Best Elon Musk MOTIVATION (1 HOUR of Pure INSPIRATION!)

want to be happy build a life not just a business hey it's evan carmichael and this channel was created to help you overcome the number one challenge that is holding you back a lack of belief in yourself you watch these videos because you know there's something more inside you too you've got michael jordan level genius at something so today let's live your best believe life and get the best video for elon musk motivation enjoy young people globally who want to be like elon musk what's your advice to them i think that probably they shouldn't want to be you i think it sounds better than it is okay um yeah it's uh not as much fun being me as you'd think i don't know you don't think so there's definitely it could be worse for sure but it's um i i i'm not sure i would i'm not sure i want to be me okay but if you know i think advice i mean if you want to make progress in things i think that um but the best analytical framework for understanding the future is physics i'd recommend studying the uh the thinking process around physics like not just not not the equations i mean equations certainly they're helpful but the the the way of thinking in physics is the it's the best framework for understanding things that are counterintuitive and you know always taking the position that you are some degree wrong and your goal is to be less wrong over time one of the biggest mistakes people generally make and i'm guilty of it too is wishful thinking you know like you want something to be true even if it isn't true um and so you ignore the things that uh you ignore the real truth because of what you want to be true um this is a very difficult trap to avoid and like i said certainly one that i find myself in having problems with but if you just take that approach of you're always to some degree wrong and your goal is to be less wrong and and solicit critical feedback particularly from friends like friends particularly friends if somebody loves you they want the best for you they don't want to tell you the bad things so you have to ask them you know and said really i really do want to know and then they'll tell you you don't need college learning learn stuff okay everything is available basically for free you can learn anything you want for free it is not a question of learning um there there is a value that colleges have which is like you know seeing whether somebody's is can somebody work hard at something including a bunch of sort of annoying homework assignments and still do their homework assignments uh and and kind of soldier through and and get it done you know that's that's like the main value of college and then also you know if you you probably want to hang around with a bunch of people your own age for a while instead of going right into the workforce um so i think colleges are basically for fun and to prove you can do your chores but they're not for learning i think failure is bad um i don't think it's good um but if if if something's important enough then you you do it even though the risk of failure is high um and and so i think my advice if somebody wants to start a company is they should bear in mind that the most likely outcome is is that it's not going to work and they should reconcile themselves to that past strong possibility and they should only do it if they feel that they they're they're really compelled to do it you know um because it's it's it's gonna the way starting company works is like usually in the beginning it's the very beginning it's kind of fun um and then it's really hellish for a number of years you talked about chewing glass yeah there's there's a friend of mine who's a successful entrepreneur and started actually his career around the same time as i did and he has a good good good phrase his name's bully uh um he said yeah you're starting companies like eating glass and staring into the abyss and you agree with that generally true um yeah and and and if you don't eat the glass you're not going to be successful also if you want to have more self belief and more self confidence i've created a special free program where every day for the next 254 days i will send you an unlisted video to help you boost your self-belief and self-confidence the link to join for free is in the description below there are just times when something is important enough you believe in it enough that you you do it in spite of fear when you want to do something new you you have to you have to apply the the physics approach well we have a lot of good good people at spacex that um a lot of really talented people uh in fact i wonder like sometimes how we can make use of their talents in the best way because you know i think we're often not using their talents in the best way um yeah but you know to the point of the question i was just asked i want to make sure tesla recruiting does not have anything that says requires university because that's absurd but there is a requirement of evidence of exceptional ability like you just can't if you're trying to do something exceptional they must have evidence of exceptional ability i don't consider going to college evidence of exceptional ability in fact ideally you dropped out and did something i mean obviously you know we just look at like you know gates is a pretty smart guy he dropped down john was pretty smart he dropped out you know larry ellison a smart guy he dropped out i'm like obviously not needed so did shakespeare even go to college probably not but one of the fun things for me is watching the the cargo go into the crew vessel you know all of a sudden we had dragon one now we have crew dragon and it's substantially different but familiar so tell us like what's been some of the hardest parts to transition from cargo into crew because crew is a little more important than than cargo yes i mean cargo can be replaced crew cannot um and so the the level of scrutiny the level of attention is i mean i don't know order of magnitude greater it was it was it was already high for cargo i mean and and uh but it's it's just a whole nother level for for a crew um so you know after and after i told the spacex team that you know the uh this mission reliability is not really the top priority it is the only priority right now um so we're just doing continuous uh engineering reviews uh from now non-stop uh 24 hours a day until launch just gone over everything again and again and again and i was out at the pad just recently just walking down the rocket um we've got a team that's just crawling over the rocket in the horizontal then we're gonna rotate it vertical then we're gonna crawl all over in the vertical and we're just looking for any any possible action that can improve the probability of success no matter how small whether that comes from an intern or me or anyone it doesn't matter what sort of things do you look for in people or in processes that make the workforce better sure well i think the massive thing that can be done is to make sure your incentive structure is such that innovation is rewarded and lack of innovation is punished they've got to be a characteristic so uh if somebody is innovating um and doing making good progress then they should be promoted sooner and if somebody is completely failing to innovate not every role requires innovation but if they're in a role where innovation is should be happening and it's not happening then they should either not be promoted or exited and let me tell you you'll get promoted you could you'll you'll get innovation real fast so now your actual total mass of a steel uh of a reusable steel spacecraft is less than that of the most advanced carbon fiber vehicle you could possibly imagine yeah wow but this happened by accident by the way this may sound like some great insight but it actually happened because we were moving too slowly on composite um and i was like we cannot move this slowly or we'll go bankrupt so just do this with steel so yeah i mean the design has to be focused on problem solving otherwise