How Elon Musk Works 100 Hours A Week
“If you need inspiring words, you should not do it” Elon Musk
Ah, the weekend. Work is over. Relaxation is the only to-do. Right?
Well, Elon didn’t get to where he is today by taking the weekend off.
With the rigorous demands of being a visionary, he is one entrepreneur that struggles to separate work life and home life. The e-mails never stop coming, the calls never cease, and everything reminds you of the work you weren’t able to finish.
It’s absurd to think that he once failed to even land a job for Netscape.
Netscape used to the dominant web browser back in the 90’s until the browser war killed them.
Elon was one of those who thought very early on that the internet would change the world in a dramatic fashion.
…and so he went for it.
Fortune certainly does favor the bold.
Elon Musk went on to start Zip2, a web software company and ended up selling to Compaq for $307 million in 1999.
Entrepreneurs don’t need motivation to start each day.
Real entrepreneurs have a tendency to dive into their dreams.
They’re unafraid of failure.
If you have a willingness to fail, then what you can do next is to ramp up your rate of experimentation.
Not all your dreams are going to be realised.
If you have mastered the fear of failing, then success is the only other way you could end up.
Actually doing something worthwhile comes at the risk of failure.
Doing what you love is a good place to start.
But first you must understand the art of the transition.
This is the key.
It is not about hitting the nail on the head on your first try.
It’s taking each step forward, moving into the next phase and repeating day in and out until you succeed.
Elon proves that you have to actually fail your way to success.
He has the resume to prove it.
…from being ousted from his own companies, to rocket explosions and standing at the brink of bankruptcy.
He didn’t want to be known as a failure.
So he just worked like hell. Put in 80–100 hours every week.
This only improves his odds of success.
Most would just buy an island in the Bahamas and retreat for the next decade or so.
He simply leveraged his interest from the sale of Zip2 and then from Paypal to challenge the auto and space industry. He now pioneers in both of them. Industries that are largely bogged down by bureaucracy and legacy technologies from the past.
To Elon, does working 100 hours a week feel like a chore? No. He is LIVING the dream.
I leaped straight out of Engineering school and into the fray of internet marketing back in 2011.
I was taught all kinds of methods; Article marketing, affiliate marketing, setting up websites, facebook, etc.
I tried maybe dozens of strategies just to stay afloat without an income. I would send out 10 or 20 emails and messages a day to various bloggers, gurus, marketers, business owners, everywhere.
100% failure. Hundreds of rejections. It was just white noise. And I was on the verge of giving up. I was simply depressed and desperate.
But I figured, let me start writing for content mills and make a quick buck from places like Fiverr.
Then, let’s also try networking with a company called bHIP. I started pitching friends and family to join.
They said, “No, no, no.”
Then adversity hit me like a brick wall. I was stuck in this darkness that seems to never end.
I could have wallowed in self-pity and regret. But I chose to pick myself up and bounce back stronger than ever.
From my hospital bed, i devised a simple but strict plan. Publish at least 10 books a month for the next 6 months.
Amazon KDP became my one and only FOCUS. I started publishing all kinds of books. I tried all kinds of niches, from “how to buy boats” to “setting up your own home theater.” I even wrote one about homebrewing beer.
Those books are still selling today. Eventually I published over 200 short books from guides to entertainment. I reached 4 figures a month even before I reached 100 books.
Published one book and another book. 400 books later, I grew my online publishing business to over 6-figures a year.
“I admire your stamina. As the going gets tough, the tough gets going.” a friend told me. I told myself, this isn’t my final destination. It is but a stepping stone to something bigger and better.
“Those who have a ‘why’ to live, can bear with almost any ‘how’.”
Understand that life is about crossing bridges. You never know which type of bridges you need to cross.
Success rarely happens by choosing which bridges to cross. Maybe it did for Bill gates and Warren Buffett. But they’re two in a billion.
I wish I was there when the internet first started.
I wish I was there when Amazon first introduced self-publishing.
I wish I was there when Bitcoin was cost just $100.
There is no such thing as choosing which bridge to cross.
One bad idea after another and another will only help you to get rid of those bad ideas.
You have to work at it and ply your trade in different ways. Don’t nitpick.
Understand that you are just planting seeds at the very beginning.
You need to for those ideas to combine, meet and mate.
When ideas have sex, you will gradually begin to see the collective enterprise.
Respect the transition. Elon Musk clearly understood this. Repeat until you achieve success.
When you are not a slave to the future, a future which you can never predict, you can then FOCUS in the doing and not the moaning.
Success from hard work is only a by-product and an unintended side-effect of one’s dedication towards a greater cause.
You can only achieve that in the long run, simply by not caring about it. In the words of Viktor Frankl, “success will follow you precisely because you had forgotten to think of it.”
Discover more LIFEHACKS from the Man behind the Iron Musk in this Special Featured Issue. Get the Free Promo Code to Subscribe to the Magazine for Free here.
Originally published at thinkmaverick.com on October 14, 2017.
