Shadowing Practice: This is How Elon Musk Learns a New Skill in Under 30 Days - Learn English Speaking with Video
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Elon Musk once told
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Rolling Stones, I was raised by books, books, and then my parents.
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And years later, he taught himself rocket science the same way, from textbooks that he borrowed.
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Learning a new skill fast means getting good enough to use it in days or weeks instead of years.
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And in 2016, Pew Research found
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that only 36 % of American adults had taken a course
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or gotten extra training in the past year to get better at their work.
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One of the things I love so much about Elon Musk is just how big that he thinks.
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He's trying to create a backup plan for all of humanity.
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And anytime I think that I'm thinking big with my goals, I just look at Elon and realize
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that I still have a lot of room for growth myself and I get inspired by that.
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So I wanted to make this video
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because most of my best mentors are people that I have never met and Elon is one of them.
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I've learned so much from people through their videos and it's why I'm so passionate about making content like this.
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Now, I haven't met Elon yet, but the way he picks up a new skill is something
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that you can copy and it can help you go after bigger goals of your own too.
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So if you learn the way Elon does,
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you could pick up the skills that your business needs in the next few weeks instead of putting it off for years.
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If you don't, you'll end up waiting until you feel ready or keep paying somebody else to do it for you.
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There are 10 ways Elon Musk learns a new skill in under 30 days and I'm going to cover them today.
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If you've been here before, grab a hashtag believe in the comments below so I can feature you here in a future video.
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And if you're new, welcome to Believe Nation, the only channel that helps you believe in yourself daily one video at a time. But leave.
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Number one, he reads the textbooks himself.
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So when you want to learn something new, it's tempting to wait for a course or wait for a teacher to show you.
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The people who wrote the textbooks already spent years figuring the subject out.
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A textbook costs a few dollars and you can start reading it tonight.
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Reading the real material gives you the same base that the experts started from.
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That's how Elon taught himself rocket science. In 2001,
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Elon started planning a mission to Mars and he began borrowing rocket textbooks from an aerospace consultant named Jim Cantrell and others.
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They included rocket propulsion elements, fundamentals of astrodynamics, and aerothermodynamics of gas turbine and rocket propulsion.
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When his PayPal friends met in Las Vegas to celebrate the sale of their company,
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Elon sat in a cabana at the Hard Rock reading an old
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Soviet rocket manual.
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Kevin Hart, an early PayPal investor, said, Elon is there reading some obscure
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Soviet rocket manual that was all moldy
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and looked like it had been bought on eBay control later
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realized why Elon had been boring all of his college textbooks on rocketry
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he said you know whenever anybody asked Elon how he learned to build rockets
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he says I read books well that's true he devoured those books he knew everything
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so find the textbooks as the experts in your field learn from
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and read the first chapter this week one of my favorite ways to learn is not just through books
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but through videos I love learning about famous entrepreneurs I love watching your videos I learn from the things
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that they say but also how they say it and you get a glimpse behind the scenes of how they think.
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It's why I did the top 10 rules of success series on this channel
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because I want to learn from these successful people and how they think and how they operate and how they work.
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So whether it's books, whether it's videos, however you learn best, surround yourself with the people who are doing the thing
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that you want to do and the more that you are around them
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and learn how they learn the more you will pick up and be able to solve your business problems too.
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Number two, he learns the trunk before the leaves so
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if you start with the details there's nothing to connect them to
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and then you forget about them the basic principles of a subject are what everything else hangs on once
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you know them each new detail they have a place to go
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so you can remember it more easily that's why learning the basics first makes everything afterward faster
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so elon explained this when someone asked how he learned
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so much on january 5th 2015 elon answered questions from the public on reddit one person listed the fields
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that he seemed to know from aerospace to electrical engineering to software energy storage
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and he asked how do you learn so much
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so fast Elon started his answer with I do kind of feel like my head is full
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then he gave the advice
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it is important to view knowledge as a sort of semantic tree make sure
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you understand the fundamental principles i .e the trunk
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and the big branches before you get into the leaves
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and details or there is nothing for them to hang on to
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so more than 5 ,000 people upvoted that answer
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and think about it for yourself before you study the details of a new skill, think about the three ideas,
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the fundamentals that everything else depend on.
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One of the fundamentals that I like to hold on to is whatever problem that I'm trying to solve, somebody has already solved it before.
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I call it modeling the masters, right?
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I try to model the masters who've come before me.
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So whatever challenge that I'm facing, challenge you're facing, somebody has done it before.
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They have solved that problem before.
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You don't have to figure it all out yourself.
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You can go learn their story, see how they overcame it and apply it to your situation so you can get there faster.
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Number three, he works it out from the raw material.
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So when something seems too expensive or too hard, you usually just accept the price that somebody quotes you.
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That quote is is only their answer.
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That's not the full answer.
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If you break the thing down to what it's actually made of, you can see what it should really cost.
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That's called reasoning from first principles and Elon loves using it.
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And he used it after Russian rocket sellers turned him down.
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So in late October 2001, Elon flew to Moscow to buy a rocket with Jim Cantrell and his friend Adio Resi.
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On a later trip, Russian officials told him a missile would cost $8 million and he offered $8 million for two.
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Cantrell said they sat there and looked at him and said something like, young boy, no. On the flight home, Elon turned around in a seat,
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showed them a spreadsheet and said, I think we can build this rocket ourselves.
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He later explained it to Wired and said, physics teaches you to reason from first principles rather than by analogy.
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So I said, OK, let's look at the first principles.
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What is a rocket made of?
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He found the materials cost around 2 % of a typical price of a rocket.
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So in September 2008, his Falcon 1 became the first privately developed liquid -fueled rocket to reach orbit.
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So take the most expensive thing in your business and write down what is actually made of.
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And this whole reason by first principles thing is new, and I learned it from Elon Musk.
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And I'm sure other people have talked about it before, but that's one of the things I most associate with him in learning,
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is you could take any problem
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and break it down to the core principles as opposed to only what other people have said.
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And yes, it's great to learn from other people.
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And if you can look at maybe the things that everybody else is doing is wrong,
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maybe the way that has been built for years or decades, maybe it's wrong.
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Maybe it's built on some wrong assumptions or things have taken some sideways turns.
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And you can reason by first principles of what is your problem actually made of?
