- Yo, Mark here.
I have to admit something.
I kind of hate talking about Elon Musk, why?
Well, for one, I'm pretty sure that whatever
I get done in a full week, he probably gets more done
before he takes a shit in the morning.
But two, there's something about people who expand
our conception of what's possible,
that creates this like love and hate reaction with them.
On the one hand, they inspire the hell out of us.
Like, "Holy shit, this guy is doing something unbelievable
"that I didn't know could be done."
On the other hand, like, "Fuck, what am I doing?
"What have I done recently?"
And then you feel a little bit pathetic about yourself.
If you don't know what the fuck Elon Musk has done,
I don't know where you've been lately.
He's founder, CEO, and CTO and chief designer of SpaceX.
He's the CEO and product architect of Tesla Motors.
He's the co-founder of SolarCity.
He's co-founder and former co-CEO of PayPal.
He's the co-founder of Zip2,
he's the co-founder of Neuralink,
founder of The Boring Company,
He's the co-founder and co-chairman of OpenAI.
He's done all of this while having seven kids,
four different marriages, three divorces,
two to the same woman.
The dude was worth like $200 billion a couple months ago.
A lot of experts suspect that if there's anybody
who's gonna be responsible for solving climate change,
it's probably gonna be him.
Fuck he smokes weed on podcasts, doesn't give a fuck,
buys Bitcoin, he's total meme Lord, and to top it all off,
Musk says that his primary goal in life is to quote,
"Die on Mars, and not from impact."
This fucking guy, this fucking guy, man.
We're gonna talk about Elon Musk and we're gonna talk about
four life lessons that we can all take from his career.
These are the lessons that I've already taken
and I've already improved my life, my work habits,
hopefully they'll help yours.
So stick around.
(upbeat metal music)
So the first and it might been in the most important
life lesson we can glean from Elon Musk
is that it's not about money, it's about solving problems.
This was actually something that I learned
in business quite early and I'm very, very grateful,
because if I didn't, I probably would have wasted
like 10 years of my life.
Most people approach business in a way of,
"How can I get as much money as possible?
"What can I do to convince people,
"to give me a bunch of dollars?"
Whereas the proper way to look at business
is to actually ask yourself,
"How can I solve as many problems as possible
"for as many people as possible,
"and then they'll just wanna give me money anyway?"
It takes a lot of people their entire careers
to figure this out, but Musk intuited this
at a very young age.
In his autobiography, he talks about how
when he was in college, he sat down and wrote down
the three most pressing problems
that he thought he could solve with his life's work.
The first one was computerized payments and online banking.
The second one was electric cars and renewable energy
to solve climate change.
And the third one, was space exploration
and helping humanity become an interplanetary species.
He attacked online finance first, because out of those three
that's probably the easiest one to do.
He co-founded PayPal in the nineties, became Co-CEO,
got kicked out of the company 'cause he was kind of a dick,
ended up making about $180 million from that deal.
But what's incredible is that Musk took that $180 million,
he took a hundred million and founded SpaceX,
he took 70 million and used it
to get a controlling stake in Tesla,
and then he took the 10 million to finance
and take a major stake in SolarCity.
According to him, he spent most of the early two thousands
living month to month, and even borrowing money to pay rent.
This is a dude who just cashed out for almost $200 million,
and he's literally crashing on friend's couches
and sleeping on floors, 'cause he put all the money
into his next projects.
This is something that I talk about in chapter one
of "The Subtle Art Of Not Giving A Fuck."
About how it's generally the people who don't care care
about money or material success,
who generate the most of it.
Why?
Because they actually leave that bandwidth
to care about things that actually matter.
Which brings us to life lesson number two,
optimize ruthlessly for what matters.
If you read Musk's biography,
there's a lot of insane stories
of him being a ruthless asshole,
in efforts to optimize his businesses,
and work as efficiently as possible.
My favorite actually came from his personal assistant.
She had been working with them for like four or five years.
