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IDEAS, ELON MUSK

How to Generate Ideas Like Elon Musk

A look into the mind of Elon Musk and his ability to generate ideas.

Benedict Neo Follow

Mar 17 · 8 min read

E lon Musk is a man who needs no introduction. His soaring drive, grit, tenacity,
and passion to change the world has left a big mark on the world today. This
eccentric billionaire managed to conquer four separate fields — Software (Zip 2,
 PayPal),
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which are multibillion-dollar companies, before his mid-40s.

Elon Musk possesses an ingenious mental model and pure grit that provides him the
impetus to achieve his unprecedented success. From promoting Earth’s sustainability
with EVs, providing internet to all parts of the world, to creating the Starship and nuking
Mars, allowing humanity’s existence to perpetuate in case climate change conquers us.

Elon’s “crazy” ideas

This eccentric man has tons of crazy ideas for humanity. After making a fortune from
PayPal in the original dotcom boom, he’s founded Tesla, which popularized the electric
car, and SpaceX, the rocket company that now flies plenty of NASA payloads.

“Good ideas are always crazy until they’re not.”

Two newer companies — the Boring Company, focused on digging holes for transit
tunnels, and NeuraLink, which is developing brain-computer interfaces — also occupy
his time. Then there’s the Hyperloop, the high-speed land travel design he’s encouraged
others to develop.

If you’ve ever thought of becoming Elon Musk, you must think that you would need a
huge amount of capital to be able to do so, but in an interview, he was asked this very
question:

“How can you capitalize on ambitious ideas if you

have very limited financial resources?”
His answer goes like this.

“The great thing about the software or anything which just involves the intellectual capital
of you and your friends is that you can just do it. This is why an internet thing or software
thing is great as an initial company to create”

Relating to his Blastar game, which he created when he was just 12 years old and sold
for $500. Further down the road, In Zip2 and PayPal, Elon was given capital to attempt
to do more capital intensive activities.
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But without any ideas, you won’t have anything, to work on. So the crucial question now
is:

How does he generate all these crazy ideas?

Photo by Timothy Perry on Unsplash

1. Think from a physics standpoint — First-principles approach

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Photo by JESHOOTS.COM on Unsplash

P hysics is a crucial subject that helped humans understand about how the world
works and ponder upon deep, perplexing questions such as what happens to
things in the quantum world and what dark matter is. It’s these contemplations that
teaches a person how to think logically and scientifically.

“Use a first-principles approach to determine the

best way to accomplish something, then pursue it.”
Elon Musk pursued a dual degree in business and physics at the University of
Pennsylvania, where he admittedly said that he enjoyed Physics more than business. In
an interview, Elon said that physics gives him a mental framework for problem-solving,
and teaches him to be willing to admit he’s wrong. In short, he developed first-principles
thinking, which is boiling things down to their fundamental truths and reason up from
there, as opposed to reasoning by analogy.

In an article by Mayo Oshin, he defines first principles thinking as the practice of actively
questioning every assumption you think you ‘know’ about a given problem or scenario —
and then creating new knowledge and solutions from scratch. Almost like a newborn baby.

To illustrate this, before spending billions on his space company, SpaceX, he thought
about how to make rockets substantially cheaper by tearing it apart and fitting in all the
elemental pieces that form a feasible, working rocket.
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Photo by SpaceX on Unsplash

By working through the baseline cost of a standard rocket:

material institutes

weight

cost permit mass

Fuel

He is able to set the limit asymptotically for what a rocket can be. Then, figure out a
creative way to rearrange those elements into a rocket shape then you can achieve a
much better outcome. In lieu of reasoning by analogy and building rockets based on
prior assumptions, beliefs and ‘best practices’ approved by the majority of people, he
decided to build rockets own way — making them 10 times cheaper.

Fast forward to today, as the chief designer of SpaceX, he is certainly doing a fantastic
job. SpaceX is now working closely with NASA, utilizing The Falcon Heavy — the most
powerful rocket ever launched into space — to send astronauts to the moon as well as
his satellites from Starlink.

