Celebrating Moon Day with The Elon Musk Method Continued

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Elon Musk is a South African transplant by way of Canada who now has made West Los Angeles his base. He’s a nerd who became a rocket scientist by reading up on it. His goal in life is to create a colony on Mars. In order to afford that trip, he’s resurrected the failing electric car industry by creating an electric car that has a 2-year waiting list for delivery.

Jon Favreau noted, “Elon Musk serves as ‘inspiration’ for Tony Stark on Marvel’s Avengers. And for Iron Man 2, the Tesla CEO made an on-screen cameo appearance and allowed some of the filming to occur at SpaceX.”

Many forget that Musk received a huge paycheck from the sale of PayPal, which gave him the seed money to start SpaceX, SolarCity, and Tesla. He had earlier sold an online mapping company for $340 Million (his share was $22 Million).

Among Musk’s accomplishments:

Created the autonomous care and truck business. No one was talking about 100% self-driving cares and trucks until Musk said he’d offer just that by 2019. Now, every car maker is working on autonomous cars, with many being tested on the road.
Made the first-ever rocket that lands vertically on earth, thereby making all the major components reusable. Reduces the cost to launch satellites from $240M to $80M per launch.

Musk claims that a combination of curiosity, massive amounts of reading, and working 100 hours a week, every week, accounts for his success.

Webster gives the broadest possible meaning of the word “entrepreneur,” making it synonymous with business owner: “one who organizes, manages, and assumes the risks of a business or enterprise.”

There are at least five kinds of business owners, and many of those fall into the kind of business owner that Elon Musk exemplifies, the visionary. Here are the five types:

Practitioners: Many business owners are skilled at a profession or craft which can be used as the basis for being in business.
Managers: Some business owners would be successful owning any type of business. They are excellent at evaluating opportunities, creating plans, managing people and operations, and have great discipline. Many second-generation businesses are run by managers.
Trend Spotters: These business owners have a profound sense of what is fashionable.
Sales Professionals: Some folks can sell almost anything to anybody.
Visionaries: They invent their own businesses based on what they see as a perceived need in the marketplace. They then invent or modify existing products and/or services in such a way to differentiate themselves from the pack.

Visionaries are risk takers and prognosticators who boldly go where others fear to tread. Their friends, family, and advisors are all generally fighting them all the way. All the way, that is, to great triumphs or huge defeats. You see, these folks would rather fail big than not try.

Commonly, the visionary doesn’t care much about money or what money buys. They are charged up by seeing their vision come true and by seeing their employees, associates, suppliers, and family members benefit from their success.

The Early Years

Elon’s father, Errol Musk, is an electromechanical engineer, pilot, and sailor, who made a fortune in construction and emerald mining. Elon implies emotional abuse from his father and suggests that Errol’s business practices were unsavory in the extreme. Elon chose to distance himself from his dad, when he found out that his father had engaged in relations with his step daughter resulting in a child.

Maye Musk—Elon’s mother—is a dietician and nutritionist with advanced degrees who currently runs her own firm and is in demand as a speaker. Her intellectual prowess is matched by her beauty. She also continued her 50-year career as a model into her 70’s and was recently named spokesperson for Cover Girl.

Elon describes himself as shy and introverted. Although he devoured books, and his curiosity was insatiable, his time in grammar school was lonely because he admits that he was a know-it-all who had few friends. By his middle teens, Musk had arrived at two conclusions about his future:

Try to take the set of actions that are likely to prolong civilization, minimize the probability of a dark age and reduce the length of a dark age, if there is one.
To the degree we can expand the scope and scale of consciousness and knowledge, that would be a good thing.

The Accomplishments

Musk earned an economics degree from Wharton School and BS in physics from the College of Arts and Science. He was accepted into the Ph.D. program in applied physics at Stanford, but he dropped out after two days, seeing an opportunity he fears would be gone if he doesn’t take advantage.

