Elon Musk's Top 10 Rules for Success

When you had that 3rd failure in a row, did you think, I need to pack this in? Never.

Why not?

I don't ever give up. I mean, I'd have to be dead or completely incapacitated.

Elon Musk is the billionaire CEO of SpaceX and Tesla and co-founder of PayPal, founding chairman of SolarCity.

The determined engineer's big dreams transformed 3 industries.

And one of the most influential innovators in the world. Elon Musk built a reputation for changing the game by ignoring the rules. He went from being bullied as a child in South Africa.

I was, you know, bullied quite a lot. I did not have a sort of happy childhood, to be frank. It was quite, quite rough.

Teaching himself to code at a young age.

When Elon was 10 years old, he got tested by IBM and he was found to have one of the highest aptitudes they'd ever seen for computer programming. I tried to take some computer classes, but I was way ahead of the teacher.

To building companies that are reshaping space travel, electric cars, and the future of humanity.

I'd really love to go to Mars, and that's the overarching goal of SpaceX.

Becoming one of the richest people in the world with a net worth of over $840 billion.

Tesla could give Elon Musk the chance to become the world's first trillionaire.

Need motivation?

Watch a top 10 with Believe Nation.

If you've been here before, drop a hashtag #Believe in the comments below so I can feature you here in a future video. And if you're new, welcome to Believe Nation, the only channel that helps you believe in yourself daily, one video at a time. Okay, let's kick it off with rule number 1: build value.

It's best to actually pursue providing useful products and services. If you do that, then money will come as a natural consequence of that, as opposed to pursuing money directly. Just like you can't sort of pursue happiness directly, you pursue things that lead to happiness. But there's not like direct happiness. You do things like I guess fulfilling work or study or friends, loved ones that as a result make you happy. So that sounds like very obvious, but generally if somebody's trying to make a company work, they should expect to grind super hard, accept that there's like some meaningful chance of failure. But, but just be focused on having the output be worth more than the input. That are you a value creator? That's what really matters. Making more than you take.

Rule number 2, segment your day.

I have a lot of inbound communication, so it's information triage. I try to segment the days so that there's not too much context switching, because arguably fear is not the mind killer, context switching is. It's hard not to context switch if you've got an inbox full of stuff. But you can think of it like if you had to context switch every 3 seconds or every 30 seconds or every 3 minutes, the context switching Cognitive penalty would be very high every 3 seconds.

Rule number 3: Look on the bright side.

I still think there's risk associated with AI and robots. It's not zero. I guess I've come to— my sort of philosophical conclusion is to look on the bright side. I can't see any way to really stop this incredible momentum of AI and robots. And at times I sort of think, well, perhaps, you know, even if there was a stop button, we probably shouldn't press it because the most likely outcome is incredible abundance for all.

Rule number 4, take drastic action.

I have these very detailed Engineering reviews weekly. That's maybe a very unusual level of granularity. I don't know anyone who runs a company, or at least a manufacturing company, that goes into the level of detail that I go into. So it's not as though— like, I have a pretty good understanding of what's actually going on because we go We go through things in detail. And I'm a big believer in skip-level meetings where the individuals, instead of having the person that reports to me say things, it's everyone that reports to them says something in the technical review. And there can't be advanced preparation. So otherwise you're gonna get... You know, glazed, as they say these days.

Yeah, exactly.

Very Gen Z of you. Very Gen Z. How do you prevent that? You just call them randomly? No, just go around the room and everyone provides an update. So, I mean, it's a lot of information to keep in your head because you've got to— you've got them, say if your meeting's weekly or twice weekly, you've got a snapshot of what that person said. And you can then plot the progress points. You can sort of mentally plot the points on a curve and say, are we converging to a solution or not? Or are we— I'll take drastic action only when I conclude that success is not in a set of possible outcomes. So when I say, okay, when I finally reached the conclusion that, okay, unless drastic action is done, we have no chance of success, then I must take drastic action. And so that's— I came to that conclusion in 2018, took drastic action and fixed the problem.

Also, if you want to take real action after this video, I made a free worksheet just for you. It covers the top lessons from today, gives you space to write biggest takeaways and helps you build a simple action plan. It's 100% free. Just click the link in the description below to go grab it. And I'll see you there. Rule number 5, have a long-term view.

I really just need to make sure that I can focus on long-term. By long-term, I just mean in the 5 to 10 years. So one of the challenges with being a public company is that— is the sort of the pressure to have great results every single quarter, but— and to not Really invest in things that may only pay off in 5 to 10 years. And, you know, in the case of SpaceX, I want to extend consciousness beyond Earth and have a growing civilization on the Moon, Mars, and elsewhere in the solar system. The return— I think ultimately this would have a very high return on investment, but in the short term, we'll be spending all this money on a Moon base. and a Mars base. And then people are like, I'm going to get all this pressure for like, well, you missed your earnings this quarter because you spent too much on Mars. I'm like, yes. By the way, that was in the S-1 prospectus and it's literally listed as a thing we will do. So we did. But they still get grumpy about these things.

