"Skills can be taught, but changing a mindset requires rewiring the brain."

"Delete, delete, delete. If you don't end up reintroducing 10% of what you delete, you didn't cut enough."

Musk often applies “first principles thinking,” which involves breaking down problems into their simplest elements and building solutions from scratch

First Principles Thinking

„Persistence is very important. You should not give up unless you are forced to give up."

Helps him ignore distracting stimuli and focus completely on work. This state allows him to shut down emotions and distractions.Key ideas:<ul><li>Focus on Priorities: Musk can concentrate on the most important tasks, ignoring issues that do not directly impact his primary goals.</li><li>Emotional Detachment: Musk often shuts off emotions that might distract him</li><li>Limiting Distractions: He creates a work environment free from unnecessary stimuli, enabling his teams to focus intensely on work. </li><li> </li><li> He divides the day into short five-minute blocks, forcing himself to be as efficient as possible</li></ul>

Mental Sludge

“Failure is an option here. If things are not failing, you are not innovating enough.”

Musk is know for his intense approach to work, both for himself and his teams Key Ideas:<ul><li>Extreme Work Hours: Musk’s “ultra hardcore mode” involves working nearly nonstop, often up to 80–100 hours a week</li><li>Intense Deadlines and High Expectations: Musk sets what are often considered “insane” deadlines, asking teams to deliver in weeks what other companies might take months or even years to complete. </li><li>Tolerance for Failure but Demand for Learning: While Musk allows for failures—seeing them as inevitable in high-stakes innovation—he expects quick adaptation and improvement.</li></ul>

Ultra Hardcore Mode

Most important quotes and key ideas from Elon Musk biography

From the author of Steve Jobs and other bestselling biographies, this is the astonishingly intimate story of the most fascinating and controversial innovator of our era—a rule-breaking visionary who helped to lead the world into the era of electric vehicles, private space exploration, and artificial intelligence. Oh, and took over Twitter. When Elon Musk was a kid in South Africa, he was regularly beaten by bullies. One day a group pushed him down some concrete steps and kicked him until his face was a swollen ball of flesh. He was in the hospital for a week. But the physical scars were minor compared to the emotional ones inflicted by his father, an engineer, rogue, and charismatic fantasist. His father’s impact on his psyche would linger. He developed into a tough yet vulnerable man-child, prone to abrupt Jekyll-and-Hyde mood swings, with an exceedingly high tolerance for risk, a craving for drama, an epic sense of mission, and a maniacal intensity that was callous and at times destructive. At the beginning of 2022—after a year marked by SpaceX launching thirty-one rockets into orbit, Tesla selling a million cars, and him becoming the richest man on earth—Musk spoke ruefully about his compulsion to stir up dramas. “I need to shift my mindset away from being in crisis mode, which it has been for about fourteen years now, or arguably most of my life,” he said. It was a wistful comment, not a New Year’s resolution. Even as he said it, he was secretly buying up shares of Twitter, the world’s ultimate playground. Over the years, whenever he was in a dark place, his mind went back to being bullied on the playground. Now he had the chance to own the playground. For two years, Isaacson shadowed Musk, attended his meetings, walked his factories with him, and spent hours interviewing him, his family, friends, coworkers, and adversaries. The result is the revealing inside story, filled with amazing tales of triumphs and turmoil, that addresses the question: are the demons that drive Musk also what it takes to drive innovation and progress?

productivity

Productivity

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Remote Work

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Business

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Books

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Human Resources

Walter Isaacson, a professor of history at Tulane, has been CEO of the Aspen Institute, chair of CNN, and editor of Time. He is the author of 'Leonardo da Vinci; The Innovators; Steve Jobs; Einstein: His Life and Universe; Benjamin Franklin: An American Life; and Kissinger: A Biography, and the coauthor of The Wise Men: Six Friends and the World They Made. Visit him at Isaacson.Tulane.edu and on Twitter at @WalterIsaacson

First Principles Thinking

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