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What do your clients actually care about?
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And build up from there.
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You can shortcut sometimes years or decades of experience that other people have and get there a lot faster.
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number four he goes straight to the experts
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so books can only take you so far
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and often the fastest way to fill in the gaps is
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to also ask the people who are already doing the thing experts usually answer good questions especially
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if you show up and you're eager
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and you're prepared one conversation can save you years of guessing
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and elon went looking for the best rocket people
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that he could find
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so in mid -2001 elon showed up at the 500 a plate mar society fundraiser
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and handed them a check for five thousand dollars robert zurbin who ran the group said that made everyone take notice.
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Elon then brought space experts together for meetings at a hotel by the Los Angeles airport and another in Palo Alto.
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And in 2002, he met an engineer named Tom Mueller at a warehouse where
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Mueller was building an 80 -pound rocket engine designed to produce 13 ,000 pounds of thrust.
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And Elon asked him, can you build something bigger?
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Mueller said he was very focused.
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He asked if I could build it.
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And I said, yes, if I had the right people.
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Then Elon said, how much would it cost.
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Mueller never fired that engine and he joined Elon's new company instead.
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So think about somebody who's already done the thing
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that you want to learn from and whether you can go meet them in person
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or learn from them through videos or books to understand how they operate, how they solve the problem, can shortcut your path.
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Also, if you want to take real action after this video, I made a free worksheet just for you.
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It has the top lessons from the video, space for your takeaways.
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It's 100 % free.
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Just click the link in the description below to go grab it and I'll see you there.
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Number five, he learns by building something real.
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So reading about a skill isn't the same as actually using it, right?
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You find out what you don't know the first time you actually try to make something.
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Every mistake shows you exactly what you need to learn from next.
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A real project also gives you a reason to keep going because it's something that you're actually building some momentum towards.
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As an example, Elon learned the code this way when he was a kid.
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At 10, Elon had a Commodore VIC -20, a home computer that had five kilobytes of memory.
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It came with a workbook on the basic programming language
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that was designed to take six months and he finished it in about three days.
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He said it came with this manual about how to program basic.
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I spent all nights several days in a row absorbing that
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and at 12 he wrote a space game called Blastar 167 lines of code.
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A South African magazine called PC and Office Technology published it and paid him about $500.
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So more than anything in this video pick one of the ideas that we're coming up with here and just apply it.
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Start building.
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Start learning.
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Start putting it into practice in your life or in your business
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because that's when you start to actually see momentum towards achieving your goals.
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Number six, he keeps asking how he could do it better.
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If you never look back at what you did, what happens?
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You repeat the same mistakes over and over again.
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After each try, a short review will tell you what part worked and what part needs to change.
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That's how each attempt gets a little bit better than your last one.
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If you're not doing the review, practice does not make perfect practice just makes the same bad habits stronger.
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Elon calls this a feedback loop.
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So SpaceX's first three
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Falcon 1 launches failed.
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And on September 28, 2008, the fourth one reached orbit and Elon walked out to the factory floor to have cheers from his team.
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He said, as the saying goes, the fourth time is a charm, right?
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In 2012, he was splitting his week between SpaceX in LA
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and Tesla in Palo Alto and Mashable asked him how he made it all work.
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And he said, I've actually not read any books on time management.
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I think it's very important to have a feedback loop where you're constantly thinking about what you've done
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and how you could be doing it better.
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I think that's the single best piece of advice.
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constantly think about how you could be doing things better and questioning yourself.
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So homework after your next attempt you're trying some new skill it works
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or doesn't work write down the one thing that worked the one thing
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that you're going to try to improve the experiment and test next time.
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Number seven he sets deadlines that feel impossible.
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When you give yourself a year to learn something
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it usually takes a year right a short deadline forces you to cut what doesn't matter and focus on what actually does.
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It also tells everyone around you that this matters right now.
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You'll miss some of those deadlines sometimes.
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That's okay.
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Elon sets them anyway and his team knows it.
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So one of SpaceX's earliest presentations promised the first finished engine by May 2003 and the first launch by November 2003.
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About 15 months after the company started, Kevin Brogan, an early SpaceX hire, said he will pick the most aggressive time schedule imaginable,
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assuming everything goes right and then accelerate it by assuming that everyone can work harder.
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The first Uber came in 2008, years later than the plan.
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In 2018, when Tesla fell behind on the Model 3,
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the team built a whole extra assembly line in a tent in the parking lot in its Fremont, California factory.
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Elon called it a pretty miraculous effort by the team to create a general assembly line out of nothing in three weeks.
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So take a skill that you've given yourself a year to learn and set a 30 -day deadline for that instead.
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Number eight, he puts in the hours.
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Learning fast takes a lot of practice in a short, condensed amount of time.
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An hour a week takes a skill out over years.
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Ten hours a week gets you there in months.
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The more hours you put in early, the sooner the skill starts to pay you back.
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So Elon has never hidden how many hours he works.
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In November 2018, Elon tweeted that SpaceX, Tesla, the boring company, and Neuralink are the places to be if getting things done matter to you.
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Then he said there are way easier places to work, but nobody ever changed the world on 40 hours a week.
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When someone asked how many hours it does take, he said 80 hours a week was sustainable with peaks above 100 at times.
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He said pain level increases exponentially above 80.
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That same year, he told the New York Times his work week had stretched to as much as 120 hours.
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He said there were times where it didn't leave the factory for three or four days.
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Now, you don't need to work 120 hours a week
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but you can block five extra hours this week for the skill
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that you're learning put them on your calendar so it gets done
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when it gets scheduled you're much more likely to actually follow through
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and accomplish it number nine he learns where the work actually happens
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so the people doing the work see problems
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that never come up in a meeting
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when you spend time where the work actually happens
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you learn how things really get done you also find out quickly when your own plan is going wrong.
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That's much harder to see from an office.
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And Elon learned this the hard way at Tesla.
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In 2018, Tesla was struggling to build its Model 3 fast enough.
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He said, we were losing $50 million, sometimes $100 million a week.
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He told CBS's Gail King, I'm sleeping on the factory floor, not because I think that's a fun place to sleep.
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You know, terrible.
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Tesla had to build the Model 3 line with a lot of automation and the cars were coming out way behind schedule.
