Elon Musk Principles
Elon Musk is obviously a brilliant visionary, engineer, businessman, and philosopher. I’m fascinated by listening to all of his interviews on YouTube which get millions of views from like minded observers of this not so boring man. Everyone has role models, and it’s a good thing to strategically choose your role models. You might ask yourself whose perspective and knowledge do you want to absorb and be brainwashed by? This document will be my ongoing attempt to summarize Elon Musk’s principles and key ideas — those especially which he emphasizes across multiple interviews.
Strive to be useful. Try to have a positive net contribution to society.
Try to be useful. Do things that are useful to your fellow human beings, to the world. It’s very hard to be useful. Are you contributing more than you consume? Try to have a positive net contribution to society. Don’t try to be a leader just for the sake of being a leader. A lot of the time people we want as leaders are people who don’t want to be leaders. If you are living a useful life, that is a good life — a life worth having lived.
I put a lot of stock and certainly have a lot respect for someone who puts in an honest days work to do useful things.
Learn a little bit about a lot of things; Get a rough lay of the land of the knowledge landscape by reading in a broad range of subject areas and talking to people from different walks of life.
Find an occupation where there is a good overlap of your talents and what you are interested in.
I’d encourage people to read a lot of books. Basically try to ingest as much information as you can, and try to also develop a good general knowledge, so that you at least have a rough lay of the land of the knowledge landscape. Try to learn a little bit about a lot of things because you might not know what you are interested in, how would you know what you are interested in if you are not at least doing a peripheral exploration of the knowledge landscape. Talk to people from different walks of life and different industries and professions and skills and occupations. Learn as much as possible. Man’s search for meaning.
Read broadly in many different subject areas and then try to find something where there is an overlap between your talents and what you’re interested in. Someone may have skill in a particular thing, but they don’t like doing it. Try to find a thing where there is a good combination of things you are inherently good at but you also like doing.
When I was a kid I read through the Encyclopedia. That was pretty helpful. There were many things I didn’t even know existed. Maybe read through the condensed version of the Encyclopedia Britannica, I’d recommend that. You can always skip subjects where you read a few paragraphs and know you are not interested, then just jump to the next one.
Have a grow the pie mindset rather than a zero sum mindset
Have not a zero sum mindset. Have more of a grow the pie mindset. When you see people doing things that are morally questionable, it’s often because they have at a base axiomatic level a zero sum mindset — without realizing it. They don’t realize they have a zero sum mindset consciously. If you have a zero sum mindset, then the only way to get ahead is by taking things from others. If the pie is fixed then the only way to have more pie is by taking it from others. But this is false. The economic pie has grown dramatically over time. The pie is not fixed. You really want to make sure that you’re not operating without realizing it from a zero sum mindset where the only way to get ahead is to take things from others. It’s much better to focus on adding to the economic pie. Create more than you consume.
Belief in the future. The best way to predict the future is to create it.
Try to make the future something exciting to look forward to. Life can’t be just about solving one miserable problem after another. We need more things like traveling to the moon that make us proud to be part of humanity.
Building a prototype is orders of magnitudes easier than setting up production at scale
Biggest existential threats against humanity…
Apply the mental tools of physics and first principles thinking broadly in life.
I would encourage people to use the mental tools of physics and apply them broadly in life. They are the best tools.
