It’s a blessing to live in a timeline that has business builders like Elon Musk. Forget his political/social stances for a second. JUST THINK about what he’s built. An extreme example of radical purpose-driven living, none of us can ever hope or even dream of being in his shoes, nor do we probably want to be. His attitude of no-quit and living life fully has lessons. Here’s an amalgam of his lessons extracted from the internets with AI, with my color commentary.

Taking risk:

• If things are not failing, you are not innovating enough – Increase cycle time of delivery and feedback.
• There’s a tremendous bias against taking risks. Everyone is trying to optimize covering their butts – Feelings of failure are powerful.
• Some people don’t like change, but you need to embrace change if the alternative is disaster – You don’t always need to change, but if you think hard enough, you know a part of your life you need to change.
• The first step is to establish that something is possible; then probability will occur – Execute, build. Do.

Hard work:

• Persistence is very important. You should not give up unless you are forced to give up – It’s not always easy to know when to cut-ties and drop the ball. I’ve found it becomes obvious over at least a 90 day window. You’ll know.
• Work like hell. I mean you just have to put in 80 to 100 hour weeks every week. This improves the odds of success – He’s not wrong here.
• When something is important enough, you do it even if the odds are not in your favor – The value is the process and purpose in the process. You’ll have life lessons and stories to tell.

Leadership:

• The path to the CEO’s office should not be through the CFO’s office, and it should not be through the marketing department. It needs to be through engineering and design – People buy great products.
• People work better when they know what the goal is and why. It is important that people look forward to coming to work in the morning and enjoy working – I talk about this so much in my Agile & Scrum classes. We must understand the Why if we want to do our best work.
• If you’re a co-founder or CEO, you have to do all kinds of tasks you might not want to do. No task is too menial – Take out the garbage. Sweep the floors. It’s your dream, first.

Personal growth:

• Very important to have a feedback loop, where you’re constantly thinking about what you’ve done and how you could be doing it better – The more feedback the better. Communities are great for this.
• Really pay attention to negative feedback and solicit it, particularly from friends – Pushback forces you to think and re-design.
• It is possible for ordinary people to choose to be extraordinary – Every action is a choice.
• If you get up in the morning and think the future is going to be better, it is a bright day – Positive juju only frens.
• People should pursue what they’re passionate about. That will make them happier than pretty much anything else – Find the joy in life and work. Engage the world.

Entrepreneurship:

• Starting and growing a business is as much about the innovation, drive, and determination of the people behind it as the product they sell – Your leadership matters. Hard workers only.
• Being an entrepreneur is like eating glass and staring into the abyss of death – The unknown unknowns are plenty. Thicker skin will be produced.
• When somebody has a breakthrough, it is rarely one little thing. Very rarely, is it one little thing. It’s usually a whole bunch of things that collectively amount to a huge innovation – Team work.
• Talent is extremely important. It’s like a sports team, the team that has the best individual player will often win, but then there’s a multiplier from how those players work together and the strategy they employ – Scrum is a game of team discipline over time.
• It is a mistake to hire huge numbers of people to get a complicated job done. Numbers will never compensate for talent in getting the right answer – Delivering and getting feedback is greater than anything else.

Thanks to the amazing amounts of data of Elon Musk, we can distill his business building tips into useful reminders for us today.

Be a human DOing, not a human (just) BEing.

All the best,
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