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And on April 13, he tweeted, yes, excessive automation at Tesla was a mistake
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To be precise, my mistake, humans are underrated.
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So homework in your business, spend one day this month where the work actually happens with the people who are actually doing it
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and write down what surprises you.
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And number 10, he moves what he learns from one field into another.
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Every skill you learn gives you more ideas to work with.
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So a problem in one field has often been solved in another.
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When you know both fields, you can carry the answer across from one to the other.
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It also means that you aren't starting from zero each time you're trying to learn something new.
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So Elon does this between SpaceX and Tesla.
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In August 2017, on the call with his Tesla investors, Tesla's John McNeil described the problem the service team had just come up with and faced.
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They needed to check an object deep inside an aluminum casting.
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And that's something SpaceX's engineers know how to do.
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The SpaceX team helped them solve it with ultrasound sensors so they could quickly find the issue and then fix it.
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And Elon said it saved us eight hours of work per car.
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This cross fertilization of knowledge from the rocket and spacecraft industry to auto and back and forth, I think has really been quite valuable.
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This is also why I love modeling success so much, because as I learn from different successful entrepreneurs, I apply different parts of their thinking,
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of their experiences, of their history to whatever problem I'm facing right now.
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And I think the more you study successful entrepreneurs
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and how they got started and what makes them tick and the problems they solve,
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you will eventually come across multiple different solutions for the problem that you're facing right now.
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Even if it doesn't make sense in the moment, like why am I studying this?
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Why am I learning from this person?
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Why do I find inspiring?
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Down the road, you will pull elements from their story
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that can help you in the moment with that problem because you've already spent the time studying them.
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Pick one skill and give it 30 days.
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So it's easy to look at Elon Musk now
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and think he just learned so fast because he's a genius and he has billions of dollars.
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He learned the code at 10 from a workbook
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that came with his computer and he learned rockets from textbooks that he borrowed from his friends.
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You can borrow a textbook too.
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This is not something that's beyond you.
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So read the textbooks yourself.
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Learn the trunk before the leaves.
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Work it out from the raw materials.
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Go straight to the experts and learn by building something real.
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Keep asking how you could do it better.
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Set deadlines that feel impossible.
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Put in the hours.
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Learn where the work actually happens and move what you learn from one field into another.
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Pick one skill you've been putting off and give it the next 30 days.
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Read the book, ask the expert and build something small with it immediately you don't need to feel ready to start.
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And 30 days from now, you will be glad that you did.
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And congratulations, you're one video closer to who you're meant to be, but leave.
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Now let's learn how Elon cuts through doubt to make a decision.
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Elon Musk makes bigger decisions in five minutes than you make in a month.
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Tesla this year, we'll do over a hundred billion in revenue.
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So that's $2 billion a week.
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If I make slightly better decisions, I can affect the outcome by a billion dollars.
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First principles analysis, I think is something that can be applied to really any walk of life,
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anything really it's really just saying let's boil something down to the most fundamental principles the things
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that we are most confident are true at a foundational level
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every one of those decisions goes through the same short list of questions his biographer walter azikson reported
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that elon made about a hundred command decisions in a single
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day walking the factory floor first make your requirements less dumb
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your requirements are definitely dumb does not matter who gave them to you it's particularly dangerous
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if a smart person gave you the requirements because you might not question them enough.
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Try very hard to delete the part or process.
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This is actually very important.
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If you're not occasionally adding things back in, you're not deleting enough.
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Elon will be wrong on some of them, but he'll still be further ahead than the person who waited.
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Whatever requirement or constraint you have, it must come with a name, not a department.
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Because you can't ask the department, you have to ask a person.
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And that person who's putting forward the requirement or constraint must agree that they must take responsibility for that requirement.
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So you should always like assume that you're to some degree wrong
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and you want to be less wrong this is i think very important it's a little tougher on the ego
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but it's great for getting to the truth of things in 2018 spacex had spent years
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and a lot of money building starship out of carbon fiber
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there was tooling for it there were engineers whose whole job was carbon fiber
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and elon musk threw the material out
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and told them to build the rocket out of stainless steel instead until october last year
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we were pursuing a completely different design
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so it was really i switched the design to steel
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i think yeah approximately maybe october last year now this was a decision based on math.
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He said it like this.
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The carbon fiber is $135 a kilogram, 35 % scrap.
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So you're starting to approach almost $200 a kilogram.
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The steel is $3 a kilogram.
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So the material he'd been building with cost about 45 times what the material he switched to cost.
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And the steel was better in the place it mattered most because carbon fiber starts falling apart above 150 degrees Celsius.
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And the stainless aloe he picked holds up past 800 degrees.
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It also has high melting temperature
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so for a reusable ship you're coming in like a meteor you want something
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that does not melt at a low temperature you want something else at a high temperature
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and this is where steel is extremely good as well
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and it wasn't just a material swap carbon fiber had to be laid up in an autoclave by specialists
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and steel gets welded so the change throughout the tooling the suppliers
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and a chunk of what the team had learned how to do
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and it made the rockets buildable outdoors in a texas field instead of inside a clean room
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which is why the thing got built as fast as it
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did very easy to weld stainless steel the evidence being
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that we welded it outdoors without a factory with carbon fiber this is impossible with aluminum lithium also impossible
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but steel is very easy to weld
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and it is resilient to the elements the team fought him on it
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and he said
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so it took me quite a bit of effort to convince the team to go in this direction
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then he told the reporter obviously i'm in love with steel
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so here's elon betting his biggest program on the material change
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and the reason why came down to two things it's cheaper by 45 times and it survives the heat.
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The rocket standing in Texas right now is stainless steel
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because one person ran the numbers on what the thing is actually made of and then acted on the answer immediately.
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Now, you can say, well, he's Elon Musk.
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He has billions of dollars and he can afford to be wrong.
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And you can't.
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If you made a bad call on your business, that could be your house.
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Except being wrong is something Elon accounts for.
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He's making 100 decisions a day
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and he says at least 20 % are going to be wrong and we're going to alter them later.
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But if we don't make decisions, we die.
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He's saying a fifth of his calls come out wrong
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and the company still moves faster because he made a decision instead of procrastinating on them.
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And he does get them wrong on a big scale too.
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In December 2022, he decided to shut down
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Twitter's Sacramento data center.
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His own manager said moving those servers would take six to nine months.
