Day1: Elon Musk

The reason: He is the prototype of disruptive innovator in 21th century

I believe he is one of the most brilliant guys on the earth. Elon Musk is the Co-founder of Paypal. And he is currently working on Tesla motor and SpaceX as CEO. He is a disruptor car industry, new wind for space industry. He recently even mentioned he will send people on Mars [1]. How can someone possibly make an internet company to the space rocket company? I have no idea. I don’t know why there aren’t so many books that analyze his talent? I did not know him so much, so I researched a lot of publications from self-publishing e-book, and articles and interviews (including TED) yesterday to write this post. I need to do more though, here I guess what I learned from him.

• Keep taking risk like crazy

He has been taking huge risks every project he has done. He gave up Ph.D at Stanford to start his company. I surely could not. He was born in South Africa and went to Canada, and then the U.S., started his companies and has had several issues for his projects and money, but still he is running in every direction. I have lived the foreign country. So, I know how hard someone succeeds in the foreign country. He started everything from scratch and now he is competed with giant company or government institute. It seems that the adversities he had has been trained him a lot. He even worries that his sons don’t have enough adversity like him.

• Read books and talk to people

On his interview [2], he said “Read books and talk to people, it’s kind of how I have learned anything”. This is very simple suggestion though, it is very profound. Even making rockets, there is someone specialist and great books out there. Why not asking or reading how I can make them. I love to read book, some of them is too hard to read for me but I now knew someone like me (must be human beings, not alien from another planet) wrote that book. Why not sticking to read it until I understand it well? If I can’t, even how hard I tried, why not asking about the problem to the author?

• Only authentic people can tell who is authentic.

On this interview [2], he also explained how to tell the person who are really involved in and have solved the problem. I think what is said is very true. But I know, as a scientist, who is the person who solved the problem. If he were me, I can explain how I could solve the problem with multiple levels because I struggled a lot to solve the problem. We can tell who the one is because the person is he who struggled a lot the problem and never forgets how he solved the problem.

• Study physics, boys and girls, and gentlemen and ladies!!

As a physicist, I am kind of feeling ashamed when I learned about him. He said that the frame work of physics is very strong. It seems he is learning everything by using the framework of physics. I knew physics framework is very important though, I was not challenging enough to take advantage from it. I know physics, I am professional. The physics is the comprehensive study to solve the problem by keeping asking “Why is this happening?” He reminds me that I have to use physics a lot more.

• Honesty

He says honestly sometimes “I don’t know” during interviews when he was asked question that he doesn’t know or cannot answer. It seems it is easy to say so, I don’t think so. He can say “I don’t know” because he knows something clearly and confidently, but also he knows he doesn’t know or can’t say exactly. I don’t think this is easy.

• Living in the 21th century

When I saw and read about him, I realized that we are living in the 21th century. Since even we are living 21th century we are using many of ideas from 20^th century. And they are great. Also they are improving gradually, but the concepts of them don’t change so much. Many people might say that we have everything to live already, say “Why should we innovate something to the future?” This question might be the biggest disruptor of our motivation to innovate.

People might have cheap electric car, live sustainably with self-produced electricity (with Solar power maybe?), travel with hyperloop, talk to artificial intelligent, and even live on Mars in near future. Let’s struggle to our future human beings!! We are living the 21th century!!

References

[1] CNBC’s number 1 disruptor, Elon Musk: http://video.cnbc.com/gallery/?video=3000285676#.

[2] How Elon Musk Can Tell If Job Applicants Are Lying About Their Experience http://www.businessinsider.com/elon-musk-job-interview-rule-2013-12