SCARY WORK ETHIC - Elon Musk Motivational Video

i'm available 24 7 just to help solve issues right i call me 3 am on a sunday morning i don't care the way that i usually describe myself is an engineer because that's mostly what i most of what i do is engineering so i spend most of the week with my engineering and design team uh working on you know the current car and future cars and the rockets and spacecraft and that kind of thing 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 and i play lots of computer games and 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 [Music] i tried at first to convince my parents to move to the us but uh neither of them would they were divorced and and so eventually i was able to get my canadian citizenship because my mom had been born in canada so i moved first to canada by myself when i was 17 and then a few years later i moved to the us the reason i came out to stanford was actually to work on energy storage technologies for electric cars at that summer 95 i was looking at the internet and it seemed to me like the internet was going to have a big effect on humanity so i i thought well i can either work on electric vehicle technology and do my phd at stanford um and watch the internet get built or i could put my studies on hold and try to be part of the internet and at first i tried to get a job at netscape because that was the only internet company and they didn't respond to me so and i was like okay if i can't get a job at the only internet company then i better try starting something but i talked to my professor and i said look i'm going to try starting a company it's probably not going to succeed and if it doesn't succeed can i come back he said sure no problem and so i put my studies on hold and started the company did some internet stuff one of which was paypal i think maybe it's helpful to say one of the things that was important then in the creation of paypal was uh which was kind of how it started because initially the initial thought was with paypal was to create an agglomeration of financial services so if you have one place where all your financial services needs would be seamlessly integrated and um and and work smoothly and then we had like a little feature which was to do email payments and whenever we show show the system off to someone i would show the hard part which was the um the agglomeration of financial services which was quite difficult to put together nobody was interested then we'd show people email payments which was actually quite easy and everybody was interested i think it's important to take feedback from your environment you want to be as closed loop as possible we focus on email payments and really try to make that work and that's what really got things to take off um but but if we hadn't if we hadn't responded to what people said then we probably would not have been successful going from paypal i thought it will what what are some of the the other problems that are likely to most affect the future of humanity um it really wasn't from the perspective of what's the rank ordered best way to to make money um which which is which is okay but it was really what i think is going to most affect the future humanity so the i think the the biggest terrestrial problem we've got is uh sustainable energy but the production and consumption of energy in a sustainable manner if we don't solve that this the sensory is the century we're we're in deep trouble um and then the the other one being the extension of life beyond earth to make life multi-planetary um so the latter is the basis force for spacex and the former is the basis for tesla and solar city when i started spacex um i it actually initially i thought that well there's no way one could possibly start a rocket company i wasn't that crazy but but then i thought well what is a way to increase nasa's budget that was actually my initial goal so i actually went to i went to russia three times to look at buying a refurbished icvm i can tell you it was very weird going there in 2000 late 2001 2002 going to the russian rocket forces and saying i'd like to buy two of your biggest rockets but you can keep the nuke they thought i was crazy but but i did have money so that was okay [Music] 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 uh in instead of getting an apartment we just rented a small office and we slept on the couch and we we showered at the ymca and uh we're so hot up we had just one computer so the the the website was up during the day uh and i was coding at night seven days a week all the time briefly had a girlfriend in that period and in order to be with me she had to sleep in the office so work hard like every waking hour that's that's the thing i would i would say to 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 work like hell i mean you just have to put in you know 80 hour 80 to 100 hour weeks every week [Music] that all those things improve the odds of success 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 [Music] then just you have to apply a lot of hours to actual work actually working so the way i generally do it is i'll be working at spacex on monday and then monday night flight to bay area tuesday and wednesday at bavaria then at tesla and then fly back on wednesday night spent thursday and friday at spacex um in in the last several months then i would fly back here on a saturday and either spend saturday and sunday at tesla or spend saturday at tesla and sunday at spacex there's some days a week sleeping in the factory i worked everywhere i worked in the paint shop general assembly body shop you ever worry about yourself imploding like just too much absolutely no one should [Music] 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 this is not recommended for anyone i just did it because if i didn't do it then tesla your chances would die [Music] i gave basically both spacex and tesla from the beginning uh a probability of less than ten percent of likely likely