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He gave them 90 days, then flew there on Christmas Eve and started pulling servers off the racks himself with a borrowed pocket knife.
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Months later, he admitted, in retrospect, The whole Sacramento shutdown was a mistake.
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He was wrong.
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It was in public it was a big mistake, and he still makes more progress in a month than the person who over analyzes everything.
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He wrote the reason into the operating rules at both companies, a maniacal sense of urgency is our operating principle.
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Urgency here means a bias about time.
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So a decision that could be made today is a decision that gets made today.
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And the difficult answer to when is always now.
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So how does he make so many decisions so quickly?
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Elon has a fixed set of questions that he runs every decision through.
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And we're going to talk about each of those six right now.
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Question number one, what's actually physically true here?
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So for years, the whole car industry agreed that battery packs cost about $600 per kilowatt hour and always would.
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Every plan in the industry was built on that number.
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And it's why electric cars were always written off as just too expensive and will never work.
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Musk didn't argue with the $600.
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He just asked a different question.
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What do we know is actually physically true about this situation?
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So he broke a car battery pack down into the stuff it's physically made of,
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cobalt, nickel, aluminum, carbon, the polymers in the separator, a steel can.
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And he looked up what those materials cost that day on the London Metal Exchange, and he added them up.
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The total was about $80 per kilowatt hour.
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The $600 price was coming from how the battery pack was being made
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and how a thing is made as something that you can change.
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That one calculation is why
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Tesla built its own cells instead of buying them.
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And it's why the price came down for the people who bought those cars.
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There's an awesome line he gives his engineers.
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The only rules are the ones dictated by the laws of physics.
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Everything else is a recommendation.
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So physics is the short list of things that nobody gets to argue with.
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Everything else, pricing, timelines, industry standards, the way it's always been done, they're on the other list.
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And the other list is something that you can change and influence.
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It reminds me of the Steve Jobs quote around everything around
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you has been created by somebody who's no smarter than you and you can change it and you can influence it.
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So you're carrying your own version of a $600 number, a price that you accepted, a timeline that somebody quoted you,
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a rule about how your industry works.
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You got it from other people in your industry and you never analyzed it yourself.
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So take one industry assumption this week.
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Write down what the thing is actually made of
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or actually takes to make happen in hours and in dollars and then add it up yourself.
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And then do the same with another one next month.
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All progress begins with telling the truth.
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And the first truth is usually a number somebody else gave you that you never checked.
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Question number two, whose name is on this requirement?
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So step one of the process Musk runs at both companies is to question every requirement.
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And to do
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that, he says every requirement has to arrive with a person's name on it rather than a department
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or compliance or the customer.
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A human being is responsible that you can go and talk to about it.
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So here's what Elon has said.
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Your requirements are definitely dumb.
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It does not matter who gave them to you.
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And he says the dangerous ones come from smart people because when a smart person hands you a requirement, nobody argues with it.
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So it just gets approved and it sits in a business for years, whether it's right or not.
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A requirement from somebody junior usually gets challenged.
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A requirement from the smartest person in the building gets written into the spec
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and inherited by people who never met that person.
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And six years later, a team is designing around a decision that never made sense in the first place.
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You have these in your business and life too.
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The report nobody reads, the approval step for a thing that never once has been rejected, the 12 page onboarding doc.
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Each of these exist because somebody asked for it at some point, but you can't name who or when or for what reasons.
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So take your three most annoying recurring tasks and write a person's name next to each one.
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Whoever actually wants this.
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If you can't fill in a name, you found something to delete and you should run the same test on three more next month.
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Half the work sitting on your calendar is somebody's old preference that nobody has questioned since.
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Question number three, what can I delete right now?
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Step three is to delete the part or the process.
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So Musk's problem with deleting is that people are too careful about it.
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So he puts a number on it that tells you when you've cut enough.
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He says, if you're not adding things back in at least 10 % of the time, you're clearly not deleting enough.
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You're supposed to cut so hard
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that roughly one in 10 of your cuts turns out to be a mistake that you have to reverse.
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If you never have to put anything back, then you weren't actually cutting enough in the first place.
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He said, possibly the most common error of a smart engineer is to optimize a thing that should not exist.
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Making a useless process 30 % faster is worse than useless because now the useless process is efficient.
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Everybody gets to say they made progress, but nothing actually happened.
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Once you've cut, then you can speed up the process then you can automate
405
it last he's got a line for people who just skip right to speed
406
if you're digging your grave don't dig faster automated a step
407
you should have deleted just means the wrong thing now happens itself at scale faster without anybody watching it
408
so you don't work to improve your onboarding your content systems
409
your sales process until you try to delete pieces of it first Thank you homework.
410
Pick one process this week and cut something out of it instead of trying to improve it.
411
Remove a step and run it without that step.
412
Then do it again next week on the same process and keep going until you have to put something back.
413
That moment when you put one thing back is a signal that you finally cut deep enough.
414
Question number four, what does it cost versus what it's made of?
415
Musk uses a ratio he calls the idiot index.
416
You take what a finished part costs and you divide it by the raw materials in its cost.
417
So his rule is that when that number comes out high, the money is going into how the thing gets made
418
and who handles it on the way and not into the thing itself.
419
So a rocket part that costs $10 ,000 with $200 of aluminum has an idiot index of 50.
420
That part has a process problem or a supplier problem, and you can go and fix both of those.
421
The useful part is what a high number tells you to go and look at.
422
The price is coming from the machining, the certification, the shipping, the supplier's margin, and the three people who have to touch it along the way.
423
And every one of those is something that a person decided and a person can undo and change.
424
It takes about 30 seconds and it works on things that aren't rockets too.
425
What do you pay for a lead?
426
What does the ad that produced it actually cost you?
427
What does an hour of your service cost a client?
428
What does the labor in it cost you?
429
What's your software bill against the thing that a replace would take in hours?
430
Run that math on your three biggest expenses this week and put it into your calendar to run again every quarter.
431
The gap between those two numbers is where a lot of your profit margin is hiding.
432
And you've probably barely looked at that calculation.
433
Question number five, am I still adding anything in this meeting?
434
So I love this one.
435
Elon Musk sent a company -wide email to Tesla staff calling excessive meetings the blight of big companies.
