How does Elon Musk study?
Everyone knows that Elon is the best student in the world. He has trained and achieved success in three different business areas – SpaceX, Tesla and PayPal. Elon talks a lot about training, but I decided to dig under the hood of his short tips.
How does he learn?
What rules does it apply?
How can we use it?
All this will be inside this article. And I will show you where Elon is wrong when he talks about his motivation.
Elon Musk uses a unique first principle method for learning.
©Physics, you know, is a kind of reasoning based on the first principle.
So, the essence of the first principle method: you take a giant piece of knowledge and divide it into smaller ones.
Let's try it on the example of playing the guitar. If playing guitar is a full-fledged skill that we want to have, we need to divide it into several sub-skills.
So, the first one will be a fight.
Clarity of chords
Chord speed
Instead of mastering a giant skill, you divide it into micro skills. And the fewer subskills you can take, the better and more convenient. And then you train not the guitar playing in general, but specifically the strumming or the speed of the performance.
The most striking example where all of humanity uses the first principle method is the gym. Almost no one trains the whole body. Everyone trains individual muscle groups, such as biceps, triceps, and so on. This is the mechanics of applying the first principle method.
Now remember an ordinary English lesson: they are not divided into listening, speaking, grammar. There, usually everyone is trying to listen, correct grammar, and learn new words at the same time.
This is completely different from what Elon says.
Dividing skills into subskills can only be understood if you clearly understand the purpose of why you are learning.
And this is not at all the goal that coaches/teachers often tell us. Because there is a global error here. So Musk says:
©The view that I see emerging in education is that human teachers do not explain why children are being taught a particular subject.
And they don’t just not say why. They sometimes explain that you need mathematics to get into university, and English will be useful to you when you travel. But they don't speak the language the audience needs to hear.
Imagine a typical second grader who goes to study math and wonders why I need math? To which the teacher gives him, as it seems to the teacher, a completely logical answer. It will be useful at university. A second-grader has no idea what a university is, what will happen if I fail, what difference does it make to me what will happen in 10 years.
You know, 10 years ago I was 20 years old and I wanted to play sports. I read a bunch of articles and content, and when I was asked the question, why do you exercise, I answered, as I often read in these smart articles, for health. The fact is that at the age of 20, my health was fine, I had no obvious problems, and certainly not such that I spent several hours a week trying to correct them. Now, at 30, I understand much more what sports is for health. I have a bad back, and sometimes my knees creak. This became a more obvious motivation. But at 20, I needed to explain things completely differently. So I studied for 2-3 months and quit for the next two years.
It would be desirable for someone smart to tell me: “buddy, do you want to show off in front of girls or other guys”? I would nod very hysterically. And then it would be a much brighter, understandable and suitable goal for my age and level of consciousness.
It is important to understand that the energy for any activity is allocated to us by the body, not the brain. The brain understands perfectly well that sports are cool, useful and healthy. But it is not he who decides where energy is released and where not.
To release this energy in order to receive it from the body, you need to explain it to the body – the Amygdala. It is this part that is responsible for emotions and it is emotions that give us energy for different activities.
The Amygdala doesn't care what happens in 10 years. She needs to understand the benefits of action here and now. If I tell my body that I work out in the gym so that I can walk around afterwards and feel awesome because everyone is looking at me and saying how cool my muscles are, it will understand this perfectly well.
Therefore, when we talk, especially about ourselves, we must clearly understand why our body needs to do what we want RIGHT NOW. This is the right goal.
And after setting the right goal, you need to start. Usually it’s as difficult as possible to start, but we always start one lesson super easy.
We need to make learning a video game, says Elon Musk.
©As a rule, education should be as close as possible to video games, a good video game. Like you don't have to tell your kid to play video games.
Have you ever had to convince your children to play a computer game? Game makers themselves are amazing psychologists. They understand perfectly how easy it is to engage, how to retain and how to extend the time that the player spends in this very game as long as possible. It is advisable for us to understand and apply this knowledge for ourselves. For your tasks – sports, for English, reading, for anything else.
One of the interesting things about games is that you can finish almost at any time. You can play for two minutes, 22 or 202. We don’t treat sports, running, or reading that way. When we go to play sports, we don't talk, I'll get bored and stop.
No, you definitely need to train for an hour, two, three hours. We are not saying that I will spend five minutes studying English and then do whatever I want. No, if we spent less than yesterday, we are usually unhappy, angry, we scold ourselves.
Imagine that the game would interfere with you, lag, close and display some angry messages that you are playing incorrectly if you played less. Do you think there would be a big chance that you would return to this game?