His employers, school associates, and friends describe Musk as having an intensity that “separates him from the rest of humanity.”

In October 2002, eBay purchased PayPal for $1.5 Billion. After being ousted from the CEO position at PayPal, Musk lost no time in turning his attention to his big plan…getting to Mars. He was unhappy that the US had basically given up on efforts to explore other planets.

Jim Cantrell, an actual rocket scientist, was one of the early cadres advising Musk regarding his space ambitions. He tells the story this way, “Elon came to me in 2001 wanting to ‘do something that could demonstrate that humanity could become a multi-planetary species.’ He still uses that phrase. He wanted to do it with his own money and had the idea of launching a colony of mice to Mars.”

Musk now says, “I gave basically both SpaceX and Tesla from the beginning a probability of less than 10% likelihood to succeed, and if you were to do a risk-adjusted rate of return estimate on various industry opportunities, I would put building rockets and cars pretty close to the bottom of the list. They would have to be the dumbest things to do.”

For SpaceX, Musk eventually sank $100 Million of his own funds into the venture. As of December 2018, SpaceX was valued at $30.5 Billion and launched more rockets and tonnage per year than ever before—by any company or sovereign nation.

Musk asked, “How can we safely get satellites into orbit at the lowest possible cost, whatever the payload is?” This meant rethinking every aspect of how rockets are built; how, when, and where they were launched; and what would happen if the parts could be reused rather than discarded after every flight. The result is a lowering of cost per flight from over $1 Billion for NASA to a current $65 Million for SpaceX, and some expectation of a cost as low as $7 Million when reusing all the parts that are discarded by every other space endeavor. Musk insists all of the SpaceX work is dedicated to a final goal of populating Mars. The goal is to send the first starship to Mars in 2022, loaded with supplies that will be needed when humans are sent in 2024.

Artificial Intelligence is taking over, whether we like it or not. Musk is very concerned. “It’s not as though I think the risk is that the AI would develop all on its own right off the bat. The concern is that someone may use it in a way that is bad, and even if they weren’t going to use it in a way that is bad, somebody would take it from them and use it in a way that is bad. That, I think, is quite a big danger. We must have democratization of AI technology and make it widely available. That’s the reason [we] created OpenAI. There’s a quote I love from Lord Acton—he was the guy who came up with, ‘Power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely’—which is that ‘freedom consists of the distribution of power and despotism in its concretion.’ I think it’s important if we have this incredibly powerful AI that it not be concentrated in the hands of a few.”

Musk believes that his rockets could offer city-to-city passenger transportation anywhere on earth in 45 minutes. The rockets would launch and land on specially designed pods that could be land or sea-based. In SpaceX’s video that illustrates the idea, passengers take a large boat from a dock in New York City to a floating launchpad in the water. There, they board the same rocket that Musk wants to use to send humans to Mars by 2024. But instead of heading off to another planet once they leave the Earth’s atmosphere, the ship separates and breaks off toward another city—Shanghai. Just 39 minutes and some 7,000 miles later, the ship reenters the atmosphere and touches down on another floating pad, much like the way SpaceX lands its Falcon 9 rocket at sea. Other routes proposed in the video include Hong Kong to Singapore in 22 minutes, London to Dubai or New York in 29 minutes and Los Angeles to Toronto in 24 minutes.

The founder of Tesla Motors and Space Exploration Technologies announced that in the near future he may work to develop an all-electric supersonic jet that could take off and land vertically. Elon Musk said that supersonic air travel, exceeding the speed of sound using an electric-powered jet that could take off and land without the need for a long runway was “the ultimate form of transport.”

Traveling at supersonic speeds, an aircraft could fly from London to Shanghai in about seven and a half hours, which compares with the more than 11 hours for a direct commercial flight. An all-electric plane would benefit the environment, in addition to being fast and quiet, Musk noted.

The Vision

At age 31, Musk was in a position to do almost anything he wanted. With $190 Million in the bank, he began to focus on the idea that man needed to keep exploring the heavens.