436
And he gave his staff a permission almost nobody gets typically at work
437
he tells them to walk out of a meeting
438
or drop off a call the moment it's obvious they're not adding or getting value.
439
Then he gives a reason.
440
It is not rude to leave.
441
It is rude to make someone stay and waste their time.
442
The rude part is keeping a person in a room where they can't contribute
443
and you staying in meetings just to be polite isn't making progress.
444
So he runs the same rule upwards in the organization too.
445
His managers are required to do the actual work and he's specific about why.
446
He says all technical managers must have hands -on experience.
447
For example, managers of software teams must spend at least 20 % of their time coding.
448
A manager who can't do the work can tell a real constraint from a bad excuse.
449
So the meeting fills up with people reporting instead of doing.
450
He asked for the same thing on jargon and on the chain of commands.
451
So drop the buzzwords because what they do is really just hide meaning.
452
Talk to whoever can solve the problem instead of routing it back up and down through four different layers of management.
453
Basically, the goal is to get to the shortest path to the answer possible, no matter who you have to talk to.
454
So look at your calendar for the next week and find the meetings that you had nothing to.
455
You already know which one of those are.
456
Get out of it and check for a new one every Friday because they grow back like new arms.
457
An hour a week is 50 hours a year, which is a working week and a half.
458
You're getting back for one uncomfortable cancellation message you have to send.
459
Question number six, have I decided or am I still deciding?
460
So here's the last one and it turns the other five into even more speed.
461
On a good day, Musk makes about 100 command decisions walking the Tesla floor.
462
He knew roughly 20 % of them were going to be wrong.
463
So he trades some decisions that need to be changed in exchange for a company that's never waiting on him.
464
He puts one condition on it though.
465
He says, it's okay to be wrong.
466
Just don't be confident and wrong.
467
Being wrong fast is cheap when you set up front that you might be wrong.
468
Because then everyone around you is paying attention.
469
And if it fails, you can actually correct it pretty quickly.
470
But being wrong after you sold the room on certainty is what becomes really expensive
471
because people just assume that it's going to work.
472
You've probably got the opposite problem though and are likely carrying a decision that you've held onto for weeks.
473
And while it sits there on your calendar, people on your team can't move.
474
What that costs you is another week of your business being stalled
475
because everyone is waiting on you to finally make a decision.
476
So give the next one five minutes.
477
Run it through the questions.
478
What's physically true?
479
Whose name is on it?
480
What can I delete?
481
What's the idiot ratio?
482
And am I adding value here?
483
Then decide, apply it immediately and move forward.
484
You know when the best time to start is?
485
Now.
486
How about right now?
487
The rocket is made of steel because somebody decided.
488
So the paper airplane on my logo on this YouTube channel, it's a paper airplane because it's breaking the sound barrier.
489
And I think that's impossible.
490
And that's what entrepreneurs do.
491
We do the impossible every single day.
492
Elon's Starship is impossible too.
493
And it's standing in a field in Texas made out of the same steel
494
that your kitchen sink is made out of because one person asked what the thing was physically made of,
495
got an answer he didn't expect and acted on it that week instead of later that year.
496
And the thing that made all this possible was small.
497
Somebody looked up the price of steel, wrote it next to the price of carbon fiber and saw a number 40 times too big.
498
That took a willingness to question how things are done and check a price the whole industry said was standard.
499
So none of the six questions require you to have a ton of money.
500
They don't require a factory or a team or somebody's permission.
501
They're free, they're fast, and the only reason you're not running them is that nobody gave you the list of questions before,
502
but now you've got that list.
503
If you have the ability, then you have the responsibility.
504
If you can, then you must.
505
That's what my mom always told me.
506
So pick the decision you've been carrying the longest, give it five minutes today, and get it off your desk,
507
then do the same thing tomorrow with the next one
508
because the best skill is in becoming the person that people stop waiting on.
509
Now let's learn Elon Musk's advice on how to stop playing it safe.
510
You know Elon Musk today as the billionaire innovator sending rockets to Mars and building electric cars, but rewind a few decades
511
and picture a young Elon with barely a dollar to his name crashing on an office couch and showering at the YMCA.
512
Sounds almost like an urban legend, right?
513
In fact, one of you, a subscriber named 70s Discozilla, straight up asked me, does anyone really believe he slept on YMCA floors?
514
It's a wild idea.
515
Did Elon Musk really live like that?
516
Well, let's break down the truth behind this story and more importantly, what it means for you and your entrepreneurial journey.
517
Sleeping on the office floor, myth or reality?
518
Elon Musk's humble beginnings aren't a myth, they were very real.
519
In the mid -90s, when Elon and his brother Kimball started their first company, our startup eventually known as Zip2, they couldn't afford an apartment.
520
So what did they do?
521
They rented a tiny office instead and quite literally slept on the office couch to save money.
522
No beds, no frills, just two young entrepreneurs catching Zs under their desks.
523
And the YMCA part, absolutely true.
524
Ilana said that each morning he would shower at the local YMCA in Silicon Valley because the office had no shower.
525
Think about that for a second.
526
One of the world's richest men was once showering at a public gym and sleeping in his makeshift office -slash -bedroom.
527
Why go to such extremes?
528
Simple.
529
Cash was tight, and the dream was big.
530
Elon and his team were pouring every hour and every dollar into building their startup.
531
In his own words, our goal was literally how do we make enough money to pay the rent?
532
By crashing at the office, they slashed their living costs so they could invest more into the business.
533
It wasn't glamorous, but it was effective.
534
And by the way, Elon isn't alone.
535
This kind of sacrifice is more common among founders than you might think.
536
More on that in a second.
537
So yes, 70s Discozilla Elon Musk really did rough it out in his early days.
538
He didn't exactly sleep on the YMCA floor.
539
He slept on an office floor, but he used the YMCA as his personal bathroom.
540
The legend is true, and it's one of those stories
541
that entrepreneurs point to when they talk about paying the price for success.
542
Sacrificing comfort for your dream.
543
Entrepreneurship often means sacrificing comfort today for success tomorrow.
544
Elon Musk's story is a dramatic example, but it's far from the only one.