to succeed in the beginning i wouldn't actually wouldn't let my friends invest because i don't want to lose their money i thought it was like you know i'd lose my own money we almost did die at spacex actually so we i budgeted for three flights um i mean technically i didn't have a plan where i had the money from paypal i had like 180 million from paypal i thought you know i'll allocate half of that to spacex and tesla and solar city and um that should be fine i'll have 90 million likes just lots you know uh but but then what happened is um things cost more and took longer than i thought so i had a choice of either put the rest of the money in or the companies are going to die and it's like so i ended up putting all the money in and borrowing money for rent from france if you want to try to come up with an innovative breakthrough um that's kind of that's going to be how it is anything which is significantly innovative is going to come with a significant risk of failure you've got to take big chances in order for the potential for a big positive outcome if the outcome is exciting enough then then taking a big risk is worthwhile it's really our approach but but then once executing down a path i actually do my absolute best to reduce uh risk you know because or to improve the another way of saying to improve the probability of success very risky uh that you hate you you have to spend a lot of effort trying to reduce that risk as you embark down that path i mean i i think i'm kind of constitutionally just geared to to just keep going i don't know um it's uh um yeah i mean it just like i i don't know i mean it certainly there are times when things don't go well and then uh that's quite dispersing for sure um and so then it's difficult to proceed with the same level of enthusiasm but i do think like i do think the things that we're doing are you know pretty important to the future um and if we don't succeed then you know there's well there's not it's not clear what other things would succeed um and if if we don't succeed then we'll be certainly pointed to as a reason why people shouldn't even try for these things so i think it's important that we do whatever is necessary to keep going so how do you keep your focus on the big picture when you're constantly faced with we could be out of business in a month well it's just a very small percentage of mental energies on the on the big picture like you know you know where you're generally heading for and the actual path is going to be some sort of zigzaggy thing in that direction and try not to deviate too far from the path that that you want to be on but you're going to have to do that to some degree one of the most difficult choices i ever faced in life was was in 2008 um i think i had maybe 30 million dollars left or 30 or 41 left in 2008 i had two choices put it all into one company and then the other company would definitely die um or split them between the two companies and if i split it between two companies they both might die and when you put your blood sweat and tears into creating something you're building something it's like a child it's like which one am i going to let one starve to death i can bring myself to do it so i split the money between the two fortunately thank goodness uh they both came through was there any great failure yeah that you think you have had well i certainly have lost many battles so far i've not lost a war but i've simply lost many battles oh yeah more than i could count probably um i mean we had many tesla who came many times close to bankruptcy in fact at the end of 2008 we were only a few days from bankruptcy it was literally two days three days at least curious in general what do you think of the silicon valley mantra fail fast fail often or as esther dyson says always make new mistakes as if failure is the crucible of learning i'm curious if you had any further thoughts on that and that maybe off the guff comment you made out there well i mean there are many that sort of i mean i think it's sort of there's like some entropic basis for this like there are many more ways to fail than to succeed so you i mean you have to explore i mean particularly for a rocket there's like a thousand ways that thing can fail in like one way it can work so uh you could you could have a lot of rocket failures to explore all the ways in which you can fail um so a bit but i do think that one great thing about silicon valley is that failure is not a not a big stigma so it's like if you if you try hard and it doesn't work out uh that's okay like you can learn from that and do another company and it's not a big deal i mean it i think it's it's like quite quite painful and difficult honestly and it feels terrible um but yeah i mean the the company is sort of looking to you know me to you know rally them and so i do but i honestly feel super bad place was hard and rockets tend to fail unfortunately um and even when you've got like a lot of really smart people working super hard to minimize the probability failure it's still still there and it's um and it's you know it's quite significant you know people have asked me like well why why are rockets you know especially hard um and the you know part of it is like everything has to work the first time like there's no you can't do a recall you can't patch it it's got it's like nine minutes to orbit or it's over that mindset that embraces failure how do you personally i mean it that those kinds of failures would drive a lot of us in this room nuts but doesn't seem to drive you nuts seems like you're very comfortable with it can you talk about the mindset that requires for you to be that accepting of that kind of failure well i think of the 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 and some of which will fail some which will succeed and you want the the the net useful output of your set of actions to be the highest so if you use like a baseball analogy like you know baseball they don't let you just sit there and