Arjun Khemani

Elon Musk. Founder, CEO and Chief Engineer at SpaceX. Early investor, CEO and Product Architect at Tesla. Founder of The Boring Company. Co-Founder of Neuralink and OpenAI. One of the greatest entrepreneurs in history and in the top among the richest people in the world. He wants to make humans a multiplanetary species by sending them to Mars. That also makes him one of my favorite people in the world.

Elon Musk has achieved wonders. Far beyond wonders, actually. His achievements are scattered in completely different industries from space to solar energy and EV’s and tunnels and whatnot. And he still wants to thrive for more. His list of the things he wants to achieve in life is never-ending. His biggest goal is to send humans on Mars and that I think is the most fascinating goal to ever have. And even more fascinating to be talking about.

I’ve read a lot about Elon—his best-selling biography by Ashlee Vance. The story about the desperate early days of his company SpaceX written by Eric Berger and countless other articles and news about the incredible individual. And I never get tired of telling people how great I think Elon Musk is. On top of that, I think we can even learn a lot from the amazing entrepreneur who dreams big and accomplishes—those inconceivable dreams for some —almost always.

There’s possibly a million things to learn from him but I’ll stick to the bigger and important ones. Still it’ll take me a lot of time and space to write so stay tuned for part 2 of this article (Article 006). In any case, let’s dive right in. Things we can learn from Elon Musk:

1. Minimize task switching by focusing on only one thing at a time: OK, this may sound counter-intuitive since Elon Musk probably has businesses in the most scattered industries any man can comprehend always hustling in between Tesla, SpaceX and whatnot, but bare with me for a minute. Elon Musk very snappily has blocked days in his calendar throughout the week. Blocked days, yes. So, simply he blocks three days for SpaceX and three days for Tesla. Where he (in most cases) will only focus on the work he has planned. He won’t go to the Tesla factory on his SpaceX days and vice-versa. About his other relatively small businesses, he’ll find some time in between to work for them. I think this is very smart and required really for a person with so many responsibilities to handle and big things to do everyday. Many of us complain about not having enough time to do stuff, but we really do have time, we just need to observe where we’re spending our time on a particular day and we’ll easily see how much time we just let pass everyday doing nothing productive. (An average person spends two hours a day on social media. Think what you can do with 600 extra hours a year) Elon Musk has done so much while having 7 kids, 4 different relationships and in between so many other difficult crises and responsibilities. But he manages his time very well. And I think that’s one of the most crucial things to his success and achieving so much in just a single lifetime with more to come for sure. Research even shows that multi-tasking and constant task switching drains a person more than merely focusing on one task for a long duration of time. This may well be one of the reasons why Elon, as he has said in many interviews, was able to work 90-100 hours a week while starting out with x.com and PayPal. So focusing on one thing at a time and giving it a hundred percent of your attention—that’s something that’s really valuable and which can make you get more work done. And it’s just one of the things we can learn and implement from the incredible guy.

2. Dream bigger than people can even comprehend… and then believe: This may sound cliché, but it’s important. Elon Musk is just a man who started out with a dream. (Many people do, many fail too.) People thought he was crazy when he put all his money he got from selling PayPal into such “dangerous ventures”. But the fact is Elon always believed in himself and his goals. He believed that the private sector could play a huge role in space. He believed in electric cars and investing in clean energy. It didn’t matter to him what others thought of his ideas. He just teamed up with some other big dreamers, employed them and made that big of an empire that the people who doubted him could never even comprehend. And even now people doubt about us going to Mars anytime soon. I don’t, really. I believe we can. And there’s a big probability that Musk’s company SpaceX takes the first humans to Mars.

Part 2 out now