545
Steve Jobs, for instance, once described his early startup life after dropping out of college i didn't have a dorm room
546
so i slept on the floor in friends rooms
547
i returned coke bottles for the five -cent deposits to buy food
548
and i would walk seven miles to get a free meal
549
at the hari krishna temple once a week not exactly a cushy lifestyle it wasn't all romantic it was tough
550
but these anecdotes show the reality behind the success founders often endure hardship
551
and extreme frugality to make their dreams happen in fact most
552
entrepreneurs have to put skin in the game according to a
553
kauffman foundation report around 65 percent of entrepreneurs rely on personal and family savings as startup capital.
554
That means many of you will put your own money
555
or your family's money into your business and live lean to stretch every dollar.
556
Maybe you won't end up literally sleeping in an office or showering at a YMCA, but you might downsize your apartment,
557
skip nights out, or sell your car to keep your startup afloat.
558
Sacrifice can be a badge of honor.
559
One of Elon Musk's own top 10 rules of success, which I've highlighted on this channel, is to make sacrifices.
560
He lived that rule.
561
He gave up a normal life, no fancy house, no comforts, because he was all in on his vision.
562
The takeaway for you guys is not necessarily go be homeless, but rather be willing to give up immediate comforts.
563
If you're trying to build something great, there's a good chance you'll have to step outside your comfort zone, financially, physically, and emotionally.
564
And when you do, you're in good company with legends like Musk
565
and Jobs who prove that temporary pain can lead to long -term gain.
566
Outworking the competition.
567
Suck if Arcelone isn't the whole story.
568
It goes hand in hand with insane work ethic.
569
Elon Musk didn't just sleep in the office for fun.
570
He did it so he could work around the clock.
571
He's famously said, work like hell.
572
I mean, you just have to put in 80 to 100 hour weeks every week.
573
If other people are putting in 40 hour work weeks and you're putting in 100 hour work weeks, then even if you're doing the same thing,
574
you will achieve in four months what it takes them a year to achieve.
575
Rewind and watch that again.
576
It's straightforward math.
577
The more you put in, the more you get out.
578
Elon basically doubled or tripled the typical work effort, and he reaped the rewards and accelerated progress.
579
Is this approach extreme?
580
Yes.
581
But being an entrepreneur isn't a 95 job, especially not in the startup phase.
582
And research backs up the idea that long hours are common for high achievers.
583
A 12 -year
584
Harvard study found that CEOs of multi -billion dollar companies.. work an average of 62 .5 hours per week.
585
Musk operates way above that average, roughly 28 % more hours than other CEOs, according to that study.
586
So when people call Elon crazy for his 80 plus hour work weeks, remember that extraordinary outcomes often require extraordinary effort.
587
Now, working 100 hours a week isn't for everyone and not every entrepreneur needs or should do that.
588
There are smart ways to work and you have to avoid burnout.
589
Elon himself admits that after about 80 hours a week, the pain increases exponentially.
590
But the core principle here is work ethic.
591
If you want to outpace your competition, ask yourself, are you working harder and smarter than they are?
592
When you're an entrepreneur, especially at the very beginning, every bit of effort you invest builds momentum.
593
Musk and his brother were coding seven days a week, pulling all -nighters, doing whatever it took.
594
Elon even joked that he had a girlfriend back then who had to sleep in office with him
595
if she wanted to see him that's the level of commitment he gave to his company
596
so how about you you might not need to sleep under your desk
597
but are you giving your project every week an hour
598
you can early on hard work is a massive competitive advantage
599
because most people simply aren't willing to do it use
600
that hustle can be your differentiator just like it was for elon
601
perseverance and grit pay off hard work and sacrifice are crucial but there's one other piece, perseverance.
602
The entrepreneurial journey is a roller coaster.
603
You will face moments where things go wrong, the funding runs low, the product fails, you lose a big client, and you'll be tempted to quit.
604
This is where Elon Musk's story really drives the point home.
605
Grit matters.
606
Psychologist Angela Duckworth's research suggests that when it comes to high achievement, grit, which is passion and perseverance for long -term goals,
607
may be just as essential as intelligence.
608
In other words, your ability to keep going in the face of hardship can count more than how naturally talented
609
or smart you are.
610
Elon is a smart guy, no doubt, but plenty of smart people would have folded under the pressure that he faced.
611
Elon's edge was that he persisted where others might give up.
612
Consider this.
613
Even after Elon became somewhat successful, he earned about $22 million from his first company sale.
614
He bet it all again on his next ventures.
615
He plowed his money into SpaceX and Tesla and things got really dire around 2008.
616
Both companies were on the brink of failure.
617
He later admitted that he had multiple near -death experiences financially during that time.
618
He was this close to going broke despite having been a multi -millionaire.
619
SpaceX's early rockets kept exploding.
620
Tesla was bleeding cash.
621
It looked like everything might implode.
622
Imagine the stress, employees to pay, critics laughing at you, personal fortune dwindling.
623
Elon himself thought the odds of success were slim.
624
He said, at the start of both
625
Tesla and SpaceX, I thought we would most likely fail.
626
But, and here's the kicker, he still went ahead because I thought this was worth a try.
627
That right there is grit.
628
He was prepared to fail in pursuit of a cause he believed in.
629
This level of perseverance is something to aspire to.
630
It comes from having a mission that drives you.
631
Elon wasn't sleeping on an office floor and risking bankruptcy just for kicks or mere money.
632
He genuinely believed in his vision, whether it was bringing the internet into people's lives, accelerated sustainable energy, or making humans multi -planetary.
633
That belief fueled his perseverance.
634
When you have a strong why, you can endure almost anyhow.
635
So, ask yourself, what's your why?
636
What mission or vision will keep you going when things get tough?
637
When you connect to that, you tap into a source of grit.
638
And remember, setbacks, they're normal.
639
As the saying goes, smooth seas don't make skilled sailors.
640
Every entrepreneur will hit storms.
641
The successful ones like Musk navigate through them with determination.
642
They adapt, they learn, and they keep moving forward.
643
So every time you overcome a challenge, you're building your perseverance muscle, your grit, and that will pay off in the long run big time.
644
Applying the lessons to your journey.
645
By now, Elon's story should be inspiring you, but I also wanted to challenge you.
646
It's time to get practical.
647
You might be thinking, all right, I get it.
648
Work hard, sacrifice, persevere.
649
But what does that actually mean for me?
650
Let's break down a few lessons from must experience and how you can apply them as an entrepreneur.
