Elon Musk Archives - Charles Doublet

3 Things You Can Learn From Elon Musk to Create More Success in Your Life

March 23, 2021 by Chuck Leave a Comment

Sendhil Mullainathan Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos

Recently, you may have noticed that Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk have been locked in a back and forth race for the wealthiest man on the planet.

And while that may make for great clickbait headlines, it takes away from the main point and, in some ways, creates more harm than help.

For many people, comparisons don’t help us to feel good. In fact, research has shown that since the advent of social media, unhappiness and depression have increased due to the perception of other people having happier lives via their posts.

So, instead of using comparisons to feel good or bad, let’s use some comparisons to learn and grow.

And since, Elon Musk is on the top by some metrics that many of us value, i.e. repeatable business success, financial wealth, and the ability to bounce back from adversity, he would seem like a good place to start.

Come From a Place of Service

At its most fundamental level, to have a successful business, you must provide a product or service that makes another person’s life easier, better, or happier. Preferably all three.

If you do this then want to do business with you, if you don’t, even if you’re great, they will eventually look and find a way to replace you.

“All things being equal, people buy from people they like. All things being unequal people still buy from people they like.”

Tim Sanders, The Likeability Factor

It also doesn’t matter if you are an entrepreneur or an employee, the same litmus test applies. The customer is the person putting money in your pocket, individuals, organizations, or your boss. Be focused on making that entity’s life better.

You don’t need to be the best or even perfect to come from a place of service, all it takes is a willingness to help.

When Elon Musk started Tesla, he was sure it was going to fail. After all, how could one guy challenge the supremacy of the Big 3 automakers of the US, let alone also the Japanese and the Germans?

Elon started Tesla because he felt it was important to reevaluate how cars were produced, sold, and the impact they had on the planet. Even if it failed, it would get the conversation started and he was willing to bet a big portion of his wealth to have the conversation.

The same reasons applies to Elon’s other business ventures:

PayPal – to make financial transactions easier for everybody
SpaceX – to make space travel more easy and affordable and to make man an interplanetary species, improving our chance for survival
The Boring Company – create an alternative for gridlock and traffic congestion on freeways
NeuraLink – create a seamless way for man to interact with technology

That epitomizes coming from a place of service.

What are you doing to serve those around you? How can you serve them better?

Learn from Experts and By Doing

Ego can be the biggest hurdle for your success.

Not knowing, making mistakes, and looking foolish.

But that doesn’t stop Elon.

When Elon wants to pursue a BHAG, he puts his ego aside and talks to experts. As many as needed to help him explore his vision.

Not only that, but Elon also learns everything he can about the field. He dives deep into learning mode until he breaks the subject down into its First Principles, not making assumptions or taking anything for granted.

And then Elon starts taking action, not afraid to make mistakes or to look foolish.

Elon knows the secret to success is willing to not look or be good as you are starting out and that there will be nay-sayers all along the way. Even when those naysayers are your heroes.

This is probably most relevant with SpaceX, where the many failures, especially in the beginning, were so glaring for everybody to see.

How Not to Land an Orbital Rocket Booster

And through it all, Elon was able to focus on the learning through the mistakes almost as much as enjoying the successes.

It’s a testament to Elon Musk and his leadership that even when events go poorly, they are able to reframe it in a positive light,

“Again, we’ve just got to work on that landing a little bit,” SpaceX principal integration engineer John Insprucker said during SpaceX’s launch webcast.

“We got a lot of good data, and the primary objective — to demonstrate control of the vehicle in the subsonic re-entry — looked to be very good, and we will take a lot out of that,” he added.

You learn best by doing.

And in the doing, mistakes are going to happen.

And you might even look foolish.

The question is, are you going to let that stop you?

Don’t Be a One-Trick Pony

Do you know of people who are so good at one thing that they’re afraid to try anything new?

You hear it all the time.

The creative artist who says she’s not wired to be structured.

Or, the stoic academic researcher who’s too stiff to relax and enjoy himself on the dancefloor?

We all have strengths. But those strengths can be our biggest weaknesses when we let them override our lives.

That’s another thing that’s amazing about Elon Musk, the range of business ventures he explores.