Therefore, the excellent student syndrome, the desire to do perfectly, maximum every day – let’s get all this to hell, it’s not in video games. And this brings us only harm.
And once we get rid of this, we need to understand where exactly to start.
Here we have a skill, it is broken down into small parts. Okay, how can you study them as efficiently as possible?
And here is the secret of how Musk chooses what exactly and how to study.
©You know, here's the engine, now let's take it apart. How are we going to parse this? Oh, you need a screwdriver. That's what a screwdriver is for. You need a wrench. That's what a wrench is for.
He sets himself the ultimate goal. I want to understand how the engine works so I can rebuild it and make it for a rocket. To do this, I need to disassemble it and see its component parts. I take a screwdriver for this, the most suitable tool.
If we take some other skill as an example, such as public speaking, then we need to dive in and understand:
Okay, so I’m going to speak publicly, what’s the first thing stopping me from doing this?
And, of course, I’m sweating, I’m nervous, I’m scared. Then the first tool will be
– fight against fear. Not memorizing texts, not honing a million cool skills, because under stress you’ll forget them all to hell. The first thing you need to do is get rid of fear.
And we choose the most disturbing point that blocks us. For example, if we speak English and forget words, then we learn not to forget the words. They forget words out of the same fear and stress. Instead of learning another 1000 words in order to score them too.
If we play the guitar and we don't have perfect strumming and we don't practice chords, we only train strumming.
To act on these goals, to use these tools, Elon needs tons of energy. Where does he get them? What is it charging with?
Elon Musk's motivation: “If I fail, I'll die” And with this phrase he explains exactly what gives him the strength to move.
In fact, we could barely scrape together enough parts and money to make a fourth launch. If the fourth launch had failed, we would have been dead.
Of course he's exaggerating. It is clear that if he goes bankrupt, he will not die. He will return to some mansion to his friends and parents. And everything won't be so bad.
But, nevertheless, for him it will be a public death. He will lose everything. He fears her like fire. It is clearly evident from him that he is very dependent on public opinion. And that’s exactly why he always publicly tries to look cool and cool. And what feeds this mechanism is not motivation, as he often says. This is not discipline at all, as I would like to believe. It's forced. He can't lose. Otherwise death.
Why then does it work for him, but not for us?
Very easy to explain. He is ready to put everything on the line. He bets all his money on two companies and divides it. He is one step away from ruin. And he is ready to risk it. Are we ready?
If we want to learn English, we need to move to America. Quit your job today. Close all accounts in Russian banks. Pack all your things, sell your apartment and go to America. This will be the level of compulsion that will give us enough energy to master English.
Take 10 thousand dollars, give it to a trusted friend. Just say: “If I don’t work out in the gym for a year and don’t lose 50 kilograms, under no circumstances give it back to me.” And only in this case your compulsion will also work.
Elon is ready to make such a bet. The question is, are we ready? There are, of course, other, more effective options, such as discipline and a habit framework.
You won't be able to travel far if you're forced to, unless you keep raising the stakes. Elon can afford it.
But we often don’t succeed because there is fear and self-blame for mistakes.
SpaceX and Elon Musk suffered three major global failures before achieving their first small success.
Imagine you are announcing something loudly: ©“In three years I will launch a cheap rocket, everyone will be able to fly on it, and so on.”. This is Elon Musk in the early 2000s. More than six years later, only the first successful launch is achieved. Everyone laughs at him for a very long time, and he can get over it.
Failure doesn't really matter unless it's catastrophic. Everything is fine.
Imagine if he blamed himself for each of his mistakes, along with the society that makes it. Motivation, any energy would have ended long ago. It is impossible to last this long on energy when everyone is putting pressure on you, and you are doing exactly the same thing without supporting yourself. Therefore, Elon does not blame himself for mistakes; he reacts to mistakes as if they were a mathematical equation.
So what do I think about these things? So, there is simply a certain period of time and during this time you want to get the best end result. Thus, for the entire set of actions that you can take, there are bound to be some that fail and some that succeed. And you want the net benefit of your set of actions to be as high as possible.
If, due to three of my mistakes, I lost 60 million, and from one successful case I gained 80 million, then 20 million plus. Don't care about mistakes. One victory completely overwhelmed them. We psychologically invest much more into a mistake.
We think that we are a stupid person, we have the wrong skills, no knowledge, languages, talent and all this nonsense that emotionally crushes us. And this is exactly what distinguishes us from Elon Musk.
These are the 6 big tips that Elon Musk uses.
