had left he put it into Tesla to keep it alive for a few more week
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long enough to close a new funding round long enough to survive he has spoken about that period with complete honesty he was borrowing money from friends he was sleeping at the factory he was hiding from some people how close to the edge he was
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because if the fear had become public knowledge if investors and employees had seen how bad it truly was the companies would have collapsed from the panic alone so he carried the fear quietly and kept working and kept showing up and kept making decisions
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as if failure was not the most likely outcome because giving in to the fear was not something he was willing to do courage builds over time here is something Elon says in this chapter that most people miss he says I definitely emboldened over time
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not that he was always courageous not that courage came naturally from the very beginning he was emboldened over time which means courage is not a fixed personality trait it is something that develops with experience with repetition every time you face a fear and act anyway
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the fear becomes a little smaller and you become a little larger every time you survive something that you thought might break you your understanding of your own capacity expands and the next time fear shows up at the door
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you recognize it you have seen it before you know that it does not have to stop you because it did not stop you the last time this is what Elon means when he says he grew bolder he collected evidence evidence that fear was manageable
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evidence that on the other side of the thing you were afraid of something worth having was often waiting that evidence built into confidence and confidence built into courage look fear directly in the eye this chapter opens with one of the most powerful lines in the entire book
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Elon says look fear straight in the eye and it will disappear the nature of fear is that people do not look at it look at it directly and it will be gone most people deal with fear by avoiding the thing they are afraid of
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they walk around it they delay it they distract themselves from it and the fear stays alive growing quietly in the background getting bigger the longer it is left unexamined but Elon says the solution is the opposite look at it name it
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examine it ask what exactly you are afraid of ask what the real worst case actually looks like ask whether that worst case is truly as bad as the fear is making it feel and in most cases when you actually look
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the fear shrinks not because the danger disappears but because you see it clearly and something you can see clearly is something you can move through quitting is not in my nature this chapter ends with the most defining statement
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Elon makes about himself when asked where he finds the strength to push through the hardest moments he does not talk about motivation he does not talk about optimism he says this is simply something important it must get done we will keep doing it or die trying
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I do not care about optimism or pessimism we are going to get it done not because it is easy not because he is certain not because the fear is gone but because quitting is simply not an option he is willing to consider
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and that position that refusal to accept quitting as a possibility is itself a form of courage the most practical form the kind that does not wait to feel brave the kind that simply moves forward because moving forward is the only direction that matters
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Chapter 7 The Algorithm Engineering is magic in 2,018 Elon Musk was losing sleep not because of money not because of competition because of a single machine inside the Tesla factory the Gigapress a massive robotic system designed to automate the production of Tesla's Model 3
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Elon had been so excited about automation so convinced that robots and machines could solve every problem that he had tried to automate nearly every single step of the production process and it was failing badly cars were piling up
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quality was inconsistent the production line was moving slower than a human workforce would have and Tesla was once again on the edge of disaster he walked the factory floor he looked at every robot every conveyor every automated system and he made a decision
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he switched off some of the robots and brought the humans back and the production rate immediately improved why because Elon had violated his own most important rule he had started with the last step instead of the first and this chapter is about the five step process
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that he now teaches to every engineer at every company he runs he calls it the algorithm what the algorithm is Eric Jorgenson presents the algorithm as one of the most valuable tools in the entire book and Elon introduces it in his own words
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he says I have everyone at my company's rigorously implement a five step process for engineering I call it the algorithm the order is very important 5 step in a specific order and the order is everything because as Elon's own Tesla mistake showed
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doing the steps out of order can be just as damaging as not doing them at all let us go through each step step one question every requirement the first step is to question everything not accept anything as given
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not assume that a requirement exists for a good reason question it Elon says in this book make your requirements less dumb he explains that every requirement should come with a name attached not a department not a policy document
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a specific person who owns that requirement because when a person is accountable for a requirement they can be questioned they can be challenged they can be asked why does this step actually need to exist and very often when you ask that question