He started in the fintech industry with X.com, which later became PayPal. Then the space industry with SpaceX, the auto industry with Tesla, urban development with The Boring Company, and bio-engineering with NeuraLink.

The guy is all over the place.

Not only is he willing to try and be willing to fail.

But he is also willing to do it again and again and again. And in different fields.

How many of us give up after running into hurdles in just one area of endeavor? Let alone many?

What stops you from picking yourself up and trying again?

If you are extremely talented and qualified in one area, do you use that as an egoic-label to prevent you from trying new things?

Personality temperaments and the lies we tell ourselves hold us back from truly living. Have you taken one of those temperament tests for work that Human Resources doles out?

Whether it’s DISC, Myers-Briggs, the Enneagram, Hogan Assessment, or whatever, the problem with them is that they are static snapshot pictures and are not the video movie that you are in life.

Don’t get me wrong, those quizzes are great to build some insights into patterns you may have but they are not the sum total of who you are.

One key to success is to be willing to try things out just to see what will happen, in the same way, that Elon started Tesla so many years ago.

And since that time, and all of those experiments, Tesla has outpaced all of those automotive giants.

The same thing for SpaceX, with all of its glorious failures and explosions, it is almost normal happenstance that you hear about another SpaceX rocket launch and payload or satellite delivery, hardly makes the news anymore.

So what are you willing to let go of so that you can try something new?

How are you willing to look foolish so that you can enjoy life more?

What new tricks are you willing to play with?

And if it’s any consolation, mine is coaching and writing.

After almost 20 years on the mat with GM Bong Soo Han, and over 35 years in construction, with the egoic-labels of martial artist and construction worker, I’m now embracing new labels as a leadership coach and thought-leadership content-creator.

Sometimes, I mess up with coaching clients, and sometimes I’m really embarrassed by my writing, but I’ve learned over the years on the mat and on the job, that was the only way to get better.

So we shall see…

Let me know what you’re embracing to be more successful.

If You Really Want to Be Successful, Stop Being a Life-Long Learner

March 15, 2021 by Chuck Leave a Comment

Let me guess.

You love learning.

Over the years, you’ve taken an endless series of classes. As soon as you finish one, there’s another one that you have queued up, like an endless Netflix binge-watching session.

Class after class after class.

Always something more to learn.

Let me ask you a question.

How much success have you been able to enjoy with all this learning?

You see, there’s a lie out there.

“Knowledge is power.”

Every class that you enrolled in sold you this lie, “If you take this class, you’ll be able to do XYZ…”

But after the class, do you do XYZ, or do you feel like you still don’t know enough and sign up for another class that promises to teach you how to do more of XYZ?

The truth is that knowledge is only potential power. It doesn’t matter how much you know if you don’t take action.

Fear Trumps Knowledge Every Time

The problem isn’t in the knowing, the problem is in having the confidence in trying and doing.

I’m a coach and every day I speak with potential clients on how do they want to powerfully move forward in their lives.

I’ll hear stories of how they want to find the partner of their dreams, build a business around a passion that they love, or by being a leader and serving their community. I hear these stories every day.

And about half the time, when it comes down to making a choice, they choose not to take action and work with me. They tell themselves that life really is fine, that they’re learning and growing every day, and that they are happy with where they are in life.

These individuals feel that taking classes will get them where they want to go and don’t feel that coaching will make a difference.

I’ve learned to recognize fear and a lack of commitment to change, as the saying goes, “You can’t push a wet noodle.”

Fear trumps knowledge every day of the week.

When you let your fear control you…

Learn to Be Unreasonable

We all have reasons.

In fact, for any worthwhile endeavor, there will be 100 reasons why not to do something for every one reason why to do it.

At a certain point, the only reason to do something is because you choose to.

Elon Musk started Tesla, “knowing” it would fail. He was so sure it was going to flop that he refused to let his friends invest in the company knowing they would lose their money.

When asked why he would start something, knowing it would fail, he responded, “If something is important enough, you should try even if the probable outcome is failure..”

Elon is unreasonable. All you have to do is look at this timeline of his successes and failures.

How Elon Musk started infographic — Source: https://blog.adioma.com/how-elon-musk-started-infographic/

Learn by Doing

Don’t misunderstand me.