wait for the perfect pitch until you get a real easy one they didn't give you three shots and the third one they say okay and they get off the go back to the put somebody else up there so these three strikes on on baseball you know not only bad anymore so see what you're what you're really looking for is like what's the batting average you know how you're doing on on score and just there's going to be some amount of failure but you want your net output that useful output to be maximized failure is essentially irrelevant unless it is catastrophic where spacex first three launches failed and uh we were just barely able to scrape together enough parts and money to do the fourth launch that fourth launch had failed we would have been down so multiple failures along the way um i tried very hard to get the right expertise in for spacex i tried hard to to find a great cheap engineer for the rocket but the good chief engineers wouldn't join and the bad ones there was no point in hiring them so i ended up being chief engineer in the rocket so if i could have found something better than it would have maybe had less than three failures how do you think about making a decision when everyone tells you this is a crazy idea where do you get the internal strength to do that well first of all i'd say i actually think i think i feel feel fear quite strongly um so it's not as though i just have the absence of fear i feel it quite strongly um but there are just times when something is important enough you believe in it enough that you do it in spite of fear there are people who've been in the rocketry business for decades who say about you that you don't know what you don't know well i suppose that's true of anyone how can anyone know what they don't know but when critics say you can't do this your answer to them is we've done it you know there are american heroes who don't like this idea neil armstrong gene cernan have both testified against commercial space flight and the way that you're developing it and i wonder what you think of that i was very sad to see that because those guys are yeah [Music] you know those guys are heroes of mine so it's really tough you know i i wish they would come and visit and and see the hardware they were doing here and i think that would change their mind they inspired you to do this didn't they yes and to see them casting stones in your direction it's difficult did you expect them to cheer you on so they're hoping they would what are you trying to prove to them what i'm trying to do is to make a significant difference in in space flight and and and help make spaceflight accessible to to almost anyone so many people try to talk me out of starting a right company it was it was crazy what did they tell you one good friend of mine collected a whole series of of videos of rockets blowing up and made me watch those you just didn't want me to lose all my money we're doing these things that uh seem unlikely to succeed and we've been fortunate and at least thus far they have succeeded generally starting a business i'd say number one is have a high pain threshold but that's it um with a friend of mine who's got a good saying which is that starting a company is like eating glass and stirring into the abyss okay that's um that's generally what happens because when you first start a company there's lots of optimism and things that things are great and then so happiness at first is high then you encounter all sorts of issues and happiness will steadily decline and then you'll go through a whole world of hurt and then eventually you'll if you succeed and in most cases you will not succeed and tesla almost didn't succeed came very close to failure then if you succeed then after a long time you will finally get back to happiness frankly starting a company i would advise people to have a high pain tolerance it is definitely true that i mean maybe there are occasionally companies that get created where where there's not an extended period of extreme pain um but but i'm not aware of you know very many of such instances but i do think that the new great entrepreneurs are born of every day and we'll continue to see amazing companies get built but i i would definitely advise people for starting a company to expect a a long period of quite high difficulty it's really not that fun when there are periods of fun and there are periods of where it's where it's just all for [Music] and particularly if you're a ceo of the company you actually have a distillation of all the worst problems in the company there's no point in spending your time on things that are going right so you only spend on things on your time and things that are going wrong and there are things that are going wrong that other people can't can't take care of so you're like the worst you have a filter for the crappiest problems in the company the most pernicious and painful problem i think you have to feel quite compelled to do it and have a fairly high pain threshold i mean as long as people stay super focused on creating the absolute best product or service that really delights their end customer like if they stay focused on that then basically if if you get it such that your customers want you to succeed then then you probably will if your customers love you your odds of success are dramatically higher for somebody who's just starting out as an entrepreneur i think the internet is a great place to start because if you're just starting out unless you've got a ton of capital that you somebody gave you or you're inherited or something you have to do something you have to start a company that requires a small amount of capital where it's heavily weighted towards intellectual capital in your head um so i think anything to do with the sort of software and with you know the internet uh is is is a really good starting point you know it would have been impossible for me to have done electric cars or rockets you know right from the start because i would have does require money