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Failure As A Tool
If we look at the number of failures and setbacks in Elon Musk’s life, we begin to see why he is so successful.
The Tesla and Space X CEO uses failure as a tool towards eventual success, if at all. It is a non-linear path to innovation, which involves starting from the first principle, which is obtained by breaking down all the unessential parts and getting down to the fundamental truth.
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Early Years Of Elon Musk
- Right from childhood, Elon Musk preferred books over people, often devouring them at one go.
- He was an introvert and a deep thinker and began to gather deep insights about life and how to shape humanity and the future of mankind.
- Musk eventually developed a practical and efficient approach towards goals and carried the drive to follow through.
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Reaching Goals By Embracing Failure
Elon Musk shows the world how big, audacious goals can be achieved by dividing them into smaller milestones and embracing failure and negative feedback.
His goals are not something he is doing for the media circus, but something in which he is emotionally committed. Goals work when they are bigger than ourselves, enhancing our commitment and responsibility towards them.
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Optimal Milestones
Most long-term goals are intimidating, and the mind can feel overwhelmed, resulting in demotivation. If the goal is too easy, the mind feels bored.
The optimum state of productivity, known as ‘flow’ occurs when the activity in question is reasonably challenging, but not too hard. Slicing the larger mission into smaller milestones which have the right amount of challenge makes one enjoy the process and stay on track.
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The Necessity Of Failure
- Failure is generally looked down upon but is necessary for success.
- Failure is a learning mechanism that eliminates what didn’t work and provides a clear path towards a way to achieve success.
- Fear of failure is what kills motivation, as we believe it is an outcome to avoid, and do not look at it as a tool to harness.
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Albert Einstein worked at a Swiss patent office, a rather uninspiring place relative to his interest in physics. Between the hours he spent on the job, he also dedicated hours to scientific work. He was deliberate in his commitment to creation, which led to the formulation of the two fundamental theories in physics: general relativity and quantum mechanics.
Seeking connections between existing ideas
Creativity is not equivalent to originality. Creativity is just a new way of combining old ideas.
Albert Einstein saw invention as a product of "combinatory play." He would separate his existing ideas from language, so he could freely visualise and mix these known elements of information to arrive at some new logically connected concept.
Chess Is More Than a Game
Chess first originated in its early form more than 1,500 years ago in India or China, but the modern variant has been around since the 15th century.
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Ask the Right Questions to Narrow Focus
- When novice players play chess, they focus on what to do with the pieces. They may try and visualise a few steps ahead, but mostly just react to the board without considering the reasons behind the pieces.
- Professional chess players focus on how their opponents think. They seek to ask the right questions to understand their opponent's process.
Whether in chess or life, don't be fooled by what's on the surface. The best approach is to have a framework in place to trim the fat and focus on what matters. Ask enough pointed questions to lead you to clear answers.
Balance Calculation with Imagination
In chess, students learn famous patterns and tactics. If an opponent does one thing, you are expected to react with another.
While it is good to recognize appropriate cues and employ the tactics you have learned, sometimes it is good to look towards where you want to end up and fill the gaps in a new way rather than using the past to move in a predictable direction.
The two states of being: surviving and thriving
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The gap between surviving and thriving
There is a gap between the state of surviving and thriving that needs to be closed before a thriving life can be embraced.
In the modern world, our senses are abused by artificial lights, sounds, and smells in the cities we live in. Our media devices fill us with more helpful and useless information that we can consume in multiple lifetimes. Our problem is not with the abundance, but that we don't know how to manage all of this.
What successful people have in common
When the most successful people were interviewed in the 1990s, they all shared one commonality: They were incredibly complex people. They were both differentiated and integrated.
They were differentiated because they took it on themselves to get exposed to the world. They were integrated because they learned to make sense of this diverse absorption.