We all have the same number of hours in a day, and roughly the same number of years on this planet. Some appear to drift through life without any thought of their purpose. Others contemplate their purpose but never spend the time or take the risks to play it out. Some choose to look for meaning and then act with purpose to maximize their contribution. Elon Musk seems to be emblematic of this third group.

As Jim Cantrell pointed out, “Those of us who helped Elon start SpaceX had all self-ejected from Corporate America at one point or another because of its conformity in thinking and limitations on doing. Early SpaceX was a merry band of brothers who were refugees from the oppressive ‘group think’ of Corporate America—and especially the aerospace industry. Those we left behind ‘in the system’ referred to us derisively as ‘Rogue Engineers.’ We came to wear those words, meant to insult us, as a badge of honor. Elon is the biggest and best-known member of this group and, as far as I can tell, was born outside of it. He would lead the ‘group’ but by definition we have no leaders and cannot be led. In many ways, this is the story of North America and the United States as a whole.”

Elon explains his motivation to succeed, “That’s what really drives me, is trying to figure out how to make sure things are great.” Ali Montag said, “There need to be things that inspire you.”

16 Practices of Elon Musk that Every Entrepreneur Can Learn From

Musk said, “Fundamentally, if you don’t have a compelling product, at a compelling price, you don’t have a great company.”

1. Curiosity: The Necessary Root of Invention

Musk’s curiosity resulted in his digging deeply into hundreds of subjects, primarily in the fields of science, math, history, and philosophy.

Einstein’s sentiment is true of the typical entrepreneur and especially Elon Musk, the poster child of entrepreneurship.

If you want to be more curious, you’ll need to make the decision to do so. That is step one in almost any process of change. Your “why” might be a desire for self-improvement, a specific need to innovate in your field, or a hope that is greater curiosity might lead to new adventure.

Next, you’ll want to learn to be an amazing listener and questioner. God gave us two ears and one mouth for a reason. Do you listen twice as much as you speak?

Every conversation you have, whether analog or virtual, has the potential to further stimulate your curiosity, build upon your knowledge, and bring about potential solutions to issues you are considering. Question everything! The person who is always questioning will meet a lot of resistance from peers who might feel threatened by your ideas.

One thing that seems to be true of all the great tech giants, including Musk—they are all lifetime learners, and this means they are readers.

Finally, don’t strain for new ideas. Let them come. Most great innovators have their best ideas and worst ideas just before falling asleep or just after waking when the mind is doing the work.

2. Observation: Seeing the Forest and the Trees

Some folks can’t see the trees for the forest. The really great entrepreneurs are good at seeing the big picture without losing sight of the details. To do this requires observation.

A single observation—cost per launch can be lowered—has created a complete disruption of the rocket industry and created huge potential for benefits not even under consideration until two years ago.

You need to understand core principles. This is akin to UCLA basketball coach John Wooden’s famous quote about fundamentals when he addressed the top high school recruits in the US at their first practice under his leadership, “This, gentlemen, is a basketball.”

Musk has reported that during the design stages of each automobile, a weekly meeting takes place to go “over every inch of the design.” He participates in this meeting because he literally intends to “go over every inch.” And not just once, but with different lighting and from every angle, so that the car looks beautiful and functions perfectly in every condition.

Most of us spend our day with little or no focus on ideas, tasks, or solutions. In fact, because of our devices, we may be the least focused humans in history. Musk offers a solution. He breaks his day into 5-minute chunks. During this time-limited period, he works on just a single subject, and allows no distractions. In this way he has almost no choice but to give intent and focus to the issue at hand for that chunk of time.

Musk states that his best ideas come during his morning shower. He believes that the relaxing moments after waking are times when the brain’s effort during sleep find purchase.

3. Expertise in Every Aspect of the Business

Every one of us is capable of becoming the expert and then applying that expertise to issues around us. Why would you want to become an expert?