to get anything done being focused on something that you're confident will have high value to someone else and just being really rigorous in making that assessment um because people are attend tend to a 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 you know so you need to be sort of very rigorous in self self analysis successful entrepreneurs probably come in all sizes shapes and flavors and obsessive uh nature with respect to the quality of the product it is very important even if you're if you're the best the best there's always a chance of failure so i think it's important that you really like whatever you're doing if you don't like it life is too short if you like what you're doing you think about it even when you're not working i mean it'll just it's something that your mind is drawn to and and if you don't like it you just really can't make it work i think if you're creating a company or if you're joining a company the most important thing is to uh is to attract great people so either you would join a group that's amazing that you really respect or if you're building a company you've got to gather great people i mean all the company is is a group of people that have gathered together to create a product or service and so depending upon how talented and hard-working that group is and the degree to which they're focused uh cohesively in a good direction that will determine the success of the company so do everything you can to to gather great people uh if you're creating a company then i'd say focus on on signal over noise a lot of companies get get confused they spend money on things that don't actually make the product better so for example at tesla we've 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 and i think that's that's the way to go so if we're for any given company just keep thinking about are these efforts that people are expending are they resulting in a better product or service and if they're not stop those efforts [Music] don't just follow the trend so you may have heard me say that it's good to think in terms of the physics approach the 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 that way about everything it takes a lot of effort but if you're trying to do something new it's the best way to think and that framework was developed by by physicists to figure out counterintuitive things like quantum mechanics so it's really a powerful powerful method i think that the final thing i would encourage you to do is now is the time to take risk you don't have kids as you get older your obligations increase so and once you have a family you start taking risk not just for yourself but for your family as well it gets much harder to do things that might not work out so now is the time to do that before you before you have those obligations so i would encourage you to take risks now do something bold um you won't regret it [Music] i think when i was i don't know five or six or something i thought i was insane it was just strange because it was clear that other people did not their mind wasn't exploding with ideas it was like hmm i'm strange i don't think i don't think you'd necessarily want to be me it's very hard to turn it off it's like a neverending explosion all the time when i was a kid i was wondering kind of what's the meaning of life why are we here what's it all about i came to the conclusion that what really matters is trying to understand the right questions to ask the more that we can increase the scope and scale of human consciousness the better we are able to ask these questions there are certain things that are necessary to ensure that the future is good some of those things are in the long term having long-term sustainable transport and sustainable energy generation be a space-bearing civilization and for humanity to be out there among the stars and be a multi-planetary species being a multi-planet species and being out there among the stars is important for the long-term survival of humanity the part that i find personally most motivating is that it creates a sense of adventure and it makes people excited about the future how many things came by that you really love that really give you joy so rare so rare i wish there were more things that's what we're trying to do just make things that somebody loves the universe as we know it will dissipate into a fine mist of cold nothingness eventually i don't want to sound like things are too dark because i think like you kind of have to be optimistic about the future there's no point in being pessimistic like what are the set of things that can be done to make the future better i think that a future where we are space-faring civilization and out there among the stars this is very exciting this makes me look forward to the future this makes me want that future there need to be things that make you look forward to waking up in the morning you wake up in the morning look forward to the day look forward to the future that second version is incredibly exciting and inspiring 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 the future where we are space-faring civilization and out there among the stars i think that's very exciting that is a thing we want if if you knew we would not be a spacefaring civilization but forever confined to earth this would not be a good future that would be very sad i think [Music] if there are two futures and one futurists we're out there among the stars and things we read about and see in science fiction movies the good ones are true we have these starships and we're we're going to see what other planets are like we're a multi-planet species and the scope and scale of consciousness is expanded across many civilizations and many planets and many star systems this is a great future this is a wonderful thing to me and that's what we should strive for

Channel: Alpha Leaders

Views: 166,491

Rating: 4.9437652 out of 5

Keywords:

Id: iu3Wtf5Vwjk

Length: 30min 2sec (1802 seconds)

Published: Tue Mar 16 2021