She'd been handling all of his meetings, all of his flights,
all of his routes and everything,
going between SpaceX and Tesla,
for years and years and years, and she finally came to him
and was like, "Mr. Musk, I've been doing this
"for a long time, I think I do a very good job.
"I'd like to ask for a raise."
So most bosses in this situation would say,
"Yeah, of course you work your ass off, you're great,
"I love you, blah, blah, blah, here's a bunch of money."
(clicks tongue) Not Musk.
Musk said pretty much the opposite.
He said, "Why don't you take a week off, and in that week,
"I'll do everything that you do,
"and then I'll see how much you're actually worth."
Sure enough, she took the week off,
Musk did everything that she did, and when she came back,
he said, "You know, I actually discovered that,
"what you do, isn't very valuable,
"so I think I'm gonna fire you."
Yeah, that's fucking hardcore man.
That's next level shit.
Musk's career is littered with crazy stories like this.
So apparently Musk just scrapped his entire public relations
and media department at Tesla.
Most large corporations spend tens of millions of dollars
on publicity and media relations.
Musk, he was like, "I don't know, I got Twitter."
Like, "Fuck this shit, everybody go home.
"We'll use this money for something else."
And the most hilarious part is that a couple of months ago
the Washington Post actually reached out to him for comment,
by emailing his personal address.
And he replied, "Give my regards to your puppet master."
(laughing)
The dude is just fucking trolling them.
This brings us to life lesson number three.
And this is the question that everybody
wants to fucking know.
If you look at interviews of Musk, everybody asks him this,
everybody wants to know, it's what I wanted to know,
it's like, dude, how do you run like five companies
at the same time with like seven kids,
and all this shit going on?
Like, how do you do it?
There not enough hours in the day?
Well, obviously he works like a crazy person.
He works six days a week, sometimes seven,
he works long hours, that's a given, right?
But when I watch interviews with him, the thing he says
that I find to be very profound that he points out,
is that he minimizes task switching.
So he's got a block like of days in the week
that it's all Tesla, and then he has a block of days
in the week, it's all SpaceX, and there's no crossover.
People know this too.
You know, the people at Tesla know that like,
he's not available until Thursday.
And then when he's at SpaceX,
they know that he's not available until Monday
or however it works.
It turns out that through his ruthless optimization
of his own productivity and time,
Musk came across something that's pretty important
and backed up by the research.
Which is that our mental energy isn't necessarily drained
through pure effort, it's drained more
through the sense of switching tasks.
So, let's say you have two different work days.
One day, you're working on one work project,
and it's just one project for eight hours that day,
and the next day, it's eight different projects
for one hour at a time.
Now, what the research shows is that,
the day that you're working on eight different projects,
one hour at a time, you're gonna be way more
mentally exhausted than the day
that you spent the entire day on one project.
There's just something about switching focus
from one thing to the next, to the next, to the next,
that wears us out.
And that makes us feel a sense of mental fatigue,
that, you know, a deep focus on one thing
for a long time doesn't cause.
I eventually discovered this in my own career as well.
You know, years ago when I started writing books,
I would like, you know, work on my website
for a couple hours, and then try to write the book
for an hour or two, and then like do interviews for an hour,
and then take meetings with my agent for an hour,
and it was a total clusterfuck.
Eventually what I came across is that,
you need to start batching things.
So like these videos, for instance,
I do these videos in batches of three or four.
I block out like two full days,
I just fucking hammer on the videos,
It's all I do for those two days, and then I move on.
I spend like three, four weeks not thinking about it.
It's the same thing with books, you know,
it's when I'm writing a book, I block out three days a week.
That's book day, like I don't do
anything else on those days.
And it's by batching these projects into short-term bursts
of focus and attention, that you're able to
leverage your energy the best.
Now the final life lesson I wanna talk about with Musk
is just go bigger than anybody can possibly comprehend.
You know, there's that cheesy, old saying?
It's like, shoot for the stars
and you'll land on the moon or whatever?
I feel like with Elon, like what he mastered was like,
he started building the technology for the 2040s,
in the year 2000, and we've basically gone through 20 years
of people thinking he's a crank,
thinking he's fucking insane, thinking he's nuts,
and he's just now transitioning to that point
where like, people are like, "Oh, shit, whoa,
"he's actually, no this is some pretty important stuff."