So—

Because they're like, well, you had whatever, you said your gross margin would be this and it's actually slightly worse. And now, Now we're going to punish you and the short sellers all descend upon you and you get a lot of pressure. You're going to get a lot of that. Yeah. I just need some way to say like, listen guys, we're going to focus on 5 to 10-year or longer time horizon investments. This will depress our short-term earnings. If you take a long-term view, and there are investors, we have many investors that do take a long-term view. In fact, I'm a big fan of the retail investors. In fact, I find our retail investors On balance, they're very insightful and have very long-term views. If part of this comes to say, what's the incentive structure? For portfolio managers, it's understandable why they put so much pressure on quarterly earnings, because their compensation and whether they get promoted or not is dependent on how their portfolio does. They only have a few years to make these decisions, and then they're evaluated based on those decisions over the course of sometimes only a year or less. Since they're under pressure to have immediate returns, they then put companies under pressure to have immediate returns. Once you understand the incentive structure, the behavior of Rule number 6, don't fear failure. If you don't succeed with your first startup, it shouldn't be sort of a catastrophic career-ending thing. It should be, you know, well, good. I think it generally should be like, well, you know, you gave it a good shot, you know, and now try again. Exactly. Yeah. So one thing I was going to mention is like, obviously creating a company is sort of a high-risk, high-reward situation. But I don't know quite what the how it works in the UK. I think it's probably better than continental Europe. But the stock options are very difficult in most parts of Europe. I'm not sure how it is in the UK, but if somebody's basically going to risk their sort of life savings and with— And the vast majority of startups fail. So, I mean, you hear about the startups that succeed, but most companies are— most startups consist of You know, a massive amount of work followed by failure. That's actually most companies. And so it's a high risk, high reward. And so the high reward part does need to be there for it to make sense.

Rule number 7, balance your life. How do you balance your life? I mean, with this stress, with so many different, you know, you run so many different companies parallel, how do you balance it?

Well, I mean, I should point out that a 20-hour workday is relatively unusual and rather painful. But I do sleep 6 hours a night. And if I sleep less than 6 hours a night, I find that I might be awake longer, but I get less done. But I do work a ridiculous amount, I think, relative to most people, in that it's pretty much 7 days a week and mostly from when I wake up to when I go to sleep. I'm not suggesting this is good for everyone, and I think frankly I would like to work a bit less than that. So, I think if I look at, say, Tesla, Tesla went through some very difficult times where it was on the ragged edge of survival, and really if I didn't give it everything I got, I think the company could have easily gone bankrupt. It was really on the verge of bankruptcy for quite a while. I don't mean to suggest complacency at this point, but it does require much less work to operate Tesla now versus, say, in the 2017 to 2019 timeframe. And it's not at mortal risk of survival. It's achieved economies of scale that make it not on the ragged edge of survival. And then SpaceX also has a strong team and is able to make a lot of progress, even if I spend less time there. It does help if I spend time there, but it keeps making progress even if I don't. Twitter is still somewhat of a startup in reverse, and so there's a lot of work required here to get Twitter to a sort of a stable position and, like I said, to really build the engine of engineering, of software engineering at Twitter and have it, you know, really have a great product roadmap and the people in place to implement that product roadmap. And so it is not my intention to work Like crazy, you know. I mean, I think I still— I got comfortable with a mere 80-hour work week would be fine.

All right.

And that is what I would aspire to.

Rule number 8, never stop learning.

When you think about education and self-education, what do you recommend? I'd encourage people to read a lot of books. Just read— like, I mean, basically try to ingest as much information as you can. And try to also just develop a good general knowledge so you at least have a rough lay of the land of the knowledge landscape. Try to learn a little bit about a lot of things because you might not know what you're really interested in. How would you know what you're really interested in if you at least aren't doing a peripheral exploration broadly of— of the knowledge landscape. And talk to people from different walks of life and different industries and professions and skills and occupations. Just try to learn as much as possible. I would encourage people to read broadly in many different subject areas and then try to find something where there's An overlap of your talents and what you're interested in. So people may be good at something, or they may have skill at a particular thing, but they don't like doing it. So you wanna try to find a thing where you're— that's a good combination of the things that you're inherently good at, but you also like doing.

Number 9, believe in yourself.

How do you deal with the people who say, no, you are shooting too far ahead. You are trying to do something that's impossible. Don't bother doing it, or, or are resistant to change. How do you manage those— that resistance, the naysayers out there, and continue on? Well, I would go back to physics in that the only things that are truly impossible are breaking the laws of physics. So as long as you're not breaking the laws of physics, it's possible. You know, it doesn't matter what anyone's opinion is. Um, you know, physics is the law and everything else is a recommendation. I've seen plenty of people break the law, but I've never seen anyone break physics. Anything within the laws of physics is possible. Yeah, I mean, and you can certainly challenge the laws of physics, but they've been challenged quite well and have found to be resilient.

And rule number 10, the last one before a very special bonus clip, is be optimistic.

I mean, I'm generally of the view philosophically, philosophically, that it's better to be optimistic and wrong occasionally than pessimistic and right. I think you want to look on the bright side of things, and I'm a little worried that young people today maybe sometimes are a little pessimistic about the future, but I'd like to just assure people that as long as we are not complacent, we will solve The climate crisis. We'll solve the climate crisis and we will solve these issues. We also need to take them seriously and work hard to solve them. They will be solved and that people should be optimistic about the future and work to make that optimistic future real. You know, they say that the best way to predict the future is to create it. And so if you take the actions necessary for there to be a good future, then we will have a good future. And so I'd encourage people to be optimistic, take the actions that will create a good future, and we will have one. What would you say to young people that want to change the world, that have big ideas?

What advice could you give?

I would say, you know, go do it. Just go out there and And do it. I mean, the biggest thing I think people fail to do is that they're too afraid to try things. That they shouldn't be afraid of failing and they should just go and do it. Did you fail at anything that you tried? I've lost, I mean, I've not lost a war, but I've lost battles certainly. I mean, the first 3 flights of the Falcon 1 rocket, they crashed. Wow, that must have been a big bummer. It was a big bummer. Did you cry? No.

And congratulations, you're one video closer to who you're meant to be.

Believe.

For 10 more amazing rules from Jeff Bezos, check the video right there next to me. I think you'll love it. Continue to believe, and I'll see you there.

Whenever you're in a situation where it seems that, uh, short-term, you're doing a business deal with someone And if you think you're never going to deal with them again, then maybe you would come to a certain answer.