he went from knowing next to nothing about rockets to becoming the ceo of the world's
largest private space exploration company with spacex now valued at over 100 billion dollars
he has built a net worth of 185 billion making him the wealthiest man on the planet former
engineer at spacex robert zubrin describes just how quickly musk was able to learn and absorb
information in order to make the transition from rocket science rookie to becoming an
industry-leading expert in just six years he wrote he did not know anything about rockets
nothing that was in 2001 by 2007 he knew everything about rockets he really knew everything
in detail what elon musk was trying to do essentially create a space company to compete with
nasa the biggest space organization in the world there was a whole graveyard of dead bodies that
musk had to step over that tried to do this before him billionaire businessman andrew beale spent 100
million dollars trying to do exactly what musk was aiming to do and he went bankrupt so at the
time space exploration was considered a government domain that nobody really dared to step into but
elon's approach was different he defined a goal and he put a lot of effort into understanding
what that goal was and why it was a goal worthy of spending the vast majority of his lives pursuing
his goal back in 2001 a year before spacex was formed was to make mankind a multi-planetary
species and the first problem he had to solve was the transportation problem and to this day
that goal has not changed once he had his goal his next step was to learn as much about the subject
area as possible and in this video we're gonna go through four main ways he was able to learn
and process vast amounts of information in such short periods of time and he used learning methods
that all of us every single one of us both me and you can implement into our lives to learn faster
and become an expert in any field and before i go on a lot of people watching are probably thinking
elon musk is more of a businessman right he's more of a businessman than an engineer
he doesn't really get that involved in the building and engineering of the rockets right
well not exactly you probably don't remember this a very long time ago many many years you took me
on a tour of spacex and the most impressive thing was that you knew every detail of the rocket and
every piece of engineering that went into it my time is almost entirely with the engineering team
working on improving the falcon 9 and the dragon spacecraft and developing the mars colonial
architecture and there's an interesting post on korra from tim walstahl who is a journalist and
at the time he was a global expert in a very rare type of metal it was an aluminium scandinave which
the russians had developed to compete with nasa's aluminium lithium and a number of years back he
received an email from a guy called elon musk he was very vaguely aware of who he was but back then
he was nowhere near as well known as he is now and he gets an email asking whether the aluminium
skating room will actually make his rockets lighter and tim replied back that it wouldn't make
them lighter but it would make them easier to weld and that was pretty much the end of the exchange
so when people ask whether musk is involved in the engineering side of spacex at least to me it's
pretty obvious that he is he managed to track down a one-man company that knew the straight answer
to the question he needed answering so the first and arguably the most efficient way that elon musk
became an expert in rocket science was that he surrounded himself with experts in 2001 he would
cold call industry leaders in the aerospace field just hoping that they would pick up the phone jim
cantrell was an experienced aerospace engineer and an expert in russian rockets having joined
the french space agency back in 1990 and going on to work at the joint french soviet mass program
then musk ended up cold calling control back in 2001 just before spacex was launched and cantrell
explained i had the top down on my car so all i could make out was that some guy named ian musk
was saying that he was an internet billionaire and needed to talk to me i'm pretty sure he used
that phrase internet billionaire he also wrote in a quora post answering someone's question of
how did elon musk actually learn enough about rockets to create and run spacex and he replied
he literally sucks the knowledge and experience out of people that he is around we also hired as
many of my colleagues in the rocket and spacecraft business that were willing to consult with him
learning from people much better at that particular area is such an incredibly
effective way of learning far more efficient than reading books or watching youtube videos or
listening to podcasts because when you're talking one-on-one to someone you can receive direct
feedback in real time you can ask specific focused questions and elon's mother mae musk noticed this
specific trait in him from a young age saying in an interview even at an early age he would
always migrate to the most successful person in the room and he would just stand there and listen
and then ask very pointed questions they were always highly intelligent and highly directed
and it made sense when i was studying economics at university i noticed something interesting
we would be taught in a matter of a couple of hours things that the best economists in the world
noble prize-winning economists took decades to develop and leading the way is easy but being
the first one is far more difficult musk employed the people that had already cut the path through
the jungle and he constantly asked them questions to pick their brain and learn from them as much as
he could and he used their expertise in the field of aerospace engineering to show him the ropes one
former spacex employee said that elon musk would quiz you until he knew 90 of what you knew he even
moved from silicon valley to los angeles because he realized that the highest concentration of
