Ep 616 | Elon's 5-Step System for Fixing Anything

Thank you for joining me today. It's Brian Gubernick, and welcome to the No Days Off podcast, where we believe that every single day brings a new opportunity to get better. Elon Musk, one of our favorite, uh, entrepreneurs to talk about here at No Days Off. Well, Elon does a few things, right? Right? He builds rockets, he builds electric vehicles, he's got AI companies, social media platforms, and he's doing all these things at the same time. I don't think his superpower is just about his ambition or his level of intelligence. I think it's his obsession with simplifying complexity, with eliminating waste and speeding up progress and scaling smarter than, than almost anyone else, specifically as it pertains to eliminating waste and speeding up progress. Whether he succeeded or not, there's not a political commentary, but I mean, his specialty is eliminating waste, right, and speeding up process, so, or progress. So that's probably why he was involved with Doge. At SpaceX and Tesla, he actually teaches a 5-step system that every one of his engineers and executives and operators are expected to follow. It's not very complicated, but it is pretty relentless in my opinion. And if you apply it to your business, if I apply it to my business, even to our own personal productivity, we're gonna find some bottlenecks, we're gonna find some busy work, and we're likely to find some legacy thinking that we may not have even realized was slowing us down. So today, I want to spend some time walking through Elon's 5-step system for fixing anything. Step 1 of Elon's 5-step algorithm: question every requirement. Question every requirement. Elon's very first rule: make your requirements less dumb. Make your requirements less dumb. If it doesn't matter if the requirement— it doesn't matter if the requirement came from from a customer or an engineer or even from Elon himself. Assume every single rule, every standard, every spec is wrong until it's proven otherwise. You need to ask questions like, who created this requirement? Do they fully understand the problem? Does this even need to exist? Now, in my opinion, it's a pretty powerful mental shift. Don't just improve things, challenge the reason they exist in the first place. I think it's a great step 1, question every requirement. Step 2, delete any part of the process you can. Delete any part, or I'm sorry, delete any part or delete any process that you can. So once you've questioned the requirement, Elon says, just delete, delete as much as possible. The best part, according to Elon, the best part is no part. The best process is no process. So Elon has a rule: if you're not deleting at least 10% of your parts or steps every single cycle, you're not trying hard enough. Because complexity is really the enemy here. Every process Every part, every layer that isn't absolutely necessary just creates some drag. So, think about your business. What meetings can you kill right now? What reports are you producing that no one's reading? What approvals or reviews exist just because they always have? Cut first and then decide what's left. Step 3, simplify and optimize. Most people kind of start here, but Elon insists it comes third. Why does he insist it comes third? Because if you simplify a process that should have never existed to begin with, you're just polishing garbage. Once you've questioned and deleted, then you make what's left a little simpler and clearer and more efficient. So you want to ask at this step, can this be done in fewer steps? Can a generalist handle this instead of a specialist? Can we reduce handoffs or decision fatigue? Optima— optimization is only valuable when you're working on something that's actually worth doing. Step 4, accelerate cycle time. Once you validated and simplified the process, speed it up. So Elon pushes his teams to move faster, not just for productivity, but for learning speed. The faster you execute, the faster you get feedback, the faster you could actually improve. So whether that's in onboarding or production or sales or content creation, tighten that feedback loop. Speed tends to compound, and being slow, the opposite of that, can end up being really expensive. And then step 5, finally, get to automation. Step 5 is automate. This is where a lot of people start, especially in tech companies or operations-heavy businesses, but Elon's very clear around this. Automation actually comes last. Elon says one of the biggest mistakes is to automate something that should not exist. So once you've stripped out what's unnecessary, once you've simplified what remains and you've accelerated that, that process, that feedback loop, then you automate and you do it right and you scale Excellence now. Because if you do it too soon, you might end up scaling dysfunction. So here's the takeaway. This isn't just an engineering system, though Elon may use it for engineering. It's a way of thinking. I think it's a mindset. Most businesses tend to protect legacy processes. They confuse busy with effective. But Elon's 5-step algorithm forces you to burn it all down. Burn it all down first and then rebuild only what matters. It works for rocket science, and it probably then will work for onboarding or sales calls, reporting, communication, anything that's gotten bloated, anything that's slow, any that's fragile, anything that's fragile. Um, it'll work. So here's your action step this week. I want you to pick one process in your business Just one. And I want you to run it through Elon's 5 steps. Again, number 1, question every part of it. Number 2, delete what isn't essential. Number 3, simplify what remains. Number 4, speed it up. And then number 5, automate only after going through the first 4 steps. At the end of the day, none of us needs more tools. We probably just need less waste. So simplify just like Elon and move faster than everyone else. That's all I have for you today, the No Days Off Podcast. Thank you so much for listening, and remember, every single day brings a new opportunity to get better. So let's get after it.