2. Combing ideas from different industries

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Photo by CJ Dayrit on Unsplash

C ombining two seemingly unrelated ideas together is the underlying factor for
many success stories you hear. It is the central core in creative thinking, allowing
you to develop ideas that double or triple in its original value.

Take Tesla, for example, Elon first has the idea of a battery company, but with the advent
of Artificial Intelligence, he combined AI with batteries and transport and the end result
is the one of the world’s most prominent electric car company along with the most
promising self-driving algorithm that promises level 5 autonomy this year. So, what
started out as a passion for sustainable energy and AI transpired into the world’s leading
electric car company.

To combine ideas, one has to possess multiple skill sets and knowledge. Elon Musk is a
voracious learner and has read dozens of books, with his technique of viewing
knowledge as a semantic tree, he learns faster and better than average people, which
allows him to combine ideas easily.

From the book Elon Musk: How the Billionaire CEO of SpaceX and Tesla is Shaping our
Future, Larry Page, CEO of Alphabet Inc. holds Musk up as a model he wishes others
would emulate — a figure that should be replicated during a time in which the
businessmen and politicians have fixated on short-term, inconsequential goals. He says,

“I don’t think we’re doing a good job as a society deciding what things are really important
to do, I think like we’re just not educating people in this kind of general way. You should
have a pretty broad engineering and scientific background. You should have some
leadership training and a bit of MBA training or knowledge of how to run things, organize
stuff, and raise money. I don’t think most people are doing that, and it’s a big problem.
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these disciplines together, you kind of think differently and can dream of much crazier
things and how they might work. I think that’s really an important thing for the world.
That’s how we make progress.”

Nonetheless, Elon Musk prompts society to understand that in reality, nothing works
perfectly, and there is always struggle in entrepreneurship. Philosophy has a concept
where life is more meaningful when you find a good struggle, something that keeps you
fired, a goal for you to pursue. Thus, Elon spurs everyone to struggle on a solution, and
try a multitude of things. Even though most of them do not work, but occasionally one
does.

Looking back at the early days of SpaceX, how Elon was close to being bankrupt after
three of his launches were complete disasters, he thought that it was over for him. But
miraculously, his fourth launch was successful, and everything else is history.

Action plan

Photo by Taun Stewart on Unsplash

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Two strategies to Idea Generation
policy.
1. First-principles approach

2. Idea fusion

Elon Musk is an extraordinary man, but people like you and I can strive to apply these
two principles in our lives, Elon is human anyways (at least we believe he is), so what he
is doing is nothing supernatural.

There are a few techniques to build First Principles Thinking and this article by Mayo
Oshin provides 3 simple steps:

STEP 1: Identify and define your current assumptions

STEP 2: Breakdown the problem into its fundamental principles.

STEP 3: Create new solutions from scratch

Read more about it below!

Elon Musks’ “3-Step” First Principles Thinking: How to

Think and Solve Di cult Problems Like a…
By the age of 46 years old, Elon Musk has innovated and built three
revolutionary multibillion-dollar companies in…
medium.com

As for practicing idea fusion, which is amalgamating two seemingly unrelated concepts
together, and making wondrous things happen can be learned, and turned into a habit.

A few ideas to do this are:

1. Reading more books, both fiction and non-fiction

2. Listen to podcasts every day

3. Ask thought-provoking questions and have deep conversations with the people
around you (such as what problems they face in life)

4. Research about how other successful people started out, and try to capture some of
their principles and methodologies and use them in your life.
 5. Journal
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6. Take long walks

By implementing these practices in your life, combining ideas will be a piece of cake. It’s
also worth knowing that absorbing information from books and articles won’t turn you
into Elon Musk, it takes sheer will and determination, as well as an element of luck, to
turn an idea into something concrete.

I hope that this article gave you a glimpse into the mind of Elon Musk and how he
managed to conquer the rocket industry, EVs, solar, AI, and more to come. I hope I
motivated you to start generating ideas to solve the pressing problems of the world and I
wish you all the best in your endeavor.

To watch the video that inspired this article, click here.

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Happy learning.

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