Become credible in the eyes of potential clients
Improve decision-making on any subject
Invent new solutions to problems
Create a new business around your expertise
Improve processes in your existing businesses
Get paid to write article in print or online
Teach others for fun or profit
Know how to help others

Step One: Select the Area of Expertise Carefully – Think about what you want to accomplish by gaining the expertise and what the specific expertise required might look like.

Step Two: Google the Expertise Exactly – Quickly read through the summaries of the articles offered and make a decision about where to start.

Step Three: Go Deep! Most net surfers and researchers are very impatient. Only 20% go to page two in the search results. Follow “good” rabbit trails. When you are on some websites, the content may not be helpful, but the links might be even better. The deeper you go into the subject, the more likely you are to find the great site, and you may also start refining your subject and, therefore, your search results.

Step Four: YouTube and Other Resources – There is a reason YouTube is the 2^nd most used search engine.

Step Five: Start Telling Others What You Know – Almost every interview with Musk includes many references to his partners, collaborators, team members, and even friends. Nothing beats the teaching method of solidifying knowledge and finding out what you’re missing that might be critical.

4. Analysis – An Acquired Skill

There is a critically important rule that determines the success of the brainstorming effort: there are no bad ideas. The theory is that you want everyone to feel that they can be completely free to suggest whatever pops into their mind. Humans are constantly analyzing. Analysis is necessary to daily living, but not all of us are great at analyzing situations.

Step One: Start by Looking at First Principles – Most innovation or invention comes from incremental changes to an existing approach or by changing something that has been done or another product, called reasoning by analogy: make smart phones larger, smaller, different colors, add more lenses to the camera feature, take away a port to make room for more battery. Consider every part of what you make or do. Break it down into first principles, then mercilessly innovate with breakthrough ideas, create completely different approaches, and then incrementally improve the resulting product, service, or process.

Step Two: Do Lots of Research – Thomas Edison was the Elon Musk of his time. His inventions are still lighting our way and bring fabulous sights and sounds into our homes and cars. Plenty of companies do just fine by copying the best. You want to be “Muskian”? Know that Musk spends his time, money, and energy doing research.

Step Three: Ask Great Questions – What in the world are the right questions? You might start with the journalists’ list: Who, What When, Where, and How? Then add a huge one, Why, and then Why Not? The key is to question everything.

Einstein said, “If I had an hour to solve a problem and my life depended on the solution, I would spend the first 55 minutes determining the proper question to ask…for once I know the proper question, I could solve the problem in less than 5 minutes.” No matter how simple the issue, the questions you ask will be key to the success of the final decision, product, or process.

Step Four: Break Down the Analysis into Categories – Like Dad always said, measure twice and cut once. Asking the right questions, followed by creating categories for analysis is the measuring tool.

Step Five: Isolate the Strengths and Weaknesses – Small business coaches use a method called SWOT (Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, and Threats), to examine the business as a whole, and/or products and services that are being offered by the business.

Step Six: Determine What Needs More Research – To paraphrase Musk, “You never stop asking yourself questions.”

Step Seven: Find Additional Human Resources as Necessary – Musk is known for asking prospective employees to tell him about problems they’ve overcome in the past, and the pathway they took to get to the solution. There are always plenty of human resources available to get to the answers you need. It is only a matter of thinking through the best way to find those resources.

Step Eight: Seek Out and Listen to Negative Feedback – The feedback loop seeks to answer the question, “What is wrong with the product, service, process, or idea?” Musk says he has almost no interest in hearing what a friend or customer likes about their Tesla. He wants to know what they thought needed attention or could have been done better. Musk explains, “People tend to avoid negative feedback because it’s painful, but this is a very common mistake to not actively seek out and listen to negative feedback.” Musk would suggest that you specifically challenge observers of your new idea to find the flaws, point out the negatives, and be honest about the overall idea. On more than one occasion, Musk has asserted that this is his number one piece of advice for budding entrepreneurs.

