Book: 20210101 to 20210122, "Elon Musk" by Vance, Ashlee

20210101 - 1. Elon's world

In my opinion, Elon Musk is not like Henry Ford, Thomas Edison, Howard Hughes or Steve Jobs. He is more like a computer. Half computer, half human.

What he said is right. The shocking thing is his executive power for long term. He never forget his ultimate goal. What he did is always around the final goal.

Riley's parties verified one thing: stimulation doesn't let people relax or recover. Money doesn't help. Psychotherapy or meditation should work better.

Elon Musk is also lucky.

a. The conditions for atom and bit integration are all there. But he is the best person to combine these two parts.

b. Talented people get bored with current technical companies' innovations. They want to make real change of the world.

c. There are plenty of cash in the market looking for opportunities.

20210102 - 2. Africa

How to maintain the prosperity of a family for hundreds of years? 

a. Encourage every generation to read.

b. Marry "smart" person to improve gene.

"Introducing NLP" says that we can improve memory through multiple senses. For example, memorize word spelling through "photo" instead of pronunciation. If we encourage children to practice it, then they would get pretty good memory in the rest of their life. This is exciting!

Don't stay in terrible environment! Or else our energy and time would be wasted in meaningless struggling/fighting.

20210102 - 3. Canada

Everyone likes playing video games. Some people wasted a lot of time, and some people became great entrepreneur. Why?

Maybe, it's like delicious food. Everyone likes it, but some enjoy it, and some got diabetes and obesity.

Another thing I noticed is that entrepreneurs are not afraid of trying. No matter it is talking to strangers, or building a new companies. They just do it. (at minimum cost)

Genesis are rare. But not so rare in first class universities.

20210103 - 4. Elon's first start-up

Even with all the talent and luck, people still need the basic fund to build their companies. Without the US$28k support from their father, I doubt how the Elon brothers can make it. For $30 per hour job, which means maybe $10 per hour savings, $28k saved then at least 1500 hours, which means 1500/40=37 weeks. Eventually they will make it, but it would be much slower.

No one knows how to manage other people at the very beginning. The key is, how fast we can learn.

Normally we need to sacrifice a bit of individual productivity to let the team going forward.

Investors only care about short term profit. They don't have vision, in most cases.

20210104 - 5. PayPal mafia boss

It is said that Elon Musk is willing to take relentless risk. I don't think so.

a. He has perfect perception of this world, and we are in the mist. The risk to him is not as high as the risk to the rest of us.

b. His capability is very strong. In the worst case, if he lost everything, he still can reboot again in a few years, and become another billionaire.

His vision seems always correct. That's amazing.

And, he always focus on long term goal. For short term, some of his behavior seems weird, but after a few years, people start to realize why he did those things.

20210106 - 6. Mice in space

How to find a lot of right people? Find the right communities. Everyone has relationship network. Ace people know ace people.

But ace people only respect ace people.

How to become ace people? Think ahead, think all the time. Only follow the first principle.

Even Elon Musk didn't know the approach. He knew the rough direction, and then tried to make each step perfect. Luck is still important, but not really critical. If he failed with SpaceX, I believe he would try again with some more buffer(fund, time, etc.).

Enemy/competitor is everywhere. It's always hard to get things done. But if every step is good, it's hard for other people to beat you.

20210108 - 7. All electric

When the most talented people with enough fund support join together to build EV, how hard it would be? Well, it's still extremely hard.

Manufacturing is completely different software development. The reality doesn't bent to willingness. Elon Musk doesn't know how to manage manufacturing. He also needs time to learn.

"I want you to think ahead and think so hard every day that your head hurts. I want your head to hurt every night when you go to bed."   --- Elon Musk told his employees. This is what Alpha people do. I know this is possible, because I did that from time to time when struggling with software development issues.

20210110 - 8. Pain, suffering and survival

Like Lucy said (in movie "Lucy"), what would happen when people confront with endless pain? They are not able of handling anything else properly.

Not Elon Musk. How did he do that?!

Elon Musk is smart and lucky, and more tough than anyone else.

We are not Elon Musk, so what we can do is to prepare more buffer, and plan B.

20210114 - 9. Liftoff

If the goal is correct, quite often the hardest way is the best way.

Many people enjoy working 80+ hours per week. But how to find and keep them? That's out of my understanding. :-)

Is 40 hour per week work really necessary? I think most of the leisure time is actually wasted. That means, a large part of our lives is wasted. So, reading is a very good way of killing time.

Without Elon Musk's companies, the US's power would drop drastically.

20210117 - 10. The revenge of the electric car

Things are not under our control. We can only/should increase the probability of winning, but keep in mind that nothing can guarantee the win. So, be careful of "Black Swan".

This is also correct for Elon Musk, although he has perfect perception, extremely high IQ, so many talented young engineers, never forget the ultimate goal, etc.

To some extent, risk management is as important as earning profit.

20210121 - 11. The unified field theory of Elon Musk

Elon Musk is so talented. Maybe similar person only appear once per one hundred years.

He has perfect memory. Love reading. Expert in almost all area. Combined all expertise together. Always keep long term goal in mind. Never give up. No ego towards anything wrong. Don't get distracted by emotions. On and on and on.

Lucky I stand with him.

Creativity is important. But good idea itself doesn't mean anything.

So many excellent experts make mistakes in something they don't know much, and they are not aware of this problem. How to avoid this type of error? Don't trust our intuition, and verify it. This process is hard and time consuming, but it's the only way to minimize the errors.

20210122 - Epilogue

Spirit, identity, perception, capability, behavior, environment.

Elon Musk is no doubt at "identity" level.

Ashlee Vance doesn't really understand Elon Musk. He cannot imagine what it is like to think like a computer, which purely relies on rationality.

Think ahead, think hard.