Sunday, January 15, 2017

Elon Musk's Quote

  • The problem is that at a lot of big companies, process becomes a substitute for thinking. You’re encouraged to behave like a little gear in a complex machine. Frankly, it allows you to keep people who aren’t that smart, who aren’t that creative.
  • I think that’s the single best piece of advice: constantly think about how you could be doing things better and questioning yourself.
  • I think it’s very important to have a feedback loop, where you’re constantly thinking about what you’ve done and how you could be doing it better.
  • When something is important enough, you do it even if the odds are not in your favor.
  • If you go back back a few hundred years, what we take for granted today would seem like magic - being able to talk to people over long distances, to transmit images, flying, accessing vast amounts of data like an oracle. These are all things that would have been considered magic a few hundred years ago.
  • I’ve actually made a prediction that within 30 years a majority of new cars made in the United States will be electric. And I don’t mean hybrid, I mean fully electric.
  • When I was in college, I wanted to be involved in things that would change the world.
  • There have only been about a half dozen genuinely important events in the four-billion-year saga of life on Earth: single-celled life, multicelled life, differentiation into plants and animals, movement of animals from water to land, and the advent of mammals and consciousness.
  • The reality is gas prices should be much more expensive then they are because we’re not incorporating the true damage to the environment and the hidden costs of mining oil and transporting it to the U.S. Whenever you have an unpriced externality, you have a bit of a market failure, to the degree that externality remains unpriced.
  • I don’t spend my time pontificating about high-concept things; I spend my time solving engineering and manufacturing problems.
  • Patience is a virtue, and I’m learning patience. It’s a tough lesson.
  • Life is too short for long-term grudges.
  • I’ve actually not read any books on time management.
  • I do think there is a lot of potential if you have a compelling product and people are willing to pay a premium for that. I think that is what Apple has shown. You can buy a much cheaper cell phone or laptop, but Apple’s product is so much better than the alternative, and people are willing to pay that premium.
  • There are some important differences between me and Tony Stark, like I have five kids, so I spend more time going to Disneyland than parties.
  • I tend to approach things from a physics framework. And physics teaches you to reason from first principles rather than by analogy.
  • If humanity doesn’t land on Mars in my lifetime, I would be very disappointed.
  • I would like to fly in space. Absolutely. That would be cool. I used to just do personally risky things, but now I’ve got kids and responsibilities, so I can’t be my own test pilot. That wouldn’t be a good idea. But I definitely want to fly as soon as it’s a sensible thing to do.
  • People work better when they know what the goal is and why. It is important that people look forward to coming to work in the morning and enjoy working.
  • I wouldn’t say I have a lack of fear. In fact, I’d like my fear emotion to be less because it’s very distracting and fries my nervous system.
  • I always invest my own money in the companies that I create. I don’t believe in the whole thing of just using other people’s money. I don’t think that’s right. I’m not going to ask other people to invest in something if I’m not prepared to do so myself.
  • The United States is definitely ahead in culture of innovation. If someone wants to accomplish great things, there is no better place than the U.S.
  • Physics is really figuring out how to discover new things that are counterintuitive, like quantum mechanics. It’s really counterintuitive.

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