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8 Lessons I Learned From Elon Musk

2021-10-29 · Long video (solo, talking head or whiteboard) · Ali · recording, 15:18 · watch on YouTube

Topic: Productivity and time (also: Goals, purpose and life design, Mindset, motivation and happiness, Books and reading) · mode: List of tips or lessons · tags: Lesson from a book, Sponsor segment present, His own products discussed

Opening his Case Studies series, Ali draws eight lessons from Elon Musk's biography and interviews: success does not automatically make life better, showers, reading, a clear vision, micro-scheduling, habits that change, stretch goals and focusing on what matters, while warning against copying anyone's advice word for word.

What is said

The parts of the video and what is said in each (★ — how much it matters to the video).

00:00:00 — Introduction: the new Case Studies series starts with Elon Musk's biography

  • ★★ Ali launches Case Studies, a new series on his channel distilling wisdom from successful people, starting with lessons from Elon Musk's biography. — 00:00:00

00:00:24 — Lesson one: success doesn't automatically improve your life; pixel theory

  • ★★★ Ali's first lesson from Elon Musk is that being ridiculously successful does not automatically make your life better, though we tend to lionize people like Elon Musk and Steve Jobs. — 00:00:29
  • ★★ Elon Musk (quoted): Elon Musk says that anyone who wants to be him or do what he has done is most probably mistaken: they would need some kind of rage demon in their skull to get it done. — 00:00:58
  • ★★★ Drawing on Tim Urban's pixel theory from Wait But Why (life is a picture but we live in a pixel), Ali says whether people are happy and fulfilled depends less on the grand narrative of their lives than on what they do day to day. — 00:01:27
  • ★★★ Ali says advice from famously successful people, like everything heard online or in interviews, should be taken with a pinch of salt: pick the bits that resonate and apply to your life rather than adopting a whole life philosophy. — 00:01:57

00:02:34 — Lesson two: showers are the best thing ever

  • ★★ Elon Musk (quoted): Asked in a Reddit AMA which daily habit has had the largest positive impact on his life, Elon Musk replied simply: showering. — 00:02:35
  • ★★ Working on his book, Ali had a three-hour writing session that morning and in between took a 15 to 20 minute shower, enjoying it and mulling over his ideas. — 00:03:05

  • ★★★ Ali caught himself thinking a long shower was unproductive while he should be writing his book, and says the point of life is not to be productive every second of the day: a shower is something he enjoys. — 00:03:05

    “the point of life is not to be productive”

00:03:50 — Team Seas in place of the CuriosityStream sponsor read

00:05:05 — Lesson three: reading is the best thing ever

  • ★★ Elon Musk (quoted): Asked how he founded SpaceX, a rocket company, without a background in rocket science, Elon Musk answered roughly that he read a book about it. — 00:05:21
  • ★★ Ashlee Vance (quoted): Elon Musk's biography says that as a young boy he was compelled to read: by Kimball's account he often read 10 hours a day and could get through two books in a day at weekends. — 00:05:21
  • ★★ Ali says that whenever he listens to interviews or reads books by famously successful people, they always say reading has absolutely changed their life. — 00:05:50
  • ★★★ To people asking how to find more time to read, Ali's biggest tip is to get a Kindle and read for half an hour before bed each night, which also helps you fall asleep; that way you get through quite a lot of books fairly quickly. — 00:06:20 · Kindle
  • ★★ Ali gives Elon Musk's visions: for SpaceX, to make humanity a multi-planetary species; for Tesla, to help accelerate the transition to renewable energy. — 00:06:20 · Tesla

00:06:33 — Lesson four: have a clear vision; gravestone, funeral and Wikipedia techniques

  • ★★ Ali says "what is my vision for life?" is genuinely a really hard question to answer: when he used to think about it he had no idea, and he is personally not interested in affecting mass change in the world. — 00:06:49
  • ★★★ Ali's first exercise for figuring out a life vision is the gravestone technique: ask yourself what you want written on your gravestone. — 00:06:49
  • ★★ Doing the gravestone exercise, Ali lands on some combination of good father, good husband and inspirational teacher. — 00:06:49
  • ★★★ The gravestone exercise made Ali realise that he values being a teacher above all, and that practising medicine as a doctor is maybe not his calling, while teaching, on the internet or in real life, resonates more with him. (hedged) — 00:07:38
  • ★★★ Two more exercises Ali finds helpful for a life vision are the funeral technique, asking what you want people to say at your funeral, and the Wikipedia technique, asking what you want written on your Wikipedia page. — 00:07:38 · Wikipedia
  • ★★ Few of us will have a vision as grandiose as Elon Musk's of making humanity colonise Mars, Ali says, but having some kind of vision and thinking about it a little might potentially help. (hedged) — 00:08:07
  • ★★ Ali says Elon Musk, in articles and interviews, describes scheduling his day (or his assistant probably does) into five-minute blocks, even having lunch in a five-minute slot, usually inside meetings. (hedged) — 00:08:07