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the answer is it does not it was added years ago by someone who is no longer there for a reason nobody remembers but it stayed because nobody questioned it Elon says requirements that come from smart people are the most dangerous
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because people rarely challenge what a smart person has decided step 1 is to challenge everything no matter who decided it no matter how long it has been there step 2 delete the second step is the most satisfying and the most underused
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delete remove everything that does not absolutely need to be there Elon says try very hard to delete the part or process and he adds something that reveals exactly how radical this step is he says if you are not adding back at least 10% of what you deleted
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you are not deleting enough that is the standard not conservative trimming not cautious reduction aggressive deletion until you know you have gone too far and then add back just what is necessary because the enemy of great engineering is not failure
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it is unnecessary complexity every extra step adds time every extra part adds cost every extra process adds a place where something can go wrong the best design is not the one with the most features it is the one with the fewest possible parts
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that still does exactly what it needs to do step 3 simplify and optimize only after you have questioned everything and deleted everything possible do you simplify what remains Elon makes this sequence very clear a common mistake he says
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is to simplify and optimize a part or process that should not exist that is wasted effort you cannot make something elegant that should have been deleted so simplification only comes 3rd after the unnecessary is already gone and what you are left with
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you make as clean as lean as clear as possible no extra complexity no unnecessary step just the essential thing done in the most efficient way available step 4 accelerate now you are moving in the right direction now you are moving efficiently
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but you are moving too slow step 4 is to speed up accelerate cycle time go faster Elon says every process can be speeded up but only do this after you have followed the first three steps in the Tesla factory he admits
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I mistakenly spent a lot of time accelerating processes that I later realized should have been deleted this is the most common mistake in business and in life people try to go faster before they have removed what is unnecessary
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before they have simplified what remains they just add speed to a broken system and a broken system that moves faster just produces failure faster acceleration without the first 3 steps is not progress it is expensive high speed confusion
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but acceleration after the first three steps is when things start moving at a genuinely extraordinary pace step 5 automate the final step is automation and Elon is very clear this comes last always he says the big mistake in Nevada and at Fremont
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was that I began by trying to automate every step that mistake nearly destroyed Tesla because you cannot automate a process that has not been questioned you cannot automate a step that should have been deleted you cannot automate complexity that should have been simplified
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if you automate first you just make the problem faster and more expensive but if you automate last after every unnecessary thing has been removed after every remaining thing has been simplified after the whole system is already moving fast
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then automation compounds everything and the results become extraordinary engineering is magic here is where Eric Jorgenson reveals something about how Elon sees the world something that most engineers and most business people never fully understand Elon genuinely believes that engineering is magic
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not a metaphor he means it he says engineering is the closest thing to magic that exists in the real world because engineering is the art of turning ideas into physical reality of taking something that exists only in the mind
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and making it exist in the world a rocket that lands itself a car that runs on electricity an internet system powered by satellites in orbit all of these things were once just ideas impossible ideas ideas that experts said could not be done
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and engineering turned them into real things that people use every day that is magic and the algorithm is the method that makes the magic repeatable you can use this in your own life here is the most important thing about this chapter
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the algorithm was designed for engineering but it works for anything your morning routine your business processes your personal finances your career decisions any system in any area of your life can be improved by these five steps question what is actually necessary
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delete what is not simplify what remains accelerate what is working and only then make it automatic most people live their entire lives running on systems they never questioned habits they never examined processes they inherited from someone else the algorithm asks you to stop
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look at everything you are doing and ask does this actually need to exist and what happens when you start asking that question is often the most productive thing you have ever done this was Chapter 7 of The Book of Elon by Eric Jorgensen
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Chapter 8 is next and it is about something that makes Elon genuinely different from almost every other leader alive his relationship with being wrong his relationship with feedback his relationship with failure as data Chapter 8 is coming and it will change how you think about your own mistakes
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Chapter 8 aspire to be less wrong most people are terrified of being wrong they avoid it they argue against it they defend themselves from it they go quiet when they are not sure they over explain when they are challenged
