How to Learn Anything Such as Elon Musk.
Transform Your Learning Approach and Conquer Any Field.
Elon Musk taught himself everything about reusable rockets, self-driving cars, digital payments, brain chips, and satellite internet. He's the modern Da Vinci Last night I found Elon's Reddit post from 9 years ago where he explained how to learn anything.
What does this mean? 'Make sure you understand the fundamental principles' Let's say you're trying to make bread. You get some flour, add some yeast, and some water, mix it up, put it in a pan, put it in an oven, and let it rise. That’s the recipe for making bread.
But let's say you wanted to make bread Elon style - by 'understanding the fundamental principles' You'd learn wheat cultivation, soil types, cold storage, supply chain, grinders, yeast biology, fermentation, chemistry, thermodynamics, baking style....everything in between.
When you know a recipe, you can only make the same bread repeatedly. When you understand bread, you can control all 23 variables to make the perfect bread. You can invent recipes.
Another example is Knowing how to operate a production line of a car will only teach you how to make that car, efficiently. But it won't teach you how to make Rockets or Satellites.
But if you had an understanding of engineering, electronics, physics, and design, you could make cars, satellites, rockets, and brain chips.
Elon’s obsession with fundamental understanding shows in how he’s building Tesla Most Car companies just make the car’s body, power train, and engines. Not Tesla
Tesla makes its batteries, chips, electronics, software, charging stations, AI, and even financing and insurance. It covers every aspect of the car business end to end. It is 19 startups combined into 1.
On a side note, Apple too does its own interface design, chips, hardware, software, and apps. This fundamental understanding of design and computing technology has led them to create the iPod, iPhone, iPad, MacBook, Apple Watch, AirPods, and now Vision Pro.
The biggest YouTuber Mr. Beast, doesn't just follow a recipe for going viral. He understands attention, storylines, plots, and social algorithms, and has proven his understanding of virality across his 27 different channels.
So back to the point of this post. In theory, it's easy to tell yourself to seek fundamental understanding. But what do you do to build a foundation of understanding?
1. Start a project in your desired field. Pour all your knowledge, intelligence, creativity, and resourcefulness into the project. The best way to learn how to build a business is to literally build one.
2. Follow the greatest practitioners in the field and absorb their work. The people doing the thing are the best doers and thinkers. The people who build businesses are both better founders and better business thinkers.
3. Seek expert guidance. When you can download the collective experience of an expert, it's stupid to try to learn everything yourself. An expert is someone who has made all the mistakes there are to make. Solicit their feedback.
To recap - 1. Do a project 2. Learn about how to do your project better from practitioners. 3. Seek expert guidance.
4. Teach other people. This is my favorite. If you want to be a great teacher, you first have to be a great student. Your gaps in understanding, you won't be able to simplify things enough for people to understand. Teaching makes you blindspots very obvious.
5. Fine-tune over time Use your 1) learnings from your project, 2) direction from practitioners 3) coaching from an expert 4) clarity from teaching people, to fine-tune your approach to doing your project a little bit better with each attempt.
6. Keep putting in more reps until you understand everything about it The world's best entrepreneurs are serial entrepreneurs. The world's best scientists are 'serial' scientists. You play a game long enough and you get world-class at every aspect of it.
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That's how Elon Musk taught himself everything.