00:08:32 — Lesson five: the micro-scheduling method

  • ★★★ Five-minute chunks are not enough time for Ali, but he stands by scheduling the day and running it from the calendar, deciding in the morning what to do with the time so as not to spend the day wondering what to do next. — 00:08:56 · time-blocking
  • ★ Ali says he is going to try scheduling his day in five-minute blocks at some point. — 00:08:56

00:09:33 — Habits can change: Elon's turn on email and Ali's changing apps

  • ★★ Elon Musk used to say he loved email and asynchronous communication, but in a recent interview with Sriram Krishnan, a partner at Andreessen Horowitz and a new friend of Ali's, he did a complete 180: he really doesn't like email and finds texts way better. — 00:09:33
  • ★★★ Ali's meta point from Elon Musk's turn on email is that people's productivity habits and lifestyles can and do change over time. — 00:10:00
  • ★★ Elon Musk's biography, written around 2015 or 2016, is probably out of date on what he does now, Ali says, though it is pretty good for his past story. (hedged) — 00:10:00
  • ★★ Ali's own app choices for to-do lists and notes often vary: he now uses Apple Notes and Todoist, while this time last year (2020) he used Things, Evernote, Notion and Roam Research. — 00:10:29 · Things 3, Evernote, Notion, Roam Research
  • ★★★ Ali advises against being overly wedded to following someone's advice word for word: think about the principles and the reasons for their choice, then build your own habits, using it as inspiration rather than step-by-step instructions. — 00:10:58

00:11:23 — Lesson seven: set stretch goals

  • ★★ Ashlee Vance (quoted): In the biography a former executive recalls a car team, aiming to drive from LA to New York on one tank, whose vice presidents privately doubted it would reach Las Vegas; it reached New Mexico, twice as far as expected, and Elon Musk was still mad. — 00:11:28
  • ★ People say Elon Musk can be very demanding, with a very short fuse, and fires people who are not fast enough; Ali says that may have changed since the book was written, he doesn't know. (hedged) — 00:11:57
  • ★ Ali says he would love to interview Elon Musk on his channel some time. — 00:11:57
  • ★★ The Tesla Roadster was supposed to come out in 2006, a ridiculously ambitious deadline, and came out in 2008, two years late, but still faster than competitors would have managed, Ali says. — 00:11:57 · Tesla
  • ★★★ For Ali the lesson from Elon Musk's ambitious deadlines is that there is some value in setting stretch goals. — 00:12:26
  • ★★★ Ali encourages his team not to take too long over doing things: you can plan all you want, but real things happen at execution, when the rubber meets the road. — 00:12:26
  • ★★★ Planned sensibly, the first cohort of Ali's Part-Time YouTuber Academy would have taken about six months to plan; in reality it took about two weeks, and then they put the course out to see what happens and iterated, in a scrappy-startup way. — 00:12:26 · Part-Time YouTuber Academy
  • ★★ Ali is not personally a massive advocate of lots of goal setting and arbitrary deadlines, but says it clearly seems to work for Elon Musk, whose ambition is much greater than his. — 00:13:15

00:13:32 — Final lesson: focus on what's important; sign-off

  • ★★ Elon Musk (quoted): In a commencement speech Elon Musk advises focusing on signal over noise: Tesla has never spent any money on advertising, putting it all into R&D, manufacturing and design. — 00:13:44 · Tesla
  • ★★★ Ali says to focus on the important 20% of activities that drive 80% of the results, always asking whether you are doing what actually drives results or what merely feels and looks like work. — 00:13:44
  • ★★★ In the book he is working on, Ali explores the idea that when we see work as having to be hard and suffering, we imagine things harder than they are and spin our wheels doing what looks like work. — 00:14:21

Threads in this video

Where the stories that moved here went next

Mentioned

Central: Elon Musk · Elon Musk: Tesla, SpaceX, and the Quest for a Fantastic Future

Also: People: Mark Zuckerberg · Sriram Krishnan · Steve Jobs · Tim Urban

Projects: Part-Time YouTuber Academy

Works: Feel-Good Productivity (book) · Wait But Why

Organizations: Andreessen Horowitz · Reddit · SpaceX · Tesla

Concepts: 80/20 rule · funeral technique · gravestone technique · micro-scheduling · pixel theory · stretch goals · time-blocking · Wikipedia technique

Products: Apple Notes · Evernote · Kindle · Notion · Roam Research · Tesla Roadster · Things 3 · Todoist

Only in the description or credits: Ashlee Vance

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