651
Number one, commit fully to your vision.
652
Elon Musk went all in.
653
He'd literally rearrange his life and comfort around his business.
654
You don't have to sleep on a couch or eat ramen every meal unless it's necessary, but you do have to be fully committed.
655
That might mean investing your savings, quitting other distractions, or simply adopting a mindset that failure is not an option.
656
Ask yourself if you're 100 % committed to your dream or if you're holding back.
657
And if it's the latter, figure out why and address it.
658
True commitment is scary, but it's also liberating.
659
It focuses you and fuels you.
660
Next, be resourceful and learn.
661
Use what you have and don't make excuses about what you don't have.
662
Elon started with one computer for his entire web business.
663
It ran during the day serving a website and he coded on it at night.
664
That's creative use of limited resources.
665
If money is tight, find a way to do more with less.
666
Work out of a garage or co -working space, use freeze office tools, barter services if you must.
667
Nearly two -thirds of founders fund their startups with personal savings, which often means living frugally.
668
So if you have to downgrade your lifestyle temporarily, do it.
669
It's not about deprivation for its own sake.
670
It's about channeling resources into what matters most.
671
Every dollar you don't spend on fancy office decor
672
or personal luxuries is a dollar that keeps your business alive a bit longer.
673
Next, out hustle everyone within reason.
674
There's nowhere around that hard work matters, especially in the beginning.
675
You have an incredible advantage if you're willing to work harder and smarter than others.
676
This could mean waking up earlier, staying up later, and making your calendar your best friend.
677
Musk's approach of 80 to 100 hours per week isn't a mandate for you to burn out, but it is a challenge.
678
Are you using your time effectively and relentlessly?
679
Could you be putting in more quality work hours towards your goal?
680
Remember, if you work twice as hard as your competitor, you can potentially get things done in a matter of months that might take them years.
681
This can be the difference between your startup leading versus lagging.
682
So grind when others relax.
683
Just do it in a sustainable way for you.
684
Take care of your health so you can keep going.
685
It's a marathon, not a sprint, but it's a marathon that often requires bursts of sprinting.
686
Next, embrace and learn from setbacks.
687
Don't shy away from failures or tough times.
688
Expect them and use them.
689
Elon's rockets blew up.
690
His cars had production hell.
691
He ran out of cash.
692
Those could have been fatal excuses to quit.
693
Instead, he treated them as problems to solve.
694
If something isn't working in your business, don't take it as a sign that it's not meant to be.
695
See it as feedback.
696
Adjust your strategy.
697
Improve your product.
698
Pivot if you need to.
699
Each setback is teaching you something.
700
The grit research that we talked about shows that perseverance can trump raw talent.
701
So when you hit a wall,
702
remember that punching through it or finding a way around it is exactly what might make you successful in the end.
703
Every founder faces doubt and darkness at some point.
704
The winners are the ones who persist one day longer than the problem.
705
Next, keep your why in focus.
706
Building a business is hard.
707
There's no sugarcoating it.
708
The only thing that keeps you going through sleeping on couches, working 100 hour work weeks,
709
or facing bankruptcy is a deep conviction in why you're doing this.
710
It could be a vision to change an industry, to support your family, to prove something to yourself, or to help others.
711
But whatever it is, keep that front and center.
712
Elon Musk wanted to revolutionize transportation and save humanity.
713
Those are not small goals.
714
That vision gave him the fire to endure what most wouldn't.
715
Your vision can do the same for you.
716
So write it down.
717
Put it on your wall.
718
Remind yourself daily.
719
When you believe in your mission, sacrifice starts to feel less like pain and more like purpose.
720
How far will you go?
721
At this point, you might be feeling a mix of excitement and a little intimidation.
722
And that's good.
723
Elon Musk's story from sleeping in an office
724
and showering out of YMCA to becoming a multi -billionaire change in the world is not meant to make
725
you think you have to copy his exact path.
726
It's meant to illustrate what extreme dedication and belief in one's vision can accomplish.
727
The real question here isn't will you sleep on the floor?
728
The question is how far are you willing to go for your dream?
729
Maybe your journey won't require a couch bed or seven day work weeks or maybe it will.
730
Either way you get to decide your threshold for commitment.
731
What I want you to take away is the mindset.
732
Don't look at Elon's story and just marvel at how crazy it is.
733
Apply it to your context.
734
If you're an entrepreneur, you are playing a high -stakes game.
735
The rewards can be life -changing, but the effort required is enormous.
736
So set your expectations accordingly.
737
When the going gets tough, and it will get tough, remember this video.
738
Remember this story.
739
Remember that Elon Musk ate dirt for years before anyone recognizes genius.
740
Remember that every overnight success is years in the making, often in the dark with nobody clapping for you.
741
The next time you're working late or making a sacrifice and you wonder, is this worth it?
742
Think of that young Elon Musk, alone in a tiny office, coding by himself at 2 a .m with everything on the line.
743
He had no guarantees.
744
For all he knew, he might've ended up back on a plane to Canada, broke and defeated, but he gave it everything anyway.
745
And look at him now.
746
As one ex -user reacting to Elon's story put it, there's absolutely no substitute for hard work
747
so no more excuses you have a dream protect it nurture it fight for it sacrifice for it
748
if you have to work your face off for it be smart be adaptable
749
but when it comes down to it be relentless
750
because the real lesson of elon musk sleeping on office floors
751
and showering at the ymca is this
752
if you want something badly enough you'll find a way to make it happen no matter how uncomfortable
753
or challenging the way and that is the mindset that creates success.
754
10 years from now, you could be looking back on your own story, telling people how you overcame the odds,
755
how you put in the work when no one else believed in you, how you made sacrifices that seemed crazy to others.
756
That story is written by the actions that you take today and tomorrow and the next day.
757
So write a story you'll be proud to tell.
758
dream big, work hard, and persevere.
759
Your journey probably won't be easy.
760
The worthwhile ones never are, but it will be worth it.
761
Keep going, keep believing in your vision, and when things get tough,
762
well, just remember that Elon Musk slept in his office and showered at the YMCA, and he didn't let that stop him.
763
If he can go from that to where he is now, imagine what you can do with the opportunities in front of you.
764
So now it's your turn.
765
How far will you go?
766
I know you have greatness inside you, and I can't wait to see what you do with it.
