8 business lessons by Elon Musk that will make you succeed in your business.
Elon Musk is worth over $22 billion. He has created game changing businesses like PayPal, Tesla Motors, and SpaceX. He’s the closest thing we have to a real-life iron man.
# NEVER GIVE UP
Q: “Did you expect them to cheer you on?
Elon Musk “I was very sad to see that because those guys are heroes of mine so it’s really tough you know, I wish they would come and visit and see the hard work that we’re doing here”
Q: Did you think, I need to pack this in?
Elon Musk “Never, I don’t ever give up!”
# TAKE RISKS
“Now is the time to take risks. As you get older, your obligations increase. And once you have a family you start taking risk 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. I would encourage you to take risks, do something bold. You won’t regret it!”
# DO WHAT YOU LIKE
“Even if you if you’re the best, there’s always a chance of failure, so I think it’s important that you really like whatever you’re doing. Life is too short. If you like what you’re doing, you think about it even when you’re not working, it’s something that your mind is drawn to. And if you don’t like, you just really can’t make it work”.
# IF IT IS WORTH IT, DO IT
“I didn’t really think Tesla would be successful, I thought we would most likely fail. But I thought that at least we could address the false perception that people had that an electric car had to be ugly, slow, and boring like a golf cart. So if something is important enough, you should try even if you probable outcome is failure”.
# MAXIMIZE YOUR RESOURCES
Focus on on signal over noise. At Tesla we’ve never spent any money on advertising, we put all the money into R&D, manufacturing and design to try to make the car as good as possible. And I think that’s the way to go. For any given company, just keep thinking about: are these efforts resulting in a better product or service? And if they’re not stop those efforts”.
# GATHER GREAT PEOPLE
“If you are creating a company, the most important thing is to attract great people. All the company is a group of people that have gathered together to create a product or service, and depending on how talented and hard working that group is, will determine the success of the company”.
# HIRE PROBLEM SOLVERS
“When interview someone, I ask them about the problems that they have worked on, and how they have solved them”.
# WORK SUPER HARD
“You need to work super hard. When my brother and I were starting our first company, we rented a small office and we slept on the couch. We had one computer so the was up during the day and I was coding at night seven days a week all the time. If you’re starting a company work hard like it you mean every waking hour. If somebody else is working 50 hours and you’re working a hundred, you’ll get twice as much done in the course of a year as the other company”.
Elon Reeve Musk
is a technology entrepreneur, investor, and engineer. He holds South African, Canadian, and U.S. citizenship and is the founder, CEO, and lead designer of SpaceX; co-founder, CEO, and product architect of Tesla, Inc.; co-founder and CEO of Neuralink; founder of The Boring Company; co-founder and co-chairman of OpenAI; and co-founder of PayPal.
In December 2016, he was ranked 21st on the Forbes list of The World’s Most Powerful People. As of October 2018, he has a net worth of $22.8 billion and is listed by Forbes as the 54th-richest person in the world.