Have you ever wondered how it can be that Elon Musk is so successful?
Well in this video, we go over 11 lesson learned from Elon, and crush it, just like him.
Hey 1% Nation, I'm Jake Voorhees, and you are watching episode 027 of The 1% Engineer
Show, where we empower young engineers to rise to the top 1% of their career.
Elon Musk is the most famous engineer alive today, and is responsible for running five
companies.
There's a lot that we can learn from him.
I can personally say that he is the biggest role model in my life, and I read his book
last year surrounding the controversy of him being on Donald Trump's board.
Which he held out for a long time and lately announced that he's stepping down.
But if we go back and analyze Elon's life we can learn so much from him.
So I made this video for that reason.
Here's a really quick summary of everything he's done.
Of course you know about Tesla and SpaceX, but a lot of people don't know the other stuff
that he's accomplished.
Elon is South African born, who moved to Canada when he was 18.
He went to Queen's University before transferring to UPenn, where he graduated with two degrees,
one in physics and one in business.
He then moved to California, registered for his PhD, dropped out two days later, where
his true entrepreneurship journey started.
He founded Zip2 with his brother, which eventually exited for $340M. Elon's take was into the
$20 millions, and he then used that momentum to found X.com which merged with what become
PayPal.
That sold to eBay in 1999 for $1.5B. He used that money to start three companies all at
the same time, Tesla, SpaceX, and Solar City.
A lot of people don't know about that one.
His two cousins run that today, and he's the chairman.
All of these ventures were perceived to be mistakes, but they survived because of Elon's
hard work.
Today in 2017, he's also running The Boring Company, which is responsible for the infrastructure
for which The HyperLoop will run.
He also founded a venture called Neurolink, which is too complicated for me to explain,
so google it.
Here' the 11 lessons from Elon Musk guys, so you can be a 1% Engineer, like him.
When you had that third failure in a row, did you think, "I need to pack this in".
Never.
"Why not?
I don't ever give up.
I mean, I'd have to be, dead or completely incapacitated.
You need to work super hard.
So, what does super hard mean.
Well, when my brother and I were started up our first company, instead of getting an apartment,
we just rented a small office, and we slept on the couch.
We showered at the YMCA, and we're so hard up, we had just one computer, so the website
was up during the day, and I was coding at night.
Seven days a week, all the time.
And I sort of briefly had a girlfriend in that period, and in order to be with me, she
had to sleep in the office.
So, work hard like every waking hour.
If you do simple math, like somebody else is working 50 hours, and you're working 100,
you'll get twice as much done in the course of a year as the other company.
You want to do projects that are inspiring, and that make people excited about the future.
Life's got to be about more than solving projects.
You have to get up in the morning and say "Yes, I'm looking forward to that thing happening."
Really believe in what you are doing, but not just from a blind faith standpoint.
To have really thought about it and say okay, this is true, I'm convinced it's true, and
I've tried every angle to figure out if it's untrue, and sought negative feedback to figure
out if I'm maybe wrong, and after all that, okay it still seems this is the right way
to go, then that I think gives one a fundamental conviction and an ability to convey that conviction
to others.
Now is the time to take risks.
You don't have kids, your obligations...
well, sorry (laughter)
You probably don't have kids.
But as you get older, your obligations increase.
And once you have a family, you start taking risks not only for yourself, but for your
family as well.
It gets much harder to do things that might not work out.
So now is the time to do that, before you have those obligations.
So I would encourage you to take risks now.
Do something bold.
You won't regret it.
Yeah I think it's important to have a future that's inspiring an appealing, I mean...
I just think that there, like, there have to be reasons to get up in the morning, and
you want to live.
Like, why do you want to live?
What's the point, what inspires you?
What do you love about the future?
And if we're not out there, if the future does not include being out there among the
stars, and being a multi planet species, I find that incredibly depressing, if that's
not the future we're going to have.
(applause)
You famously said when you were younger, there were five problems that you thought were most
important for you to work on.
If you were 22 today, what would the five problems that you would think about working
on be?".
Well first of all, I think if somebody is doing something that is useful to the rest
of society, I think that's a good thing.
It doesn't have to change the world.
You know.
If you're doing something that has high value to people, um, and frankly, even if it's something
like um, just a little game um, or you know, some improvement in photo sharing.
If it has a small amount of good for a large number of people, that's, I think that's fine.
Stuff doesn't need to be changing the world just to be good.
I think it's also important to reason from "First Principles" rather than by analogy.
So the normal way that we conduct our lives is we reason by analogy.
We're doing this because, "it's like something else that was done" or "it's like other people
are doing".
Me too type ideas.
Yeah.
It's like, slight permutations, on a theme.
And uh, and it's, kind of mentally easier to reason by analogy rather than through first
principles, but first principles is sort of a physics way of looking at the world.
And what that really means is, you kind of boil things down to the most fundamental truths.
And say, okay what're we sure is true, or as sure as possible is true, and then reason
up from there.
How did you get the expertise to be the Chief Technology Officer of a rockship company?
Um, well, I do have a physics background, let's helpful as a foundation, um and then
I read a lot of books and talked to a lot of smart people.
"You're self taught?!?!"
Yeah.
Well self taught meaning, I don't have an aerospace degree.
So how did you go about acquiring the knowledge?
Well, like I said, I read a lot of books, and talked to a lot of people, and have a
great team.
You have this incredible sort of scope, of ambition.
Right, planetary scope, interplanetary scope, right, a little more than just changing the
world, let's change some other worlds too, and this is big stuff.
Is this always in your mind, or did you become more emboldened over time?
That, this is available, we can do these things?
It definitely emboldened over time, I mean, when I started the first internet company,
Zip2, with my brother and another person, Greg Curry, it wasn't really with the thought
of being wealthy.
I have nothing against being wealthy, um...
We'll get back to that later too.
It was just from the standpoint of wanting to be part of the internet and I figured if
we could make enough money to just get by, that would be okay.
When we started off, we literally only had one computer, so it would be our web server
during the day, and I'd be coding at night.
And we just got a small office, in Palo Alto back when rent was not insane, um, and it
cost us like $350 a month.
It was cheaper than an apartment, so we just slept in the office, and then showered at
the YMCA on page mill el camino.
So we'd walk over there an show.
So the first order of business is to figure out how to get there, and it needs to be,
in a way that enables large numbers of people and cargo.
It can't just be like a handful of people, because that's obviously not going to create
a self sustaining civilization.
An Apollo was an amazing inspiring thing for all of humanity, but the last time we went
to the moon was like 1973 or 4 I believe, so, we don't want to just have flags and footprints,
and then never go to Mars again.
If we just have one mission, that will also be a super inspiring thing, but it's not going
to fundamentally change the future of humanity.
Heyyy 1% Nation, if you enjoyed these 11 lessons, consider subscribing to this channel, because
I release videos on Wednesdays and Saturdays, about how you can crush it in your career,
and become a 1% Engineer.
Cheers!
(sick music)