you're going to spend too much time trying to figure you don't start with a yeah yeah i'm like sort of taken to management management by rhyming if the schedule is your schedule is long your design is wrong right this is very true that's good good point yes advice i'd give to people starting company to entrepreneurs in general is um really focus on making a product that your customers love um and it's so rare that you can buy a product and and you love the product when you bought it this is this is there are very few uh things that fit into that category and if you can come up with something like that your business will be successful for sure tesla really faced the severe uh threat of death due to the model 3 production ramp essentially the company was bleeding money like crazy and and just if if we didn't solve these problems in a very short period of time we would die and it was extremely difficult to solve them how close to death did you come we were within single-digit weeks 22 hours a day like what how many hours working yeah seven days a week sleeping in the factory uh i worked away from the i worked in the paint shop general assembly body shop you ever worry about yourself imploding like it's just too much absolutely no one should put this many hours into work this is not good and people should not work this hard i'm not they should not do this this is very painful painful in what sense it's because my ears my brain and my heart so it's this is not recommended for anyone i just did it because if i didn't do it then tesla good chance as it would die the real way i think you you actually achieve intellectual property protection is by innovating fast enough if your rate of innovation is high then you don't need to worry about protecting vip because other companies will be copying something that you did years ago and that's fine you know just make sure your rate of innovation is fast um speed is really the speed of innovation is what is what matters um and i do i do say this to my teams like quite a lot that innovation per unit time as i go innovation per year if you're what i say like is is what matters not innovation absent time because if you wanted to make say um 100 improvement in something and that took 100 years or one year that's radically different so it's like what is your rate of innovation that that matters and is the rate of innovation is that accelerating or decelerating um and a weird thing happens when companies get big is that most companies or organizations the bigger they get they tend to get less innovative not just less innovative on a per person basis but less innovative in the absolute and i think this is probably because the incentive structure is not uh is not there for innovation um it's not enough to use words to encourage innovation the incentive structure must be aligned with that that's fundamental you need to work if depending on how well you want to do and particularly if you're starting a company you need to work super hard so what what does super hard mean well when my brother and i were starting our first company instead of getting an apartment we just rented a small office and we slept on the couch and we we showered at the the ymca and uh we're so hot up we had just one computer so the the the website was up during the day and i was coding at night seven days a week all the time and i i sort of briefly had a girlfriend in that period and in order to be with me she had to sleep in the office so i work hard like it i mean every waking hour that's that's the the thing i would i would say if if you're particularly if you're starting a company um and i mean if you do simple math say like okay if somebody else is working 50 hours and you're working 100 you'll get twice as done as much done in the course of a year as the other company i think of the these things is just there's a certain amount of time and within that time you want the the best net outcome so for you know all the set of actions that you can do there's going to be uh and some of which will fail some which will succeed and you want the the net useful output of your set of actions to be the highest so um i'm going to like use like a baseball analogy like you know baseball they don't let you just sit there and wait for the perfect pitch until that you get a real easy one they didn't give you three shots and the third one they say okay they get off the go back to the put somebody else up there um so these your three strikes on on baseball um not you know not only bad anymore so so you're what you're really looking for is like what's the batting average you know how how are you doing on uh on score um and just there's going to be some amount of failure but you want your net output um that useful output to be maximized failure is essentially irrelevant unless it is catastrophic don't just follow the trend so um you may have heard me say that it's good to think in terms of the physics approach of first principles which is rather than reasoning by analogy you boil things down to the most fundamental truths you can imagine and you reason up from there and this is a good way to figure out if if something really makes sense or if it's just what everybody else is doing it's hard to think that way you can't think think that way about everything it takes a lot of effort uh but if you're trying to do something new it's the best way to think um and that framework was developed by by physicists to figure out counterintuitive things like quantum mechanics so it's really a powerful powerful method we need to push for radical breakthroughs um and if you don't push for radical breakthroughs you're not going to get radical outcomes um and that that does mean taking risks um and yeah common sense that the the if you take a big risk in order to have a big reward there must be a big risk it's most the time you cannot find a big reward for small risk that's why those are rare so you're going to have some proportionality with the risk and reward i simplify your product as much as possible um you know and then like if i think of some of the ways which how does a smart engineer make dumb mistakes including you know is optimize something that shouldn't exist don't optimize something that shouldn't exist um but people are trained to do this in college you can't say no to the professor you know the professor's going to give you the exam and you've got to answer all the questions or they'll get angry so and give you a bad grade so then you you always optimize the you always answer the question a lot of the times you should say this is the wrong question right in fact the question is definitely wrong to some degree just how wrong and i think just generally taking the approach that your design is some degree wrong probably a lot more than you think your goal is to make it less wrong over time zip2 started off as basically like say we're trying to figure out how to how to make enough money to exist as a company and the so so since there wasn't really any advertising money being made we thought we could um help existing companies get online bring their stuff online so we developed software that helped bring um love in newspapers and media companies online because they alone just didn't they also didn't know what the internet was they were big customers didn't you yeah and even the ones that were aware of the internet didn't have a software team so they could they weren't very good at developing functionality um and uh so we had as um investors and customers uh the new york times company night reader host and and so we were able to get them to pay us to develop software for them to bring them online so online publishing stuff we did maps and directions and yellow pages and white pages and various other things 2008 in particular was was was awful because we had the third launch failure in a row of of our falcon 1 vehicle at spacex um and um we the tesla financing round that we were raising fell apart um because the economy is going to tailspin um and it's pretty hard to