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they feel embarrassed ashamed or defeated the moment someone points out that they made a mistake and because of that fear they stop growing they stop learning they stop improving because you cannot improve without first admitting that there is something to improve
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Elon Musk approaches being wrong in a completely different way not as a threat not as an attack not as something to be defended against as information as data as one of the most valuable resources a person can collect
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and this chapter is about the mindset that allows him to do that a mindset he calls aspire to be less wrong always assume you are wrong here is the starting position that Elon takes in this chapter he says directly in this book
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I take the position that I am always to some degree wrong always not sometimes not in certain areas always to some degree he does not wait for someone to prove him wrong he starts from the Assumption that he already is and then he asks
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in what direction am I wrong by how much what evidence exists that contradicts what I currently believe this is the opposite of how most people think most people start from the position that they are right and then look for evidence to confirm it
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Elon starts from the position that he is wrong and then looks for evidence to correct it that one shift that single change in starting position changes everything because a person who believes they are right defends themselves but a person who assumes they are wrong searches for the truth
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it is okay to be wrong just not confidently wrong here is one of the most important lines in this entire chapter Elon says it is okay to be wrong just do not be confident and wrong think about that carefully
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being wrong is acceptable we are all wrong about something all the time nobody has perfect information nobody reasons perfectly mistakes are simply part of thinking but being confident and wrong that is dangerous because confidence without accuracy does not just affect you
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it affects everyone around you it makes your team implement the wrong idea with full force it makes investors commit resources to the wrong direction it makes decisions that take years to reverse Elon has seen this in himself and in others
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and his answer to it is not to stop being confident it is to earn confidence by constantly testing what he believes by seeking out the evidence that contradicts him by updating his position the moment better information arrives he says aspirationally
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you want to believe things proportionate to the evidence not inversely proportional to the evidence not louder because you want it to be true in proportion to what the data actually shows the feedback loop Elon's secret weapon Eric Jorgenson reveals in this chapter
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what may be the single most important habit behind Elon's rapid improvement across every company he has built Elon says I think it is very important to have a feedback loop where you are constantly thinking about what you have done
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and how you could be doing it better a feedback loop not an annual review not an occasional retrospective constant loop every day every decision every action constantly asking was that right could it have been better what would I do differently
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what am I missing and then acting on the answers this feedback loop is the engine behind Spacex's rapid rocket iteration they test they fail they analyze exactly what went wrong they implement the correction and they test again faster than any other aerospace company in history
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because most companies treat failure as something to be ashamed of they slow down after a failure they investigate who to blame they issue reports they hold meetings weeks pass Spacex treats failure as data they analyze it immediately they implement the correction within days and they launch again
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because the feedback loop never stops running that speed of iteration that willingness to be wrong fast and correct fast is why Spacex has achieved things that the entire global aerospace industry thought were decades away constantly seek criticism here is something Elon says that most people never do
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he says constantly seek criticism a well thought out critique of whatever you are doing is as valuable as gold most people run from criticism they hear it as an attack they feel it as a personal rejection they dismiss it as jealousy or misunderstanding
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and in doing so they cut themselves off from the most valuable information available the information about what is actually wrong Elon actively invites it he wants to know what is broken what could be better what someone else sees in his work that he cannot see himself
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because he understands something that most people never accept you cannot find your own blind spots by definition if you could see them they would not be blind spots you need someone else to show them to you and criticism done thoughtfully is exactly that
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a torch pointed at the places where your own vision fails physics Elon says does not care about hurt feelings cares about whether you got the rocket right and if the rocket is wrong you need to know before it launches
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not after failure is an option not stopping is not here is something Elon says about failure specifically that completely reframes how most people think about it he says failure is an option here if things are not failing you are not innovating enough
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failure is not the sign that you have done something wrong it is the sign that you are attempting something hard enough to actually be worth doing if you only ever try things that you know will succeed you are not building anything new