I’m not saying that learning is not important, it’s vitally important. But what I am saying is that action is often more important than learning.

There’s a saying I like that speaks to beginner’s luck, “Ignorance on fire. Knowledge on ice.”

Have you heard of the Dunning-Krueger effect?

It’s a cognitive-bias model that suggests that individuals with less skill in a field will overstate their ability and how hard the task they have in front of them.

While those who are more skilled know how hard the task is. This knowledge can often create additional mental hurdles to the already challenging task, freezing them into inaction.

The happy middle ground is to know enough to get started intelligently and be ignorant enough to “know” that you can succeed.

You Don’t Always Burn When You Crash

I’ve done my best to live in this happy place of being “intelligently ignorant.”

As one example, years ago, when I was an apprentice for my career as an electrician, I was sick and tired of my “Fix-It-Again-Tony,” Fiat Spider. and traded it in to buy my first motorcycle, a Honda Hawk 650.

I had gotten my motorcycle driver’s permit but had as of yet to have ever physically driven a motorcycle. So, picking it up from Honda of Glendale, asking the salesman to show me how the controls work.

Over the next few hours, I’m driving in the back streets of Glendale, getting comfortable up to 2nd and 3rd gear. I then head to the Rose Bowl where I can use the parking lot to get up to the higher gears.

Finally, as night is approaching, I try the freeway from Pasadena to Glendale. Surviving and exiting the freeway, I’m now at a crowded intersection waiting for the light to turn green, with a line of cars behind me.

Sweating, I’m worried about stalling the bike when the light turns green, I over-react. Gassing too hard, doing my first wheelie through the intersection, only to lose it and fall of the bike and it goes crashing down in the intersection, luckily hitting no one.

Picking up my ego and bike from the ground, and luckily one of the onlookers who stopped to check on me was a motorcycle rider. He helped me to check my bike, bend back the gear shifter and made sure I was okay.

With my bike and my tail between my legs, I got on my brand new bike with its brand new “road rash.”

And I made it home and drove it to work the next day.

That was over 30 years ago, a half dozen bikes and I love riding more now than ever. That wasn’t the last time I went down and the chance is always there. I tell myself each time I get on, “I could go down today.” If I’m not willing to take that responsibility that day, I don’t rid.

But I always love it when I do.

And that might not have happened if I had been reasonable, and not bought a bike without knowing how one worked first.

To Be Successful, Be an Apprentice

As I mentioned, when I bought that motorcycle, I was a first-year electrical apprentice of a four-year program.

In our local union apprenticeship, there were two parts of it to graduate and “journey-out”. You had to go to school two nights a week and you also had to have the equivalent of 9 months of on-the-job training, working in the field for each calendar year.

We learned theoretical lessons in class and practical application in the field. The two go hand in hand.

Learning without doing isn’t true learning. Doing without understanding the principles behind the actions only creates automatons.

If you want to create more success in your life, yes, learning is important but until you find someone who will help you to take action, fear will stop you.

A great example, in the 80s, when I was an apprentice, we would work stuff “hot” to learn to respect electricity but not be afraid of it. Maybe, one day, I’ll write about drilling into a live 3000A copper bus bar.

Nowadays, because of litigation and insurance oversight, electricians today are repeatedly told not to work circuits hot, but there are times when you can’t turn off a circuit; i.e. critical-care circuits in hospitals. But if you don’t get the practice, you won’t be able to do it when you need to.

The secret to success. Know what you want to accomplish. Get the help you need. And don’t let fear stop you. And when you get knocked down, get back up, and hit it again smarter and wiser.

How Elon Musk Successfully Uses Both Parts of His Brain and Why You Should Also

September 29, 2020 by Chuck Leave a Comment

Elon Musk is a successful complex thinker

How does he do it?

Elon Musk is creating success in so many fields;

Finance – X.com, Paypal
Technology – Tesla, SpaceX, SolarCity, HyperLoop, OpenAI, NeuraLink
Urban Planning – The Boring Company

Most entrepreneurs struggle to build one successful company, Elon has built 4 profitable businesses so far and who knows what the final tally will be.

How does he do it?!?

The simple fact of the matter is that Elon Musk has learned to tap into both parts of his brain and has mastered how to use them effectively.