Step Nine: Do the Math – Know your costs. Know your margins. Know what your overhead contribution is.

Step Ten: Make Hard Decisions Quickly – As Musk points out, “When something is important enough, you do it even if the odds are not in your favor.” Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos and others recommend 70% likelihood of correctness as a threshold. Musk has a very clearly thought out 6-step process for making decisions that is taught to all employees.

Ask a question.
Gather as much evidence as possible about it.
Develop axioms based on the evidence and try to assign a probability of truth to each one.
Draw a conclusion based on cogency in order to determine: Are these axioms correct, are they relevant, do they necessarily lead to this conclusion, and with what probability?
Attempt to disprove the conclusion. Seek refutation from others to further help break your conclusion.
If nobody can invalidate your conclusion, then you’re probably right, but you’re not certainly right.

5. Asking Big Questions

Here are a few big questions:

Should I fire a large customer?
Should I drop a major product or service?
How much do I really care about increasing my income?
What am I willing to sacrifice to see my company succeed?
Why am I in business? This business?
Who can I trust?
Should I completely rethink my business plan? Processes? Staffing?
What are the chances that this business will fail in the next year? Five years?
Do I like working here?

6. Rule Breaking Is Essential to Vision

True entrepreneurs are always rule breakers. Elon Musk is the absolute king of rule breaking. When he entered the rocket business, every friend and confidant that he trusted told him not to do it.

7. Leadership – Musk Style

In War and Peace, Tolstoy told a story of a soldier who was trying to figure out how to go home alive. In order to be calm on the battlefield and consequently effective as a leader, you must consider yourself dead. You must accept that you can’t get out alive. Now you are able to lead the charge and others will follow you. This is exactly how it works in business. The owner/leader must appear to his troops to be willing to succeed or die trying.

When Musk messes up, he fesses up. This is another trait of great leaders. It also creates a reputation for transparency that helps when messes happen that aren’t your fault.

What Can We All Learn from the Musk Leadership Style?

Vision

Visionaries can commonly imagine the specific ways in which they will produce, market, and fund their ideas before they open their doors. The goal is really to communicate, hone, rework, and sharpen the vision. When this process has proven fruitful, the next step is to work on a simple way of being able to show others the vision.

Elon Musk borrowed the Apple method of doing big stage productions to introduce his ideas.

Musk says, “I try to make it a really fun place to work, really enjoyable. And I talk about the grand vision of SpaceX, where we wanna go, what we wanna do; we wanna take people to orbit and beyond. We ultimately want to be the company that makes a difference in the extension of life beyond earth, which is one of the most important things that life itself could achieve.”

Musk is genius at communicating the vision. In fact, at one of his low points in the history of Tesla and SpaceX, Musk told his public relations staff that they needed to have something new to make headlines with every single week. Here was a vision within a vision. Get the company brand in the news week after week and build a continuous buzz around the progress of the products and the company.

Public relations is one of the least expensive ways to communicate a vision, and Musk and company have brilliantly exploited this approach. Your vision will be spread by your happy customers. Musk says that he doesn’t advertise at all because he knows his customers will tell their neighbors about their experience.

Passion

Though sometimes described as enthusiasm, energy, commitment, or positivity, the owner or manager who doesn’t exhibit this characteristic is unlikely to wear the mantel of leader for long. When you talk about your vision, your products, and your company, do listeners catch your passion, or do you come across as tired, bored, robotic?

Leading the Charge

Some have argued that you should lead from behind. You will never see Elon Musk leading from behind. Musk it out front and exposing his jugular in every way imaginable. He makes bold statements, he accepts responsibility for falling short on those statements, he works harder and longer than anyone in the company, and he’s willing to subject himself to any difficult task or hardship that he’d ask his people to do.