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you are just reproducing the known and the known has already been done real innovation lives in the territory where failure is possible where the outcome is genuinely uncertain and to move through that territory you have to be willing to be wrong repeatedly
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quickly and without shame Elon says I always have optimism but I am realistic it was not with the expectation of great success that I started Tesla or spacex it is just that I thought they were important enough to do anyway
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not certainty not guaranteed success just importance and then feedback and then correction and then another attempt until the thing that was once wrong becomes less wrong and then less wrong again and eventually right enough to change the world
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wishful thinking the most dangerous trap this chapter ends with a warning Elon says one of the biggest mistakes people generally make and I am guilty of it too is wishful thinking you want something to be true even if it is not true
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and so you ignore the real truth because of what you want to be true this is a very difficult trap to avoid and it is everywhere in business in relationships in health in any area where the truth is less comfortable than the wish
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the cure is simple to describe and very hard to practice every day in every decision ask what does the evidence actually show not what do I want it to show what does it actually show and then update your position to match
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not to match your wish to match reality because reality is the only place where rockets fly and companies survive and missions get accomplished and lives actually change Chapter 9 take responsibility there is a moment that defines every leader
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not the moment of success not the moment when the product launches perfectly not the moment when the stock price goes up and not the interview where they talk about their vision the moment that defines a leader is the moment when something goes terribly wrong
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and everyone is watching and someone has to own it in most companies at that moment the deflection begins it was the supply chain's fault it was the team that failed to execute it was the market conditions it was the timing it was someone or something else
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not me never me but Elon Musk operates by a completely different rule and this chapter is about that rule it is the rule of total responsibility and it is one of the most powerful and least practiced principles in the entire book
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the CEO job is not a reward Eric Jorgenson presents Elon's view of leadership very clearly in this chapter and it is completely different from how most people think about being at the top most people think that being the CEO means having the power
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calling the shots getting the credit having the biggest office making the final decision Elon thinks of it the other way around entirely he says the CEO's job is to tackle the most pernicious and painful problems the issues that nobody else can fix
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not the fun problems not the glamorous challenges the most painful ones the ones that everyone else has already tried to solve and failed he does not see the top of the organization as a place of privilege he sees it as a place of maximum accountability
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where the hardest glass has to be chewed where the problems that would stop anyone below have to be faced head on by the person in charge and Elon says clearly there is always some amount of glass that has to be chewed
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even now even at the scale that Tesla and Spacex have reached there is always something difficult something that requires the person at the top to absorb the hardest impact and his position is simply that person is him and he does not complain about it
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he accepts it as the deal as the price of being the one who gets to build something extraordinary responsibility and control are the same thing here is the insight at the heart of this chapter and it is one that most people have completely backwards
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most people think that responsibility and burden are the same thing they think taking responsibility means carrying weight means being blamed means being the person everyone points at when things go wrong and so they avoid it they stay below the line
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they do enough to contribute but not enough to be the one who owns the outcome and they wonder why they never feel fully in control of their own lives or their own work Elon's view is the opposite he says
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the person who takes responsibility is the person who has real power because responsibility and control are two sides of the same coin you cannot have genuine control over something you are not willing to take responsibility for and if you refuse to take responsibility
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you surrender control to someone else someone who is willing that is the deal and Elon takes responsibility for everything the product the production process the culture of the company the performance of the team the decisions that worked and especially the decisions that did not
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because the moment you say this failed and I own that you also say this failed and I can fix it the two things cannot be separated responsibility is not a punishment it is the key to the door of real agency
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frontline leadership being where the work is one of the most distinctive things about how Elon leads is that he does not lead from a distance he leads from the factory floor from inside the engine room from the place where the actual work is actually happening
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Eric Jorgenson shows in this chapter that when Tesla was facing its most critical production crisis Elon did not manage it from an executive office he moved a desk onto the factory floor he slept at the factory he was present in the physical space where the problem lived
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not to micromanage but to understand because you cannot take real responsibility for something you do not fully understand and you cannot fully understand something if you are not close enough to see it clearly he says if you ask for extreme effort from your team