raise money for a startup car company uh you know late 2008 when gm and chrysler are busy going bankrupt um that was that was tough and then solar city had to deal with uh morgan stanley and morgan stanley had to renege on the deal because they themselves were running out of money um so it looked like all three companies were gonna die and i was also going through divorce so that was definitely a low point so it's 2008 you're going through a divorce which like some to borrow your word douchebag vloggers are writing about to make even worse right yes that's true um in addition to all that stuff happening i was getting dumped on massively in the press right yeah you're you know it looks like all three companies yeah are going to file i mean why do you keep going with all three like i feel like even a lot of great entrepreneurs in that situation would have been like i've already sunk everything i have in these companies and i gotta pick one but you didn't i mean you kept doing all three why um yeah that was that was a very tough call um at the end of 2008 that was that was probably the top you know one of the toughest goals i've had to make because i could either um reserve capital for one company or the other i mean before solar city didn't need a ton of capital so they were okay um but between spacex and and and tesla um you know it's sort of like like you've got two kids and what do you do do you spend all your money to to maximize probably the success of of one or do you do you try to keep both left unfortunately it worked how aside from making great products how do you get people excited about tesla there's a lot of people i know and that i talk to who are just intrigued and interested and excited about tesla as a company the thing i really focus on at tesla is like we really put all of our money into an attention to trying to make the product as compelling as possible so um because i think that really the way to um sell any product is through word of mouth so if if one somebody gets the car they really like it they and and actually the key is like to have a product that people love um and and general people um you know if that a party or tour friends or whatever um you'll talk about the things that you love but you know if you just like something it's okay you're not going to care that much but if you look at the reactions from the highs and the lows you're gonna yeah you're gonna talk you know and and then that'll generate work turns word of mouth that's basically how how our sales have have grown like we don't we're not spending money on advertising or endorsements or uh and um so anyone like buys our car they just water because they they like the car zip2 happened you sold it and it and bought the mclaren and if i'm not mistaken you you invested most of that money into your next uh your next venture uh x.com that's right um so uh yeah most of most of the funds went into x.com which was later renamed paypal that worked out pretty well [Music] it worked out pretty well but looking looking back on it um would because you put a lot of your eggs in in that basket would you would you advise entrepreneurs to roll the bones quite the way you did yeah absolutely i think so um i think i think i think it's worth investing your own capital in what you do i don't believe in the sort of other people's money thing um you know i think if you're not willing to put your own assets at stake then you shouldn't ask other people to do that to do that we don't think too much about what competitors are doing yeah um just because i think it's important to um be just focused on making the best possible uh products um you know it's sort of maybe analogous to what they say about you know if you're in a in a if you're if you're in a in a race um don't worry about what how the what the other runners are doing just run what is the likelihood that you personally will go to mars 70 we've recently made a number of breakthroughs that i that i'm just really fired up about and when does that happen in our lifetimes yeah yeah i'm talking about moving there so it's like so if it can get the price per ticket maybe around a couple hundred thousand dollars this could be an escape hatch for rich people no if your probability of dying on mars is much higher than earth really the app would go to mars would be like shackleton's after going to the antarctic it's going to be hard there's a good chance of death going in a little can through deep space you might land successfully once you land successfully there will be a map you'll be working non-stop to build the base uh series you're not not much time for leisure and once you get there even after doing all this there's a very harsh environment to use a good chance to die there we think you can come back but we're not sure now does that sound like an escape patch for rich people and yet you would unhesitate and wake up you know there's lots of people like climb mountains you know why they climb mountains because people die on endeavors all the time they're like doing it for the challenge it's very important to to seek out to actively seek out and listen very carefully to negative feedback and this is something that people tend to avoid because it's it's painful yeah um but but i think this is a very common mistake is to to not actively seek out and listen to uh negative feedback what do you do that you go into forums do you go into twitter like what are your areas where you go to look for feedback on let's say the tesla well it's like everyone i talk to is um in fact when um when friends get a product i say look i don't tell me what you like tell me what you don't like right um and and because otherwise your friend is not going to tell you what he doesn't like right this girl's going to say oh i love this and that and and then and leave out the this is the stuff i don't like list because too much of your friend want you know it doesn't want to offend you so um so you really need to [Music] to to to to sort of coax negative feedback um and you should you know that if somebody is your is your friend or at least not your enemy and they're giving you negative feedback um then they may be wrong but it's coming from a good place and sometimes even your enemies give you good negative feedback when i started the first internet companies of two with my brother and another person um a great curry the uh it wasn't really with the thought of being wealthy you know nothing against being wealthy but um we'll get back to that later but it's just it was just from the standpoint i've been wanting to be part of the internet and uh i i figured if we could make enough money to just get by it would be that'll be okay um and when we started off uh we we literally only had like one computer and so it would be our web server during the day and i'd code at night um and we we just got a a a small office um in palo alto back when rent was not insane um and uh it cost us like 450 a month it was cheaper than an apartment so we actually just slept in the office and then and then showered the ymca at page mill el camino so we'd walk over there and and shower and uh and that was um actually i think uh that was when i we first i first met you by the way um and uh so i don't know how many people probably know many people know this but uh uh we actually pitched uh steve in like january 96 on uh the zip2 business plan uh and actually i thought um she was actually one of the most up to speed on on what actually was in our business plan most most people we met did not actually read our business plan um in fact a lot of people a lot of venture capitalists who met at the time didn't even know what the internet was or they've never used they've never used that they're sure of them right yeah i'm talking like you know sort of well-known people in town here i was like wow okay um but at the time nobody made any any money on the internet so i guess that's um you know it then it wasn't really clear evidence that there was was a business i mean i should say that you