Servant’s Heart

Musk made the 2017 Glassdoor Highest Rated CEOs list and defined how he thinks of leadership in an interview with the company this year. “Your title makes you a manager, but your people make you a leader. We want our leaders to find ways of motivating and inspiring their teams, reduce the noise in their work and help remove blockers. If you are a manager or leading at any level at SpaceX, we stress that your team is not there to serve you. You are there to serve your team and help them do the best possible job for the company. This applies to me most of all. Leaders are also expected to work harder than those who report to them and always make sure that their needs are taken care of before yours, thus leading by example.”

Delegation

There are three levels of delegation that a leader must learn and teach if they are to be successful: delegation of the job; delegation of the responsibility for the job or for the people under their supervision; and delegation of the authority to act on the leader’s behalf.

If Musk could be slighted on any leadership skill, it might be this one. He continues to be very hands-on in the details of the development of the products and systems necessary to execute his plan on or near his timetables. He creates crazy expectations and then won’t take “no” for an answer. When someone says “no,” or has no solution to offer, he may take action against that employee directly, thereby undermining the managers.

As a general rule, you can manage up to 9 people without delegating any responsibility or authority. After that, your organization will become more and more inefficient if you keep trying to manage all the work. Once you reach 25 or more employees, you’ll need to start delegating authority. This is the hardest step.

Follow Through

Are you seen as the kind of leader who can be counted on to follow through?

Integrity

A reputation is hard to build and almost impossible to recover once lost. If those you lead feel you are lacking in integrity, they may believe that they have license to follow suit.

You may see short term advantages from acts lacking in integrity or pushing into gray areas. Great leaders are generally those who are trusted by those they lead.

8. Goal Setting

Norman Vincent Peale said, “Shoot for the moon. Even if you miss, you’ll land among the stars.” Remember that great expectations create great capabilities. If you limit your goals to what you know you can achieve, you are setting the bar way too low.

Elon Musk dares to set goals, really BIG goals that no one else is even contemplating. Musk said, “It’s better to approach this [building a company] from the standpoint of saying—rather than you want to be an entrepreneur or you want to make money—what are some useful things that you do that you wish existed in the world?”

Chris Anderson asked, “Why, Elon? Why do we need to build a city on Mars?” Elon responded, “I think it’s important to have a future that is inspiring and appealing… I just think there have to be reasons that you get up in the morning and you want to live. Like, why do you want to live? What’s the point? What inspires you? What do you love about the future? And if we’re not out there, if the future does not include being out there among the stars and being a multi-planet species. I find that it’s incredibly depressing if that’s not the future that we’re going to have.”

The best goal setting begins with clarity. What is your purpose? As Musk asks, “What inspires you?”

Insert your potential world-changing mission into the formula. Would you be more eager to get up in the morning if you were going to disrupt your industry rather than just pay the bills?

9. Networking is a Core Value

Elon encourages, “Join a group that is amazing that you really respect or if you are building a company you’ve got to gather great people.”

Those who are willing to reach out socially and find ways to connect and create community are building successful networks. Musk has had partners from the very beginning. In addition to his actual business partners, he developed large networks of associates that could and did help him with resources, necessary connections, financing, and emotional support.

Andrew Carnegie was the wealthiest man of his era and credited his people, “Take away my people but leave my factories and soon grass will grow on the factory floors… Take away my factories but leave my people and soon we will have a new and better factory.”

Napoleon Hill in Think and Grow Rich concluded that, “No two minds ever come together without thereby creating a third, invisible intangible force, which may be likened to a third mind.”

Have you built your own mastermind group to help guide you, encourage you, and hold you accountable?

Musk built relationships based on an honest desire to listen to their expertise and/or because he was willing to offer them something they needed with no expectation of getting something back. Who did Musk seek out? He says that, at first, he was looking for knowledge and skill, but later he came to realize that character mattered more. “The biggest mistake in general that I’ve made—and I’m trying to correct for that—is to put too much of a weighting on somebody’s talent and not enough on their personality… It actually matters whether somebody has a good heart. It really does. And I’ve made the mistake of thinking that sometimes it’s just about the brain.”

