How to apply Elon Musk’s secret sauce🚀 🍅

Each week I like to identify bite sized morsels that focus building your knowledge in business, technology & performance. This week I’ve covered how to apply Elon Musk’s secret sauce.

Image: Matt Cherubino

How to apply Elon Musk’s secret sauce —

The importance of goal setting, strategy and first principle thinking is incredibly important. After writing about it briefly here, I finally have a brilliantly researched, articulated and thought out piece by Wait But Why to support it. In this case, Tim Urban has used the example of Elon Musk and how he believes Elon views the world.

So what’s the secret sauce? Elon Musk sees humans as computers. We roughly all have the same hardware (DNA) with different polymorphisms. But our software (or operating system) is what can truly differ, and this is where Elon differs. The analogy Tim uses is the Flood Geologists v Scientific Geologists that existed back in the 1600’s. Flood geologists believed that the world was created by God 6,000 years ago and all hills/mountains/valleys were formed during the great Noah Flood. Whereas scientific geologists used evidence & reason to highlight that the world was far older than that, eventually proving to be billions of years old thanks to the discovery of carbon dating. Tim emphasises that the way most humans think, live, and make decisions is more in line with the 0.09% of flood geologists — i.e. totally irrational and never literal.

So how do we be as effective as Musk? You must view your software as something that is upgradeable; it can continuously be improved with first principles thinking & iteration. First principles is a process of starting from what evidence you have, then building a conclusion from that. I.e. I think the Earth looks flat, but now we have these new techniques & data to prove whether it is or not — let’s investigate. I can’t reiterate how important that mindset & process is, it has helped me immeasurably over the last year. The core to utilising this mentality & process of development is starting with the building blocks of your OS (Want Box, Reality Box, Goal Pool, Strategy Formation, and Macro adjustments).

Image: Wait But Why

Now that you have your OS, how do you support it? Well, the key to your tech support is the mindset. You cannot fall into a mindset of dogma and tribes. Instead, you must use the analogy of the cook & chef; the cook will follow recipes laid by those before him (even though said recipes are 30 years too dated), whereas a Chef will look at each problem and tackle it with the new technology, ingredients and resources that are available. Once she’s updated her idea of the problem, this iterates through to the Wants, Goals, Strategy & so forth. Without it, you will never progress, and remain the same.

The critical aspects that Tim argues of being a “chef” like Elon is to realise a few things:

a) you don’t know everything

b) no one else knows everything

c) you’re playing grand theft life (that is, it’s your choice what to do)

Everyone should also be wary of misconceptions that prevent most getting to “chef” status, particularly those of misplaced fears & identities and the most likely to hold you back.

So what’s the key takeaway in all of this? Just as Tim reiterates in his article, I don’t know there’s one measurable thing to take away. We’re not all perfect, but we now know how exceptionally high performers, like Elon, view their life. You often see this in podcasts like Tim Ferriss’ or Joe Rogan. The top performers are always improving, nothing immovable is immovable in their reality. I’ve personally always had that mindset — not because I necessarily want to be a strong performer all the time, but because I don’t want just to take “because” as an answer, I want to know why. If you want to improve yourself, then it’s important to move to the chef side of the spectrum of life. You have to remember you have software, not just hardware that defines who you are for the rest of your life. Reasoning is a skill that can be improved over a very long life.

Image: Fast Company

Random Morsels to get smarter

The key to having a toolkit of generalist skills is to read outside of your competency in challenging topics. Here is a list of our top reads for the week:

• How the Sugar Industry Shifted Blame to Fat. This article by the New York Times is an insightful look into how the sugar producing industries of America paid researchers to play down the link between heart disease & sugar, instead of promoting saturated fat as the culprit. The fact is your body requires saturated fat & cholesterol for cell development, and it has no direct correlation with heart diseases. Research and the general public is slowly waking up to this, and hopefully the succession of articles around this released help.
• Shipping Vs Learning. Many entrepreneurs & companies push the idea of metrics being the be all and end all of “crushing” it. Just because you’ve hit a metric for the sake of it, doesn’t mean you’ve achieved anything. What’s often used in defence of the metric is that “we know this correlates to X and works”, when in fact, there isn’t a real correlation. So what to use instead? Learning, organisations that learn quickest succeed over the longest period — simply because they’re the fastest to iterate and move forward with what works.
• Humans Not Need Apply. Brilliant YouTube video by “CCP Grey” on the imminent coming of automation & artificial intelligence, fantastic visualisation on what can and will be possible. In essence, we’re replacing organic minds with inorganic minds — much like with the industrial revolution replacing organic muscle with inorganic (mechanical) minds.

Thanks for reading,

Jordan Michaelides

We’re Single Partners; our mission is to 10x the output of entrepreneurs & investors through using artificial intelligence (AI), its supporting technologies & business models. We create content for our community that builds your knowledge in these areas.

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