know when i was a kid i didn't really have any grand designs i mean the reason i started programming computers is because i like computer games um and i play lots of computer games and um i learned that if i wrote software and sold it then i could get more money and buy better computers so it wasn't really you know with some grand vision or anything when i was growing up i'd read lots of books and they were very often set in the united states and it seemed like a lot of new technology was being developed in the united states so i i thought okay i really want to work on new technology so i want to get to silicon valley um you know which when i was growing up silicon valley seemed like some sort of mythical place uh you know like mount olympus or something i came conclusion that um my initial premise was was wrong uh that in fact the um there's there's a great deal of will uh you know that there there's there's not such a shortage um but people don't think there's a way um and and that if people thought there was there was a way or do something that wouldn't break the federal budget um then then people would support it um which in retrospect i think is actually kind of obvious because um the the united states is a distillation of the human spirit of exploration people came here from other places um i mean it's you know there's no nation there's no i mean there's no nation that that's more a nation of explorers than united united states but but people need to believe that it's possible and it's that it's not you know it's they're not going to give up like healthcare or something important you know it's just it's got to be that that that's important so so i thought okay well then it's not a question of will it's a question of showing that there's a way in the beginning nobody wanted a tesla i can tell you that the the the when we made the original sort of roads to the sports car uh people were like why would i want an electric car that's my gasoline car works fine i'm like no electric cars better try it um and it was you know hard to get people to do a test drive first one nobody knew who we were and then we heard this company and like yeah we're named after nikola tesla you know that guy nope um so for sure we were doing push in the beginning because people said there was no one telling us that they wanted an electric car so it was not it was not out of like you know it's like lots of people coming up to me saying hey i really want electric car i heard that zero times um some people like it's like man we're gonna make an electric car and show that these things can be good um and then people want them um you know it's like i think it was like henry ford said that like the you know we're talking about the model t it's like if you ask the public what they wanted they'd say a faster horse so if you did like a big survey and say well hey public before automobiles what would you like it's like well i'd like my horse to go three miles an hour faster and eat less food and you know be stronger and live longer and like i think um there will be basically a bunch of incremental improvements on horse um because people when you say like what about an automobile that car that drives itself like what are you talking about that's that sounds crazy um but when you actually make an automobile and give it to people and say okay now this is a horse where you can keep it in the barn and if you leave for a month it's still alive yeah so carry more more weight than a horse and go further and that kind of thing so yeah it's like when when it's a radically new product people don't know that they want it because it's just not in their in their scope i think when they first started making tvs they did a nationwide survey i think this might have been like 46 or 48 it's like famous nationwide survey will you ever buy a tv now it was like 96 percent of respondents said no some crazy number like basically everyone's like would you buy a tv and maybe they put a price in there or something i don't know but it was famously almost everyone said they would not buy tv but they didn't know what they're talking about so the big game-changing stuff at the beginning is a company push kind of a thing most of the time but then changes to the product over time can be a lot more customer pull kind of a focus yeah changes the product over time can be incremental changes then the customers can certainly tell you it's good to get customer feedback to say how can we improve the product um and once they're using it they can say okay i like this thing about it i don't like this other thing and then we can improve the product over time customer feedback after they they have the fundamental thing is is great when trying different things you you got to have some acceptance of failure as you're alluding to earlier failure must be an option if failure is not an option it's going to result in extremely conservative choices and you may not may get something even worse than lack of innovation things may go backwards so if what you really want is uh risk risk to you you want reward and punishment to be proportionate to the actions that you seek so if uh if what you're seeking is innovation then you should reward success and innovation um and only [Applause] there should be minor consequences for lack of minor consequences for for trying and failing should that should be minor um significant rewards for trying and succeeding minor consequences for trying and not succeeding and big and major negative consequences for not trying or maybe i just blank out the word doubt so uh you know i mean i totally frank i doubted us too so i i thought we you know had maybe when starting spacex maybe had a 10 chance of reaching orbit so so you know to those who who doubted us i was like well i think you're probably right you know um i mean there were times uh that i was told like uh because i was taking the money that i learned from from paypal and enrolling into to create spacex and tesla and and they ended up spending it all it wasn't the intention but um and and and uh almost both companies went bankrupt frankly 2008 was a tough year um you know took us took us four attempts just to get to orbit with falcon one um and uh so but a lot of times i was you know i people would tell me this joke like how do you make a small fortune in the rocket industry you start with a large one is the punch line and i was like okay i already heard that joke 12 000 times you know so anyway um and it was it almost came true [Music] you know we just barely made it there that fourth launch of falcon one that's all the money we had for that fourth launch and then uh and that wasn't even enough to save the company we also then had to win the nasa cargo resupply contract um so that that came a little after you know a little bit later or towards the end of 2008 uh those are the two key things that that saved spacex otherwise we would have we would have you know not made it so um so hey i think those those doubters were their probability assessment was correct um but fortunately uh veda smiled upon us and brought us to this day as you look back on your career in the space industry what has been the most surprising or unexpected challenge that you faced and along those lines if you were to go back in time and talk to your 20 year old self would you do anything differently go back in time to your 20 year old self i mean i think i'd if i could i think it would make far fewer mistakes obviously if i could go like here's a list of all the dumb things you're about to do please do not do them yeah wouldn't we all be a very long list and like you know here let me write it down or something you know um i mean it's hindsight's 2020. so it's hard to say um i mean a number of i've made so many foolish mistakes i had a lot count honestly um i mean some of these things i just wish i like like that's simple sort of mantra management by rhyming i mean it worked for homer okay um management by rhyming is the thing i'm saying like if but if the schedule's