Where are the hobbyists meeting in your industry? Who is crusading or organizing or innovating? Find those folks or be one of them. Be a giver of your time, energy, enthusiasm, evangelism, and talent. Be an absorber of their excitement, ideas, vision, and then apply all of this to your own business. Musk did this over and over in every business.

Until he was in his twenties, Musk is described almost universally as a shy young man, and few saw any evidence of his future potential. But shy or not, Musk was not shy about asking for help, orders, financing, partnerships, or affiliations.

10. Valuing People

Musk advises, “Do everything you can to gather great people if you’re creating a company.”

Leaders need someone to lead, and selecting the right people is a huge component of success in any business. Musk’s lifelong mantra has been to hire the best and let them do their job.

If the CEO is known to only hire top people, it is very likely that his second shift supervisor knows this and hires with a similar style. And if not, that second shift supervisor will likely get the boot.

Many people are at their best and happiest when being pushed to the max.

Jim Cantrell says, “ALL of our early hires had to talk to the founders and Elon. They had to all like them and generally came as personal references from existing employees. The creative process is more focused on assembling the right team than any other magic. The team has to be focused on the same priorities and has to be the brightest out there. Elon insisted on that. I think the creativity that comes from the right mixture of people co-located is almost defacto something that happens. They challenge each other, add to ideas, offer different perspectives.”

11. Executing the Vision

Elon Musk wakes up in the morning and believes he can create rocket ships and electric cars and tunnels under Chicago and neural transmitters from computers to our brains. Elon Musk actually executes his wild and crazy ideas.

Stating the obvious; if you can’t execute your idea, you need to give it to someone who can. You need to be mature enough to know your limitations and yet believe in yourself enough to stretch in areas where you do feel competent.

Musk also says that he didn’t really want to become a rocket scientist, but he couldn’t find someone to hire who understood his vision. So, he was forced to do it himself or abandon the plan.

12. Risk Taking

Why is Musk worth $21B and you’re not? Up until now, you’ve hopefully been inspired to up your game in some very simple ways. Hire better, network better, be more curious, set goals, have a vision, become a better leader. If you improve 5% at just those six things, you’d dramatically improve your income, personal success, and enjoyment of both your business and personal life. But then there are the big ones. And what is bigger than risk?

There are three things that determine how much money you make:

Are you willing and able to manage things and people?
Are you a good salesperson and willing to sell?
Are you willing to take risks?

If you had made a few hundred million dollars, would you turn around and invest every penny in a rocket company startup, an electric car startup, and a solar panel startup? Would you be so all in that you would not be willing to sacrifice one to improve the chances of the other? Would you also be willing to risk substantial amounts of other people’s money? Would you then work 100-hour weeks for as long as necessary to make sure you squeezed every last drop of your capability into insuring success?

A clear understanding of where you are on the risk continuum will help you make decisions about how much to rely on risk-taking compared to other ways to grow your business.

13. Overcoming Obstacles

Musk explains, “When you first start a company, there’s lots of optimism. And things are great. Happiness at first is high. And then you encounter all sorts of issues—and happiness will steadily decline. Then, you’ll go through a whole world of hurt. And, eventually, if you succeed—and in most cases you will not succeed…And Tesla almost didn’t succeed. It came very close to failure. If you succeed, then after a long time, you will finally get back to happiness.” What is the starting point for a company policy regarding overcoming obstacles? Musk says, “…be ready in case it doesn’t work out. It’s easier to recover from a failure if you already have a backup plan.” There are plenty of success books available that will tell you exactly the opposite, that if you have a plan B it works against plan A. Musk disagrees.

This is a core of entrepreneurial thinking.

Keep a completely open mind and a willingness to try new things. Musk goes on to say that, “Some people don’t like change, but you need to embrace change if the alternative is disaster.” Musk also says, “You should take the approach that you’re wrong. Your goal is to be less wrong.”