rocket scientists rocket engineers and experts in that field were mostly congregated in and around
the la area and musk has spoken about this in a number of interviews he essentially had two
options the first option was to farm spacex in silicon valley and tried to encourage as
many space and rocket engineers who lived in and around southern california and la to move up north
to silicon valley and the second option was to form the company in la which would benefit his
employees too because housing in silicon valley is notoriously expensive so in his own words
silicon valley wasn't really a viable option for him and spacex the second way musk taught
himself rocket science links in with what he calls his single best piece of advice
in an interview back in 2012 he said i think it's very important to have a feedback loop
where you're constantly thinking about what you've done and how you could be doing it better i think
that's the single best piece of advice constantly think about how you could be doing things better
and questioning yourself the feedback loop is unquestionably part of every successful
person's growing process being open to receiving feedback is one of musk's biggest strengths
as steve jobs once said it doesn't make sense to hire smart people and tell them what to do
we hire smart people so that they can tell us what to do and musk does exactly that
he hires smart people that are constantly giving feedback on every part of his business his aim to
improve a particular product or business process is to intentionally try not to be the smartest
person in the room he hires people with far more experience than himself and solicits consistent
feedback to improve himself and his businesses so he is constantly learning and growing the third
way elon musk was able to turn himself into an aerospace expert in just a few years was that he
read books he read a lot of books and he often credits much of his success to this throughout
his childhood books have played a crucial role in fueling his ambition at the age of nine he
would read the entire encyclopedia britannica and would pour through science fiction books for 10
hours or more a day and elon's uncle scott holdem and said he never went anywhere without a book in
his hand he was always reading and he was often advanced books that was one of the earliest
things you started seeing it was this intense reading and there were books about the future and
about success according to his brother musk could read through two books a day and if you like the
average person read one book a month that means musk would read 60 times as many books as you
and they were from a whole range of disciplines from soviet rocket manuals encyclopedias science
fiction and biographies biographies i think are really you know really interesting read um what
did you learn from them well i think you learn a lot depending upon you know whose life you're
reading about um there are lots of lessons in there i read isaacson's biography of jobs which
i thought was quite interesting and i actually really liked his biography of benjamin franklin
who i would say certainly one of my heroes he seemed like a really great guy and i actually
made a video the other week on the three favorite books that have transformed my life in spoiler
alert the first book in the video is elon musk's biography so you can click on the pop out banner
above to watch that musk firmly believes that most people can learn faster and learn more efficiently
more than they actually realize he wrote in a reddit comment i think most people can learn a lot
more than they think they can they sell themselves short without trying and reading biographies can
help combat that by showing you that if you play your cards right extraordinary things can happen
in a reddit thread in 2015 elon musk explained how he learns new information by viewing knowledge as
a tree by using this learning method he was able to process and retain so much information in the
field of aerospace engineering in such a short space of time musk wrote it is important to view
knowledge as sort of a semantic tree make sure you understand the fundamental principles i.e
the trunk and big branches before you get into the leaves details or there's nothing for them to hang
on to and this approach makes sense imagine a child trying to read an encyclopedia when he
doesn't even know how to read in the first place it makes more sense for him to start learning with
single words and then move on to children's books and slowly progress to more complex books
the basics of reading need to be understood before he can move on to the next level and
musk's entire career is based on this principle first he learned the fundamentals of economics
and physics at the university of pennsylvania where he received a dual bachelor's degree in
economics and physics then he deconstructed these ideas and reconstructed them in new ways
so for example paypal reshaped traditional banking by allowing for seamless online payments
and tesla shook up their car industry by releasing mass-market electric vehicles forcing every other
major manufacturer to follow suit and spacex also shook up the once almost entirely government-owned
industry by being the first private space flight company to send a crude spacecraft to space
something as basic as viewing knowledge as a tree and understanding the fundamental principles
before you get into the details can be an incredibly powerful approach to business but
also to your studying your work your health your fitness your relationships pretty much
every single area in your life and if you are on a journey of growing and learning
to develop yourself last week i made a video on the free books that transformed my life
and a few books mentioned over there elon musk steve jobs arnold schwarzenegger's biographies
and the richest man in babylon how to win friends and influence people rich dad poor dad just to
name a few and if you like this video you're gonna love that one so i'll see you over there