long the design is wrong we've overcomplicated the design many times and i think we should have just gone with a simpler design with the acid test being how long will it take to for this to fly and if it's going to take a long time don't do it do something else i think one thing that's important is if you have a choice of a lower evaluation with someone you really like or a higher evaluation with someone you have a question mark about take the lower valuation um it's better to have a higher quality venture capitalist who you think is it would be great to work with than to um you know get a higher evaluation with someone where there's even a question mark really you know i think that's that's important it's sort of like getting married you know i mean the way i tend to view problems is from a from a physics standpoint and i think i think physics is a good analytical framework um and one of the key things in in physics is to reason from first principles um this is contrary to the way most human reasoning takes place which is by analogy um reason for first principles just means that you you figure out what are the fundamental what are the fundamental truths or or things that are pretty people are pretty sure are fundamental truths and and can you build up to a conclusion from from that uh or you know perform those principles and um and then certainly if you come up with some idea and it appears to violate one of those fundamental truths then you're probably wrong um or you should get a really big prize or something like that um so uh this may seem like i don't know it maybe it may seem sort of obvious when it's explained but it's actually not what people do reasoning my analogies is helpful because it's a shortcut yeah um and it's and it's mostly correct but but uh it tends to be most incorrect when you're dealing with new things because it's hard to analyze to something really new it doesn't really face to severe uh threat of death due to the model 3 production ram essentially the company was bleeding money like crazy and and just if if we didn't solve these problems in a very short period of time we would die and it was extremely difficult to solve them how close to death did you come we were within single digit weeks 22 hours a day like what how many hours working yeah so seven days a week sleeping in the factory uh i worked everywhere from i worked in the paint shop general assembly body shop you ever worry about yourself imploding like it's just too much absolutely no one should put this many hours into work this is not good and people should not work this hard i'm not they should not do this this is very painful painful in what sense it's because my ears my brain and my heart and you started with a much smaller rocket of talking one and was your goal at that point when you started with falcon 1 to get to the point where we had nine inches for falcon 9 was that your goal at that time when i started spacex i i only thought there was maybe a ten percent chance of getting felt from one to august i did not at all think that this would happen uh so let's just make sure our dream come true um uh but i i literally at the time i didn't know anything about rockets uh and i was you know i've been the chief engineer of spacex since day one and i don't really hear anything about rockets which is why the first three rockets failed right um and then so the first three falcon ones for space section failures yes and then tell me about uh the fourth one so i had actually only had enough money for three of three clients um so i had no more money that would manage to a team sort of rally and we managed to put together enough spare prices to pay them to do a fourth launch and that both was successful um and uh so what would happen if it wasn't successful oh we would spacex for tonight so we would not be here right now uh at this moment getting ready to launch crew dragon to the internet we've got a lot of work to do because we've got a lot of service centers and charge stations to construct so mostly it's like we're trying to build our service and charge infrastructure as fast as possible um and uh i know this like some of the customers who have ordered a car they're not in the major cities so they're all unhappy with us because we are delaying delivery of their car um and uh in fact i'm going to apologize to some of them personally to explain the reason we are delaying deliveries because we really want them to have a good experience but if they're too far from a service center and and the charging is not sorted out then they will not have a good experience um so we're going to delay their cars just for a few months to make sure that they have a good experience i think it's also important to reason from first principles rather than by analogy so the normal way that we conduct our lives is we we we reason by analogy it's we're doing this because it's like something else that was done or it's like what um other people are doing me too type ideas yeah it's like yeah slide iterations yeah on on a theme and and uh and it's because it's it's kind of mentally easier to reason by analogy rather than from first principles but by first principles is kind of a physics way of looking at the world and what that really means is you kind of boil things down to the most fundamental truths and and say okay what are we sure is true or sure as possible is true and then reason up from there that takes a lot more mental energy um give me an example that like what's one thing that you've you've done that on that you feel has worked for you sure so um somebody could say um in fact people do uh that battery packs are really expensive and that's just the way they'll always be because that's the way they've been in the past um you're like well no that's that's pretty dumb you know because if if you apply that reasoning to anything new that then you wouldn't be able to ever get to that new thing right you are unusually fearless and willing to go in the face of other people telling you something is crazy and i know a lot of pretty crazy people you still stand out uh where does that come from or how do you think about making a decision when everyone tells you this is a crazy idea or where do you get the internal strength to do that well first of all i'd say i actually think i i think i feel feel fear quite strongly um so it's not as though i just have the absence of fear i've i feel it quite strongly um but there are just times when something is important enough you believe in it enough that you you do it in spite of fear so speaking of important things like people shouldn't think i i i i should if people should think well i feel fear about this and therefore i shouldn't do it um it's normal to be to feel fear like you'd have to definitely something mentally wrong if you didn't feel fear um so you just feel it and let the importance of it drive you to do it anyway yeah you know actually something that can be helpful is fatalism uh to some degree um if you just if just accept the probabilities um then that diminishes fear so um starting spacex i thought the odds of success were less than ten percent um and i just accepted that actually probably i would just lose lose everything um but that maybe would make some progress if we could just move the ball forward even if we died maybe some other company could pick up the baton and move and keep moving it forward so we still do some good yeah same with tesla i thought the odds of a car company succeeding were extremely low this is widely regarded as one of the most robotics driven auto assembly lines on the planet elon part of the thing i heard about the model 3 is that there's too many robots that made it i agree you do you think so too that maybe you need more people in here working we do in some cases the robots actually slowed the production yes they did we had this crazy complex network of conveyor belts and it was not working so we got rid of that whole thing this is cool elon realizing it needed an overhaul musk personally took