Elon Musk is one the most successful men of our lifetime and anyone who can emulate even a small portion of his success is guaranteed to be financial secure and well-regarded in their field.
Starting out with a company called Zip2, Musk went on to be involved with PayPal before it was sold to Ebay and then went in his own direction.
Musk gained international fame as the founder of Tesla
, an electric car company that hopes to bring electric cars to the masses within the coming years. Tesla has a market cap around $54 billion, making Musk a billionaire.
More recently, Musk founded SpaceX, a space company that pioneered reusable rocket technology and acts as a delivery service to the International Space Station.
In the past two-years, Musk has founded the Boring Company, a company the bores deep into the earth to build tunnels and Hyperloop, a next-generation transport system.
Not only that, but in-between all of that he managed to be the co-chairman of OpenAI, the CEO of Neuralink and co-found a company called SolarCity.
Anyone who has a desire to have financial, career and brand success should greatly admire Elon Musk.
Musk has spoken at great length in the past about what it's taken for him to achieve all that he has and we've compiled it into a list of rules for success.
1. Work “Super Hard”
Musk is famous for his work ethic, but also for expecting his employees to work the same crazy hours.
In a speech to college students he said that if you want to succeed
“you have to put in 80-100 hour weeks, every week”.
He went on to explain that if other people are putting in 50 hour weeks and you're putting in 100 weeks, then you'll achieve double what the other person does in the same year.
It seems clear that Musk believes that hard work is the differentiating factor between competitors and, to some extent, can make up for lower talent. Musk went on to tell a story:
“When my brother and I were starting our first company instead of getting an apartment we just rented a small office and we slept on the coach and we showered at the YMCA”
Musk has not only worked hard, but he's made the sacrifices that he needed to make to reach his dreams.
'Work hard, every waking hour'
2. Focus on Something That has High Value to Others
When asked by a reporter what advice he would give to other entrepreneurs, the first thing he said was to
“focus on something that has high value to others and you need to be very rigorous in your analysis of that”
.
Musk is giving great advice here by adhering to the basic idea of providing customers with a product or service that they want.
If you don't own a business then this can be paralleled to all different part of your life. Focus on giving something to others that they want if you expect anything in return.
3. Work From the “First Principles Approach”
If you've ever watched Elon Musk speak then you've likely hard him mention the
“first principles approach”
.
He explains this by suggesting that most people reason by analogy. That is, that they compare things to something they know, rather than critically questioning the problem.
Instead, he says that you must
“boil it down”
to the most basic facts that we know to be true and then reason up from there.
Musk talks about this constantly and truly believes that this is the only way to solve complex problems.
4. Never Give Up
“I don’t ever give up. I’d have to be dead or completely incapacitated”
In our lives we will all face failure, we'll make mistakes and often we might feel like quitting.
Whilst it's important to know when to quit, presuming that you followed rule two and focussed on something truly valuable to others, you must be willing to carry on.
Often in life your have to be willing to pursue your dreams in blind faith, without seeing any signal of hope, until you break through and succeed.
5. Take a Risk
When Musk decided that he would start SpaceX, he said that, his friend
'collected a whole series of videos of rockets blowing up'
and made him watch them.
In life, even your best friends and your family won't always believe in you. But, if you truly believe in what you're doing then you need to be willing to take the risk.
Musk once said that he never expected Tesla to be profitable.
“We're doing these things that seem unlikely to succeed”
6. Focus on Signal Over Noise
When talking about how Tesla focusses all their efforts on their cars, Musk said,
“a lot of companies get confused, they spend money on things that don't actually make the company better”.
Even if you don’t run a business, you should be able to take something from that lesson.
If you want to succeed at anything in life then you need to focus on the product. That might be you, it might be your relationship or it could be a company.
Don’t get distracted by anything else. If the core product is good then it will weather the storm.
7. Attract Great People
“If you're joining a company, or starting a company, you need to attract great people”
There’s a great quote that says
“no man is an island”
and it couldn’t be more true than with career success.
Regardless of how good you are at what you do, you need to work with other people at some point and attracting great people is a sure way to increase the chance of success.
8. You Need to be Much Better Than the Competition
“If you're entering anything where there's an existing marketplace against large entrenched competitors then your product or service needs to be much better than theirs”
This is another piece of wisdom from Musk, with ever increasing competitiveness in business and also the job market, you need to really shine if you want to succeed.
One of the purest examples of this is in the world of professional sports.
If you want to get into the NFL and more importantly, stick around, you need to be heads and toes ahead of the entrenched competitors.
Why?
There’s less risk with a trusty old horse who’s been competing for years than there is with the new kid on the block who is only just a little better… for now.
Blow the competition away if you want to succeed in tough markets.