And I feel like, you know, by 2030,
he's going to be the mainstream.
It's like everything his companies do,
is what people are gonna emulate.
I think this is just something that people don't understand
like Tesla, right?
It's not just a car company.
Like if you wanna solve climate change,
it's not just about electric vehicles.
The bottleneck of solving climate change
is scaling affordable and efficient batteries.
But you can't scale affordable and efficient batteries,
unless you produce fucking millions and millions
and millions of batteries.
But to do that, you need a lot of money.
So where do you get that money?
By having rich people pre-order really, really nice cars.
In a sense, Tesla's not really a car company,
it's a battery company.
It's simply using luxury cars, to scale and finance
the production of all the batteries
the planet's gonna need to beat climate change.
And so right now it looks insane.
It looks selfish, but give it 10 years,
and people are gonna be like, "Oh, shit, he just solved
"a massive worldwide problem."
It's similar with SpaceX,
I mean, he's been criticized recently
by like Bernie Sanders and some politicians saying like,
"Oh, why are you so focused on Mars,
"if we still have like starving people
"on the streets on earth?"
What people don't understand, it's not about Mars,
it's about building the technology that can get us to Mars,
because it's that technology that is gonna create
multi-trillion dollar industries in space transportation,
space tourism, space mining and minerals and materials,
opening up the frontier of space
and developing the technology to harness the power of space,
like, that's gonna generate trillions and trillions
and trillions of dollars of global wealth.
That's gonna bring up everybody.
It's gonna bring up the poor people,
the middle-class people, the rich people, everybody.
All these people are arguing about, you know,
Elon Musk has too much of the pie,
he has too much of the pie, he needs to give,
that he should be giving billion dollars
to poor people and all this stuff,
and like what they don't realize is he spending that money
to enlarge the pie for everybody.
We're all gonna be wealthier because of these technologies.
We're all gonna be better off.
It just goes to show that no good deed goes unpunished.
Perhaps that's the harsh truth of the day.
(upbeat metal music)
Haters always occur proportionally to audacity.
The more audacious your ambition, the more you try to do
something special or amazing,
the more people are gonna come out and drag you down.
And look, it's not 'cause they're bad people,
it's just human nature.
We tend to react negatively to things
that are shocking or unexpected to us.
And so when we see somebody doing something so different,
thinking in such a strange way, our natural inclination
is to try to bring them down to our level,
try to force them into the box,
that we've created for ourself, for how we see the world.
And you see this with all people
who have done incredible things.
I mean, look at the hate that Bill Gates gets.
I mean, the dude's literally cured diseases,
wiped polio off the earth, like fucking saved
hundreds of millions of lives,
and the dude just gets shat on constantly
all over the internet.
At some point it just becomes funny, it becomes amusing.
Like it's, I love the conspiracy theories
of like Bill Gates is tracking you through,
you can take the vaccine, there's a microchip,
that's gonna track your every move, and Bill Gates
is gonna know what you're doing.
You know, as if like, some neck beard in his mom's basement,
who's like jerking off to hentai every three hours
and lives off of the all you can eat shrimp buffet,
as if Bill Gates gives a flying fuck what that guy is doing
on any given moment.
Bill Gates doesn't care, Elon Musk doesn't fucking care.
Nobody who's doing anything widely impactful
and important for humanity gives a fuck
about what you say or what I say.
And that's the beauty of it.
That is the subtle art of not giving a fuck.
Is you find something more important
than what people on the internet are saying.
Anyway, I'm rambling now.
Be sure to like, and subscribe to the channel,
leave a comment, say like, what you find
particularly inspiring or what lesson you've taken
from Musk or any other person, I don't know.
Who's like the most inspiring figure for you.
And if you'd like me to do a video on somebody else,
in this same style or fashion,
let me know in the comments as well.
So until next time, this is Mark Manson
saying, hasta la vista baby.
(upbeat metal music)