It's no secret that our obsession with and admiration for Elon Musk is legitimately out of control, and we're not ashamed. The billionaire genius has done something that barely seems possible: he's built four multi-billion-dollar companies, each in a different field. And by the looks of it, he has no intention of slowing down. How does he do it?! Among other intangible factors, his success comes in part from his approach to learning.
What Would Elon Do?
As of the date this article was published, the Church of Elon does not yet exist. Luckily, we have some info on how to be more like Musk based on what he's shared in interviews and even a Reddit AMA. In 2015, Musk shared this nugget of wisdom on Reddit about how he approaches learning: "It is important to view knowledge as sort of a semantic tree — make sure you understand the fundamental principles, i.e. the trunk and big branches, before you get into the leaves/details or there is nothing for them to hang onto."
What he describes here is called "first principles thinking." "I think it's important to reason from first principles rather than by analogy," Musk said in an interview. "The normal way we conduct our lives is we reason by analogy. [...] we are doing this because it's like something else that was done, or it is like what other people are doing. [With first principles] you boil things down to the most fundamental truths ... and then reason up from there."
More than 2,300 years ago, Aristotle mirrored this same mode of thinking. The philosopher said that the first principle is the "first basis from which a thing is known."
https://curiosity.com/topics/this-is-how-elon-musk-can-learn-and-master-anything-quickly-curiosity/
Foto Source: qz.com