over the model 3 production line at the beginning of april we're aiming for really extreme levels of precision more than any other vehicle in the world he says he has resorted to pulling all-nighters at the plant when things get really intense i don't have time to go home and shower and change so i'd sleep here i want to see where is that oh yeah um i mean it's pretty boring overall really um it's actually cold in here too yeah i like it cool so you have a you like it cold i sleep on the couch over there so you're just laying here on the couch yeah last time this year i actually slept literally on the floor because the couch was too narrow yeah i was gonna say and elon i have to say it's not even a comfortable couch either no it's terrible this is not a good couch musk feels like all the overtime is paying off and now he says the model 3 line is back on track and we're able to un unlock some of the critical things that are holding us back from reaching 2000 cars a week but since then we've continued to do 2000 cars a week do you think that this is sustainable this pace is sustainable yeah i remember when you first told me that you were thinking about tunnels what did i first tell you about that years ago okay it's like a long time ago like i thought you were joking yeah it was i was joking but it's not because of some epiphany that i had one day driving down the 405. that's how it gets translated somehow i was talking about tunnels for years and years um for probably five years or four years at least whenever i'd give a talk and people would ask me about what opportunities do you see in the world i'd say tunnels can someone please build tunnels so after four or five years of begging people to build tunnels and still no tunnels i was like okay i want to build a tunnel like maybe i'm missing something here um so um yes i was like basically talking people's ears or tunnels for for several years and then said well let's find out what it takes to build a tunnel and um yeah so i started doing a tunnel i wanted to start the tunnel uh from where i could see it from my office at spacex so i said well let's just carve off a part of the parking lot across the road so i can see if it's if anything's happening or not and then we named our first boring machine uh godot because i kept waiting for it it never came finally it um and and we got it going and um now we're making a good progress i really take some thought to like how can i provide advice that would be most helpful and i'm not sure i've given enough thought to to that to give you the best possible answer but i think um i think certainly uh being focused on something that you're confident will have high value to someone else and just being really rigorous in making that assessment because people are tend to natural human tendency is wishful thinking so a challenge for entrepreneurs is to say well what's the difference between really believing in your ideals and sticking sticking to them versus pursuing some unrealistic dream that doesn't actually have merit and it's it's that is a that is a really difficult thing to to tell you can you tell the difference between those two things so you need to be sort of very rigorous in your self self analysis um i think certainly extremely tenacious uh and um and then just work like hell i mean you just have to put in you know 80 hour 80 to 100 hour weeks every week because and then a lot of work all those things improve the odds of success okay um i mean if 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 you know that in in one year you will achieve what they achieve you will achieve in four months what it takes them a year to achieve this is the secret to your success to be the ceo of two companies at the same time no i think it's just look at the correlation yeah struggling companies everything's in the craft can in december 2008 so let's take on a new ceo gig yeah and same for steve coming back to apple uh no it definitely was not my intention to be co2 companies um the uh i mean after i mean i i there's certain things that i kind of wanted to i thought were important to happen and i thought it was important that um that there was that that electric vehicle happened that there was a success in the electric vehicle arena uh because the the incumbent companies were convinced that it was not possible to create a an electric car that looked good had rain a good range performance and so forth um and that even if you did make such a car it would not sell because people had this love of gasoline and so we had to show that it was possible to create a compelling electric car long range good looking you know all those things that was a tesla roadster i certainly was quite um i was very very bookish i was reading all the time so i was either reading uh working on my computer reading comics playing dungeon dragons uh that kind of thing and i understand hitchhiker's guide to the galaxy that wonderful book by douglas adams that was a that was a key book for you what was it about that book that that fired your imagination um yeah so uh i guess when i was in around 12 or 13 i had a company existential crisis and i was reading various books on trying to figure out the meaning of life and well like what does it all mean because uh it starts seeming quite meaningless and then my we happen to have like some some books by nietzsche and schopenhauer in the house which you should not read at age 14 is bad it's really negative um so so uh but then i read the hitchhiker's guide to the galaxy which like quite positive i think and um and it sort of highlighted the the an important point which is that a lot of times the question is harder than the answer and if you can properly phrase the question then the answer is the easy part and so the if to agree that we can better uh understand the universe then we better know what questions to ask and then whatever the question is that most approx approximates what's the meaning of life you know that that's that's the question we could ultimately get closer to understanding um and so i thought well to agree that we can expand the scope and scale of consciousness and knowledge human knowledge then that would be a good thing question that has been discussed over the past couple of days should we be considering one trips one way only trips to mars uh what's the best uh approach to to colonize uh the planet is it uh but what's your view is that socially acceptable do you think people will sign up to do it i think there's plenty of people who have signed up for one retreat to mars but maybe if i could we could have a show of hands who would consider such an option i see some not many perhaps enough for a couple of missions so certainly beat up i mean i think it's sort of like is it a one-way mission and then you die or is it one-way mission and you get resupplied that's a big wait for the difference option yeah exactly um but i mean i think it ends up being a moot point because you want to bring the spaceship back like these spaceships are expensive okay if they're hard to build you can't just leave them there so whether or not people want to come back or not is kind of like they can jump on if they want but they need the spaceship back thank you i mean kind of weird like there was like a huge collection of spaceships on mars over time like it was like we should send them back and of course we should be back one of the most difficult choices i ever faced uh in life was was in 2008 um and i think i had like maybe 30 million dollars left or 30 or 40 million left in 2008 i had two choices i could put it all into one company and then the other company would definitely die um or split it between the two companies and but if i split up between two companies then both might die um and when you put your blood sweat and tears into creating something you're building something it's like a child um and so it's like which one am i going to let one starve to death i can bring myself to do it so i i split the money between the two fortunately thank