Arjun Khemani

In Part 1 we looked at how Elon Musk focuses more easily by minimizing his task switching and only focusing on one company at a time and how he dreams bigger than comprehensible for some—and then believes in his dreams and works on achieving them.

Let’s pick up where we left from:

3. Look for solving problems not money: Many people approach business like, “How can I make as much money as possible?” Maybe a better way to look at it is by asking, “How can I solve the many problems faced by people face in their lives?” And then if all is right, people would want to give you money anyway! Musk understood this theory very early in life where most of his businesses if you see are about solving huge issues. PayPal made online transfer of money possible and made it way easier to do. SpaceX started out on solving the problem of the rockets prices being too expensive. SpaceX lowered the rocket price dramatically. Tesla, well, it’s relatively great for the planet. SolarCity is also relatively great for the planet. Musk got around $180 million dollars from PayPal. Put $100 million into SpaceX, another $70 million in Tesla. At that time, he didn’t care about the money. Okay, he did also buy a McLaren “Supercar”, but all in all he wanted to fulfill his dreams ad solve problems and make the world a better place.

4. Make work-ethic feed on passion and be intense: Musk loves his work. The intense amount of work-ethic he has, (literally sleeping on his couch in his office, working 90 hours a week) is certainly fueled by has passion and drive for his incredible work. He gets to do it, he doesn’t have to. That’s really important because work can sometimes feel like a burden or something you have to do. It’s not like that with Musk. He loves his job which probably allows him to work insane hours at a single time. In his biography, there was an incident when Musk got sick when he was on vacation. Not doing anything, or relaxing, actually made Musk’s health deteriorate (at least in the short-term) and not working long hours does. Well there may be other factors, but that’s how I perceived it. Anyway, with the fuel of passion driving his work-ethic is a certain amount of healthy intensity when he works. Many people try to be intense while working and eventually burn out later. Not Musk. His intensity comes from his passion for his work and the working steadfast on only one task at a time. That makes him have some positive intensity which actually is a really good state of mind to be working in.

Obviously there’s so much more to be learned from Elon Musk. Like you can learn anything you want to, mostly for free. You don’t need a formal education to learn stuff. And that working hard on the right things do pay off eventually. Undeniably, countless other lessons can be learned from the amazing man himself. These were only a few ones that I found prominent.

Bibliography and credits: Here’s a few places from where I adopted some ideas written in this article—

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n2AUckK70cc