Imagine Elon Musk walking towards you while you are fretting over the health of your business.
What would be the top 5 pieces of advice he would give you?
In this article we will share what we believe are Elon Musk golden nuggets! These 5 compact golden nuggets are a result of years of hard work and experience.
Today, just take a minute to ponder over them and try to reflect on what you are doing in contrast to these amazing tips!
The best business advice I’ve ever heard from Elon Musk:
#1 Work Super Hard
Depending on how well you want to do, in particular, if you’re starting a company you need to work super hard.
What does super hard even mean?
When Elon Musk and his brother were starting out their first company, instead of getting an apartment, they just rented a small office. They slept on the couch and showered at the YMCA.
They had just one computer. Their website was up during the day and they used to code during the night for 7 days a week, all the time.
Elon even briefly had a girlfriend in that period and in order to be with him, she had to sleep in the office.
Work hard. Work hard every waking hour, particularly if you’re starting a company.
The simple math is: if somebody else is working 50 hours and you’re working 100, you’ll get twice as much done in the course of a year as the other company.
#2 Attract Great People
If you’re creating a company or if you’re joining a company, the most important thing is to attract great people. Join a group that’s amazing and you really respect it. Or if you are building a company, gather great people.
By the end of the day, your company is a group of people that have gathered together to create a product or service.
Depending upon how talented and hardworking that group is and the degree to which they are focused cohesively in a good direction, that will determine the success of the company.
Do everything you can to gather great people when you’re creating a company.
#3 Focus on Signal over Noise
Many companies out there are making this particular mistake. They get confused when it comes to improving their product vs. spending money on making the noise (advertising) for the product.
They spend money on things that don’t actually make the product better.
For example, at Tesla, Elon will never spend any money on advertising. They put all the money into R&D, manufacturing, and design. All this in an attempt to try to make the car as good as possible.
According to Elon, that’s the way to go. For any given company, just think about the efforts being put in.
Are these efforts that we are spending on resulting in a better product or service? If they’re not, stop those efforts.
#4 Don’t just follow the Trends
It’s good to think in terms of the physics approach of first principles which is: rather than reasoning by analogy, you boil things down to the most fundamental truths you can imagine. You then reason up from there.
That is a good way to figure out if something really makes sense or if it’s just what everybody else is doing.
However, it’s hard to think that way and you can’t think that way about everything because it takes a lot of effort.
But if you’re trying to do something new, it’s the best way to think.
This framework was developed by physicists to figure out counter intuitive things like quantum mechanics. It’s really a powerful method.
#5 Take Risks Now
Now is the time to take risks. As you get older your obligations increase and once you have a family you start taking risks not just for yourself, but for your family as well.
It gets much harder to do things that might not work out. So now is the time to do that, before you have those obligations.
Take risks now to do something bold, you won’t regret it.
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