goodness uh they both came through i've heard people say listen he's out of the box thinker he's a businessman he's an entrepreneur but people that know you would say i'm not really a business plan you're not a businessman no no what are you um i'm sure there's probably lots of analysts on wall street who agree that i'm not a businessman okay well what do you think you are um i like i'm an engineer an engineer yeah is it your dream to conquer the world and make the world a better place to what is your dream like technology's like magic you know i mean i think technology is the closest thing to magic that we have in the real world and so i think like engineering creative engineering is is essentially technology development um and uh i guess maybe it was like lord of the rings is my favorite book is it yeah that would be like what's the closest thing to being a wizard in the real world and that's like creating new technologies what was your biggest failure and how did that change you i have to really think hard about that failure never heard of it there's your answer um well there's a ton of failures along the way that's for sure um like as i said for spacex the first three launches failed and uh we were just barely able to scrape together enough parts and money to do the the fourth launch that fourth launch had failed we would have been dead so multiple failures along the way um i tried very hard to to get the right expertise in for for spacex i tried hard to to find a great chief engineer for the rocket but not the good chief engineers wouldn't join and the bad ones well there was no no point in hiring them so i ended up being chief engineer of the rocket so if i could have found somebody better then we would have maybe had less than three failures what motivations do people need to harness to try to make change as opposed to just reading about change um and that's not supposed to be an easy question oh it's it's this well like i said i think if if you study engineering and and you figure out how to design new things then it's relatively easy to start a company you just need to get a few like-minded people with you and then focus on creating a prototype for compelling prototype as soon as possible um and then that you know there's a there's a strong venture uh capital industry in this in this country that will give you funding to take things to the next level um and that that's all there is to it um and you might if you try it a few times you might may or may not succeed but um i think sometimes people fear fear starting a company too much um you know they have to say really what's the worst that could go wrong you're not going to stop to death you're not going to die of exposure what's the worst that could go wrong how do you come with this idea actually sometimes they're pushing the human limit you are always pushing the human limit why well i mean i i think about what what technology solution is necessary in order to achieve the particular goal and then try to make as much progress in that direction being a multi-planet species and being out there among the stars is important for the long-term survival of humanity and that's one reason kind of like life insurance for life collectively life as we know it but then the part that i find personally most motivating is that it creates a sense of adventure and it makes people excited about the future if you consider two futures one where we are forever confined to earth until eventually something terrible happens or another future where we are out there on many planets maybe even going beyond the solar system i think that second version is incredibly exciting and inspiring and there need to be reasons to get up in the morning you know life can't just be about solving problems otherwise what's the point there's got to be things that people find inspiring and make life worth living there's a friend of mine who's got a great saying about creating a company um which is creating trying to build a company and have it succeed is like eating glass and staring into the abyss so i mean what tends to happen is it's sort of quite exciting for the first several months of starting a company and then then reality sets in things don't go as well as planned customers aren't signing up the technology or the product isn't working as well as you thought and i think that can sometimes be compounded by a recession and it can be very very painful for several years so i think frankly starting a company i would advise people to have a high pain tolerance when did it occur to you that zip2 might be a success well i mean when we first started out i think our ambitions were really quite quite low um it was really to make enough money to pay the rent yeah we we got a visa to give us money that was yay we thought it was all over then yeah it was pretty crazy i mean when we started at 95 we literally at the beginning we had one computer which um would be the web server during the day and and then at night i'd program on it um and we'd sleep in the office yeah we couldn't afford to yeah it was cheaper to rent the office than to rent an apartment so we just rented the office and stepped in the office and showered at the water ymca and for me the worst part was eating a jack-in-the-box three times yeah man this is like it's really difficult to get food at palo alto after like 10 p.m um it's like jack in the box and a few other options we rotated through the jack-in-the-box menu through through the end of 95 where that's essentially we're just sleeping in the office and chairing the ymca and then um and around the end of 95 is when netscape went public and and then whether or not somebody knew what the internet was they knew that you could make money on the internet somehow or even if it's only on the greater pool theory so uh when we went and talked to venture capitalists in early 96 there was a much greater um interest in what we were doing um in fact the round closed in like maybe a week or something it's crazy yeah we went from sleeping in the office to people throwing i mean again this is a financial crowd so you guys see these numbers every day but for us to here we'll give you three million dollars yeah sounded extremely we thought they were crazy like why would they do that it was literally like these people are insane they obviously don't realize we're sleeping in the office in fact when they when they did fund us they realized that we were illegal immigrants well i'm sure immigrants we were sleeping in the office we didn't have a car we had one car with the wheel kept falling off but well actually yeah the the wheel didn't actually fall off the car oh yes exactly um and the venture capitalists actually bought us cars yeah well like i gave us 40 grand it was 40 grand to go buy cars which was at the time was more money than we've ever seen yeah you need a team around you to deliver a lot of idea how do you choose your team based on what well i suppose honestly that it tends to be gut feel more than anything else so when i interview somebody my interview question is always the same it's just i said tell me the story of your life and and the decisions that you made along the way and why you made them and then um and also tell me about some of the most difficult problems you worked on and how you solved them and that that question i think is very important because the people that really solve the problem they know exactly how they solved it they know the little details and the people that pretended to solve the problem they can maybe go one level and then they get stuck the president's first space policy directive to me was go to the moon and the word in there is sustainable tell me reusability is fundamental um the fully reusable vehicle will cost 100 times less per flight than an expandable vehicle it kind of makes sense think of uh of any other motor transport it could be like a jet aircraft or a cars bicycles horses every other mode of transport boats they're all reusable the only the weird one that is reusable