767
Go make it happen.
768
I believe in you.
769
To learn the three hours of money lessons that most people learn too late, check the video right there next to me.
770
I think you'll love it.
771
Continue to believe and I'll see you there.
772
Most people don't have a money problem.
773
They have a money education problem.
774
Colleges are basically for fun and to prove you can do your chores, but they're not for learning.
775
As a general matter, as a one piece of specific finance, financial advice.
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Vocabulary and speaking notes for this lesson
This speaking lesson is built on the video “This is How Elon Musk Learns a New Skill in Under 30 Days”. This video has 775 sentences and 9526 words to shadow. The speech runs for 46:06. The speaker talks fast, about 207 words per minute, so expect linked and reduced sounds. 85% of the words are among the 3,000 most common in English; the rest is worth studying before you start.
Key vocabulary in this video
15 words from the video worth learning, with pronunciation and meaning:
| Word | Pronunciation | Meaning |
|---|---|---|
| rocket noun | /ˈɹɑk.ɪt/ | A cylindrical projectile that can be fired to a great height through combustion, (specifically) a type of firework of this form, typically exploding with light… |
| skill noun | /skɪl/ | A capacity to do something well; a technique, an ability, usually acquired or learned, as opposed to abilities that are regarded as innate. |
| entrepreneur noun | /ˌɑn.tɹə.pɹəˈnɝ/ | A person who sets up a business; generally, a person who owns and manages a business and assumes its financial risks. |
| principle noun | /ˈpɹɪn.sɪ.pəl/ | A fundamental assumption, fundamental law or guiding belief. |
| sacrifice noun | /ˈsæk.ɹɪ.faɪs/ | Originally, the killing (and often burning) of a human being or an animal as an offering to a deity; later, also the offering of an object to a deity. |
| solve verb | /sɒlv/ | To find an answer or solution to a problem or question; to work out. |
| textbook noun | /ˈtɛkst.bʊk/ | A coursebook, a formal manual of instruction in a specific subject, especially one for use in schools or colleges. |
| requirement noun | /ɹɪˈkwaɪɹmənt/ | A necessity or prerequisite; something required or obligatory. Its adpositions are generally of in relation to who or what has given it, on in relation to whom… |
| delete verb | /dɪˈliːt/ | To remove, get rid of or erase, especially written or printed material, or data on a computer or other device. |
| fiber noun | /ˈfaɪ.bɚ/ | A single elongated piece of a given material, roughly round in cross-section, often twisted with other fibers to form thread. |
| startup noun | /ˈstɑɹtˌʌp/ | The act or process of starting a process or machine. |
| comfort noun | /ˈkʌm.fət/ | Contentment, ease. |
| calendar noun | /ˈkæl.ən.də/ | Any system by which time is divided into days, weeks, months, and years. |
| physically adverb | /ˈfɪz.ɪ.kli/ | In a physical manner. |
| lesson noun | /ˈlɛs.ən/ | A section of learning or teaching into which a wider learning content is divided. |
Phrasal verbs you will hear
| Word | Pronunciation | Meaning |
|---|---|---|
| write down verb | To produce or set (something) down in writing; to record something. | |
| come out verb | /ˌkʌm ˈaʊt/ | To be discovered; to be revealed. |
| end up verb | To bring to a conclusion. | |
| give up verb | To surrender (someone or something); to inform on (someone). | |
| back up verb | To move backwards, especially for a vehicle to do so. | |
| break down verb | To stop functioning. | |
| come down to verb | To reach by moving down or reducing. | |
| come up with verb | To manage to produce, deliver, or present (something) by inventing, creating, thinking of, or obtaining it. |
Sentences worth repeating
Short, complete lines from the video that you can reuse in everyday conversation:
- What do your clients actually care about?
- Why am I learning from this person?
- Why do I find inspiring?
- Question number three, what can I delete right now?
- What do you pay for a lead?
Grammar in this video
The structures the speaker uses most, with the exact words from the video:
| Structure | In the video |
|---|---|
| Present perfect continuous have/has been + -ing — an action that started earlier and is still going on | you've been putting · you've been carrying |
| Conditional sentences if + clause, will/would + verb — a condition and its result | If you don't, you'll end · if you want something badly enough you'll find |
| Present perfect have/has + past participle — a past action that still matters now | have never met · I've learned · haven't met |
| Passive voice be + past participle — the focus is on what happens, not who does it | was raised · had been bought · is actually made |
Pronunciation to watch
The speaker uses 148 contractions and reduced forms, such as you're, don't, you've. Say them the short way, as you hear them.
- The “th” sounds: mathematics /mæθ(.ə)ˈmæt.ɪks/, marathon /ˈmæɹəθən/, myth /mɪθ/, ethic /ˈɛθ.ɪk/, smooth /smuːð/
- The “sh” and “zh” sounds: ratio /ˈɹeɪ.ʃoʊ/, accomplish /əˈkɑm.plɪʃ/, automation /ˌɔ.təˈmeɪ.ʃən/, calculation /ˌkælkjuˈleɪʃn̩/, hardship /ˈhɑɹdˌʃɪp/
- Long words — get the stress right: entrepreneur /ˌɑn.tɹə.pɹəˈnɝ/, fundamental /ˌfʌn.dəˈmɛn.təl/, aluminum /əˈlu.mɪ.nəm/, sustainable /səˈsteɪnəbəl/, mathematics /mæθ(.ə)ˈmæt.ɪks/
How to practise with this video
- Listen to the whole video once without speaking and note the words you do not know.
- Start at 0.75× speed, shadow it sentence by sentence, then go back to normal speed once it feels easy.
- Record yourself and compare with the original, paying attention to words like rocket, skill, entrepreneur.
What is the Shadowing Technique?
Shadowing is a science-backed language learning technique originally developed for professional interpreter training and popularized by polyglot Dr. Alexander Arguelles. The method is simple but powerful: you listen to native English audio and immediately repeat it out loud — like a shadow following the speaker with just a 1–2 second delay. Unlike passive listening or grammar drills, shadowing forces your brain and mouth muscles to simultaneously process and reproduce real speech patterns. Research shows it significantly improves pronunciation accuracy, intonation, rhythm, connected speech, listening comprehension, and speaking fluency — making it one of the most effective methods for IELTS Speaking preparation and real-world English communication.