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you must be on the front line sharing the hardship removing the barriers between what executives do and what the people actually doing the work do because if the person asking for sacrifice is not willing to sacrifice themselves the team sees it and something quietly breaks
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but when the leader is there when they are working the same hours facing the same pressure absorbing the same uncertainty something different happens the team rises because real accountability is contagious no excuses only results here is something Elon says about excuses in this book
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that is worth sitting with he says I do not spend time pointing fingers I think that is wasted energy just fix the problem not who caused the problem not whose fault was this fix the problem because the problem does not care whose fault it is
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the rocket does not care about the meeting where someone explained why the component was late the customer does not care about the internal process that created the defective product what matters is the outcome and outcomes are fixed by action
80:59
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not by explanation not by documentation not by a well written email explaining why things went wrong by showing up by taking ownership and by making the problem somebody's clear and personal responsibility usually his own this does not mean that Elon ignores where errors came from
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he is obsessed with root cause analysis with understanding exactly what failed and why so it can be prevented next time but the energy goes into fixing not blaming because blame creates defensiveness and defensiveness slows everything down while accountability creates clarity and clarity creates speed
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sacrifice must be visible here is something this chapter reveals that most leadership books never talk about asking a team for extreme effort without sharing in that effort personally does not work not for long people can feel it when the person asking them to work weekends and skip holidays
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is not there is not doing the same is sending emails from somewhere comfortable they feel it and the energy begins to drain but when the leader is as tired as they are when the leader is making the same sacrifices
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the dynamic shifts completely because nobody feels like they are being used they feel like they are part of something that the hardship is shared that the mission is real enough to require everyone including the person at the very top
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Elon worked alongside his teams through the darkest period not because he had to because he understood that visible sacrifice is one of the most powerful leadership tools that exist and it cannot be fake it has to be real
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it has to be earned day after day on the factory floor at 3 in the morning when the rocket still is not right what you can take from this chapter Eric Jorgensen closes this chapter with something simple and deeply important
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the level of responsibility you are willing to take determines the level of control you will actually have in your career in your relationship in your health in any area of your life where outcomes matter the moment you say this is my problem and I will fix it
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you have moved from passenger to driver from spectator to builder from the person who watches things happen to the person who makes things happen Elon Musk has built the most impactful companies of this generation not because he was given more than others
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not because the path was easier for him but because he refused to hand the responsibility for outcomes to anyone else he held it he owned it every day through every failure through every crisis through every moment when it would have been easier to point somewhere else
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that refusal that daily deliberate choice to own everything is not just a leadership strategy it is a way of being and it is available to every single person watching this right now this was Chapter 9 of The Book of Elon by Eric Jorgensen
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one chapter remains Chapter 10 is the final one and it brings the entire book together with one last and most important idea the difference between those who consume the world and those who create it and why in Elon's view
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creation is the only thing worth dedicating your life to Chapter 10 is next and it is the chapter that will stay with you long after the video ends Chapter 10 create more than you consume every single day you make a choice without realizing it
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without thinking about it without naming it but you make it the choice is this are you going to take from the world today or are you going to add to it most people on most days take they consume news
85:37
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they consume entertainment they consume products opinions and other people's ideas and they give back only what they have to the minimum needed to get through the day to meet the requirement to hold their position and there is nothing wrong with that as survival
85:57
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but as a life as the full expression of what a human being is capable of Elon Musk says it is not enough not even close and this final chapter is about the philosophy that he has built everything on
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create more than you consume the question Elon asks every young person when Elon is asked what advice he would give to young people he does not talk about networking he does not talk about finding the right investor he does not talk about picking the hottest industry
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he asks one question are you contributing more than you consume that question has no comfortable answer if you are honest about it because consuming is easy consuming is designed to be easy the entire modern economy has been engineered to make consuming
86:53