14. Creating Quality

Musk is generally shooting for a different definition of quality, which is the best possible quality and performance with no compromise allowed. This is a great position to occupy in the marketplace. Quality results should be pointed out publicly with high praise. Failures must be dealt with quickly and as privately as possible.

Many owners make the mistake of allowing poor quality because of the assumed cost. You need better equipment, better people, more training, quality control processes, and sometimes lower productivity to achieve more quality.

The cost benefits include: less rework, less scrap, less downtime, fewer returns, easier to sell into all sales channels, increased brand approval, more and better word of mouth, and better morale in the entire organization.

Musk suggests yet another reason to push for unparalleled quality, “A lot of companies get confused; they spend money on things that don’t actually make the product better. For example, at Tesla, we’ve never spent any money on advertising. We put all the money into R&D and manufacturing and design to try to make the car as good as possible. I think that’s the way to go. For any given company, keep thinking about ‘Are these efforts that people are spending, are they resulting in better product or service?’ And if they’re not, stop those efforts.”

15. Insists On Incremental Improvement

Musk hammers on incremental improvement. Making incremental improvements can apply to every aspect of your business and personal life. Athletes know this and train to shave parts of a second off their time. Business coaches work hard to help their clients become more efficient users of their time, incrementally freeing up time for higher priority, best use of time functions. Imagine if you were to make five, 3% improvements in your personal efficiency and performance, and another twenty 3% improvements in various processes, procedures, pricing, and costs throughout your business. The grand total might be far more take home than a 30% increase in sales.

As of January 2019, SpaceX and Tesla each announced large workforce reductions even as they ramp up for higher sales. As difficult as this may be, the market has little sympathy for inefficiency.

16. Relentlessness – Passion Plus Persistence

Most small businesses do not require passion to reach some small level of income. Money is a reflection of the true value that you are creating. How does this relate to Elon? When he came to Cantrell in 2001, he knew nothing of rockets or space exploration, but he was deeply passionate about it. In fact, he was so passionate about the need to “make humanity a multi-planetary species” that he was willing to spend a very large portion of his portion on it.

In a September 29, 2018 interview, Cantrell explained, “I left SpaceX after about a year because I too doubted SpaceX’s ability to succeed with the amount of money they had raised (and I could not conceive of raising more). I also did not share Elon’s passion for colonizing Mars as I regarded it to be a fool’s errand as it would never happen in my lifetime. I was wrong on both counts. Elon did succeed in the end and it was because he never counted himself out. He never gave up. He kept going. He knew that he had the three ingredients and he kept upping the ante every time that he faced an obstacle or failure. This leads me to what I personally think is the most important attribute for success. It’s not intelligence. It’s not being educated. It’s not even experience. It’s simply a determination to never ever give up. That is the most important element of success: dogged determination.”

Everyone talks about Musk’s relentlessness. Over and over, Ashlee Vance gives gripping accounts of Musk sleeping on the office floor, working over 100 hours week after week, cheering on the troops after disasters, investing his own money when it seemed utterly foolish, and risking entire companies on the next launch of a rocket or a product.

Very few business owners are this relentless and persistent, because very few have a goal beyond how much money they are going to earn. When the reason for owning a business is to make a paycheck, you become less inclined to take risks, and more inclined to guard your gains.

What can you learn from Elon Musk’s persistence and take-no-prisoners approach that would work for your company? How can you teach it to others?

Elon says, “Starting and growing a business is as much about the innovation, drive, and determination of the people behind it as the product they sell.” Musk points out, “Persistence is very important. You should not give up unless you are forced to give up. I don’t ever give up. I’d have to be dead or completely incapacitated.”

Conclusion

You don’t need to be an entrepreneur like Musk or even meet the pure definition of a visionary entrepreneur in order to be a successful business person. Not in the least. In order for you to succeed at the highest possible level, the goals you set must be those that match your passion, your personality, and your definition of success.