Elon Musk

Elon Musk is the first official biography of the creator of SolarCity, SpaceX and Tesla, based on over 30 hours of conversations with Musk himself, highlighting his complicated childhood, the way he makes decisions and navigates the world, and how he managed to disrupt multiple industries, all with the goal of saving humanity.

Elon Musk didn’t have a particularly easy childhood. His relationship with his parents wasn’t easy to begin with and when they separated, this didn’t get any better. Musk decided to live with his dad, but to add pain to injury, he was also bullied in school.

Both of these circumstances led Musk to retreat and turn inward, spending most of his time reading and studying. At one point, Musk read 60 books a month. Thanks to his photographic memory, he managed to remember two entire encyclopedias. One of his biggest inflection points was reading The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, which would not only greatly influence his humor, but also his way of approaching problems.

This book showed him that answering questions is easy – the hard part is asking the right questions.

Most of the time when we’re stuck, we’re simply answering and executing answers to the wrong questions, a problem we wouldn’t have if we’d asked the right question in the first place.

A simple example is this: if you’re trying to find out how to sustain your energy to keep working a high-stress, high-income job, instead first ask why you think you need the income or the job? What is it for? Is there a better way to live, that maybe doesn’t even require increasing your energy?

This kind of thinking led Musk to ponder topics like solar power, space exploration and rockets and paperless banking even before entering high school.

I like the phrase “success-through-determination” because it’s ambiguous. Determination means to stick with things long enough until they work out. But it also means to determine what your next step should be and spend a good deal of time thinking about what you’ll do. An example of how Elon did this is how he won over his first wife, Justine Wilson. Her interest in him was zero when she met him, so he had to hustle to get her attention. She stood him up on their first date at an ice cream parlor. Not a big whiner, he determined that if she wouldn’t come to eat ice cream with him, but still liked ice cream, he’d just bring it to her instead. He asked a friend of hers what Justine’s favorite flavor was and where she studied, and then showed up with two chocolate cheap ice cream cones. This approach comes back to…