is space that's right so you can imagine how expensive it would be if every time you flew in a jet that you had to get a new jet um as opposed to refuel the jet that would be insanely expensive to fly a jet up with a single use there wouldn't be anybody flying no exactly like we are like a few research flights at uh at an extreme expense and that's that's all the flying that would occur i actually don't care at all about money at all but i do care about us becoming a space spring civilization yeah and i do know that uh if we don't uh achieve full and rapid reusability it will not happen and so that's why that's the only reason i actually want money at all what i really want to see is you know permanent based on mu on the moon permanently occupied human base on the moon and us building city on mars that's like i can see the beginning of that before i die i'll die happy in creating these companies that we thought that we would be successful i thought that the most likely outcome was failure but but it was still worth doing even though the the odds of success were low in fact even for for support spacex the originally what i started doing was not creating a rocket company but but actually was going to do a small mission to mars which was just a philanthropic mission where you would send a small greenhouse with seeds and dehydrated gel in the wood upon landing hydrate the gel and you'd have this cool picture of green plants on a red background and the public tends to respond to precedence and superlatives so this will be the first life on mars furthest that life's ever traveled um and you'd have this great money shot of green plants on the right background so um yeah i thought that would get people's attention so um but but the expectation for that was was no return so i thought we wouldn't get any uh you know we'll just spend the money on that and it wouldn't wouldn't happen you want to do some things that were of benefit to humanity why why did you think that well because not everyone does yeah no i i guess it was um i it's sort of a existential crisis uh of like what does it all mean and what's the meaning you know what's the meaning of life and uh is this 3am over a beer or this was well more seriously probably goes back to high school i guess uh um i don't want to give a laboriously long answer but uh i was uh yeah i had sort of a dark childhood it wasn't good um probably partially brought on by by reading some of the philosophers like do don't ever read schopenhauer nietzsche if you're 14. it's it's not good yeah or ein rand either too yeah yeah so um i was just trying to find figure out what you know what does it all mean and um actually uh when i read the hitchhiker's guide to the galaxy which i think is a great work philosophy um that sort of highlighted the point that uh very often the issue is understanding what questions to ask and if you can properly frame the question then the answer is the easy part um so i thought things that uh expand the scope and scale of the human consciousness um and allow us to better ask questions and you know and and and achieve greater enlightenment those are good things and so that's sort of what what can we do that's going to um most likely lead to that outcome back in 95 there weren't very many people on the internet and certainly nobody was making any money at all most people thought the internet was going to be a fad a year ago musk sold his software company zip2 which enabled newspapers to publish online for 400 million dollars cash receiving cash is cash i mean those are just a large number of ben franklin so this is an atm what we're going to do is transform the traditional banking industry i do not fit the picture of a banker raising 50 million is a matter of making a series of phone calls and the money is there i've sunk the great majority of of my net worth into x.com which is the new banking and mutual funds company on the internet that i've started big apps exactly x.com i think x.com could absolutely be a multi-billion dollar bonanza because if you look at the industry that x is pursuing it's the biggest sector of the world economy what you've got going on with the internet is it's basically like an earthquake where the epicenter is silicon valley and it's it's shaking up the whole world elon you've you've been compared to henry ford richard branson um you know steve jobs uh who do you compare yourself to um i don't really compare myself to anyone um i mean it's not um i mean there's certain people that i admire from history that i think are you know i think are great um certainly many of the scientists and engineers and literary figures and so forth and uh like i'm a big big fan of ben franklin you know he was a scientist and sort of thinker and i mean he was kind of guy who who did did what needed to be done you know so guys like that i right i wouldn't say i compare myself in any way but i certainly admire them now i've got a special bonus clip that i think you're going to enjoy but before that it's time for the question of the day i want to know what was your single biggest takeaway from this video and what is your specific plan of action for the next week when you just watch a video and get motivated by it you have a 35 chance of following through but when you get motivated and then create a specific plan of action you have a 91 chance of following through that's what we do here believe nation we get motivated but then we do something about it and when you commit to other people you increase your chances even further of following through so what was your biggest takeaway from this video and then what is your plan of action around for this week put it down in the comments below because i want to celebrate you well i think part of the problem the reason people aren't as excited about space is that we haven't been pushing the frontier as much and so you can only you can only watch the same movie so many times and it before it gets a little boring um and you know in in this in the 60s and early 70s we were really pushing the frontier of human space flight and and obviously that those land landing on the moon is regarded as one of the greatest achievements of humanity of arguably of life itself um and and even though only a handful of people went to the moon vicariously we all went there well at least i wasn't alive at the time so but retrospectively um and you know and it was it was just one of those really inspiring things that i think made everyone glad to be you know human you know it's like the things that we where we don't they're bad things human ideas and they're good things and it's one of the good things um and i i do think it's important that that we have these inspiring things that uh make you glad to get up in the morning and um and that that's uh and glad to be a member of the human race um and and and we need to we need to push that that that frontier um so um and and i think uh the great goal we should be trying to pursue is trying to make life human like make life multi-planetary so to to establish a self-sustaining and growing uh civilization on another planet uh mars being the only realistic possibility um uh and i think that would just be one of the greatest things humanity could ever try to do if you want to know the five pieces of life-changing advice from bill gates check out the video right there next to me i think you'll enjoy it continue to believe and i'll see you there when you have a business that's important as this with this many competitors you're going to have people saying some nasty things the thing that was scary to me wasn't quitting and starting the company it was when i started hiring my friends

Channel: Evan Carmichael

Views: 614,107

Rating: 4.8332758 out of 5

Keywords: entrepreneur, yt:cc=on, evancarmichael, Entrepreneur, evan carmichael, elon musk, elon musk advice, best lessons, elon musk's life changing advice, best habits for success, motivational advice

Id: 1AU819P7Bk4

Length: 72min 35sec (4355 seconds)

Published: Fri Dec 25 2020