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effortless scroll and consume click and consume stream and consume order and consume but creating creating is hard creating is uncomfortable creating requires you to sit with something that does not yet exist and struggle until it does Elon says it is very hard to be useful
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very hard and yet that difficulty is exactly the point because the things that are hard to do are the things that are worth doing and the things worth doing are the things that make a life meaningful the economy is not a zero sum game
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here is something Elon teaches in this chapter that changes how you see the entire world most people operate from a zero sum mindset they believe that the world has a fixed amount of success wealth and opportunity and that the only way to get more is to take it from someone else
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Elon says this belief is not just wrong it is actively dangerous because when you believe the pie is fixed you spend your energy competing for what already exists trying to take pieces from someone else's plate fighting for a share of something limited
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but the economic pie is not fixed Elon says the economy is a positive sum game a grow the pie situation look at what humanity has built over the last 200 years the pie has grown beyond anything anyone could have imagined
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not because someone took more because people created more they invented things that did not exist they solved problems nobody had solved before they added to the world instead of simply redistributing what was already there and when you understand that
88:55
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when you truly understand that value is created not just moved around everything changes because now the question is not how do I take the question is what can I build that adds something new to what exists have a positive net contribution to society
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this is the standard Elon holds himself to not wealth not fame not legacy a positive net contribution to society he says directly try to have a positive net contribution to society that is the thing to aim for not to be a leader for the sake of being a leader
89:38
Speaker A
not to be successful for the sake of being seen as successful a positive net contribution more value added than value consumed more created than taken think about what this means for the scale of what Elon builds Spacex is not just a rocket company
89:58
Speaker A
it is an attempt to add humanity's presence to another planet to create an insurance policy for the survival of the human species Tesla is not just an electric car company it is an attempt to add a new energy system
90:15
Speaker A
to the one the entire civilization runs on a cleaner one a more sustainable one one that creates instead of deplete these are not businesses they are acts of creation at a civilization scale and they are driven by one core question
90:34
Speaker A
what can I add that was not here before a useful life is a good life Eric Jorgenson closes this chapter with the simplest and most powerful statement in the entire book Elon says if you live a useful life
90:50
Speaker A
that is a good life a life worth having lived not a rich life not a famous life not a comfortable life a useful one we are back to where this whole book began Chapter 1 opened with the same idea
91:06
Speaker A
be useful and now at the very end after the obsession after the first principles after the algorithm after the fear after the work after the responsibility we arrive at the same simple truth was your life useful did you create more than you consumed
91:27
Speaker A
did you add something to the world that was not there before you arrived that is the score not your bank balance not your follower count not the awards on your shelf the net contribution what you gave minus what you took
91:45
Speaker A
1 million Musk here is how Eric Jorgensen ends the entire book he says 1 million Musk that is my dream for this book not 1 million people who copy Elon not 1 million people who try to build rockets
92:02
Speaker A
1 million people who take the principles in this book and apply them to their own specific missions their own obsessions their own problems their own field 1 million people who wake up and ask how can I be useful today
92:20
Speaker A
one million people who think from first principles instead of from convention 1 million people who work with genuine intensity towards something that genuinely matters one million people who face their fear and go anyway 1 million people who create more than they consume
92:41
Speaker A
who add more to the world than they take from it who leave whatever corner of the world they are in a little better than they found it that is the dream and it starts with one person right now reading this or watching this
92:58
Speaker A
asking themselves what is the most useful thing I could build with my life you already have everything you need before this video ends there is one thing that needs to be said you do not need to be Elon Musk to live by these principles
93:16
Speaker A
you do not need billions you do not need a factory or a rocket or a team of engineers you need a problem that you care about solving you need the willingness to think from the ground up to question what you have been told
93:31
Speaker A
to delete what is unnecessary to work harder than the minimum to face the fear to take the responsibility to aspire to be less wrong every day and to create something anything that adds more to the world than it take
93:51
Speaker A
because the world does not need more consumers it has plenty of those what the world needs is people who are willing to build to create to put something into the world that was not there before something useful something meaningful
94:09
Speaker A
something that when you look back at the end you can point to and say that was mine I made that and the world is a little better because I did that is the final lesson of the book of Elon
94:24
Speaker A
create more than you consume this was the complete summary of The Book of Elon by Eric Jorgensen if this series gave you something real something you can carry into your actual life please like this video share it with one person who needs to hear it today
94:44
Speaker A
subscribe to Bookverse because there are more books coming more ideas more tools all designed to give you the mindset and the methods to build something worth building we will see you in the next one now go create something
Topics:Elon MuskThe Book of ElonEric Jorgensenmindsetfirst principles thinkingusefulnessSpaceXTeslaentrepreneurshippersonal responsibility

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