How To Think Like Elon Musk
Innovation and Critical thinking skills to unleash your potential!
Love him or hate him, but everyone has heard of Elon Musk and his legendary skills in making the impossible come true! Would you like to learn how he thinks and emulate his methods for success? If so, read the book “Think Like a Rocket Scientist” by Ozan Varol.
In this book, the author shows how to think like rocket scientists and astronauts who are regularly faced with problems no one has ever faced before. They are forced to deal with the impossible, with novel problems and tasks even Google cannot answer! Therein lies the secret to Elon Musk’s thinking patterns — view the world like a rocket scientist.
Book details:
- Title — Think Like a Rocket Scientist
- Subtitle — Simple Strategies You Can Use to Make Giant Leaps in Work and Life
- Author — Ozan Varol
- Personal Review Score = 5/5 *****
Why Everyone Should Read This Book
In his bestselling book “Black Swan”, author Nassem Taleb explains the concept of “Black Swan events” — unlikely events that disrupt industries and bankrupts businesses, like a pandemic or housing bust or recessions. This book is the answer to avoid getting hurt badly when such situations and they will happen at some point or the other, no doubt about it. Covid-19 is a classic example.
This book is the answer to help us prepare for those rare events and emerge stronger, faster, better!
Whether you are a student, entrepreneur or mid-level executive, this book will help you improve your critical thinking skills. You will emerge with new ways to innovate, see patterns, and a fresh burst of creativity. The best way to describe it is as a crash course equivalent to an MBA business strategy class.
If you still need some convincing, then here are 2 other points to note. This book comes recommended by:
a] bestselling authors like Adam Grant (Wharton professor and author of “Originals”) and Daniel Pink (“Drive”), b] Tech titans like Satya Nadella and Bill Gates.
Critical Thinking Skills
The book cites nine brilliant thinking processes that you can use to boost your career. I won’t cite all of them, only the points that resonated with me along with my notes.
- Where certainty ends, progress begins. This grey area is the place where transformational innovation occurs!
- Not every question has an answer. Seriously, in the age of Alexa and Google, we have almost forgotten how to think on our own and ponder without the crutches of online information.
- Risk-taking is important for innovation. However, you can improve your odds of success by identifying what is truly fatal and what is not.
- For practical innovation implementations, identify your “kill metrics”. This concept is extremely valuable for small businesses and corporations so that you can ensure money is not drained in perpetuity, trying to salvage “sunk” costs (or egos!)
- “It has always been done this way”. Elon Musk has succeeded by ignoring this statement and returning to first principles i.e. question the basics. Often the underlying starter assumptions have become void with time, and are prime for disruption because no one has re-evaluated them yet.
- Read the story about the talking monkey and the pedestal. Innovations get stranded because we focus on building the pedestal!
- So much more!
My honest recommendation would be — buy the book! There are so many gems of wisdom; you will get the full benefit only when you read it yourself!
Conclusion:
There are some self-help books that simply rehash generic concepts or regurgitate cliched content from other books. This book is NOT one of them!
This is one of those books I gush about to everyone I know, and buy copies to hand out!
In this book, I was looking for practical strategies to hone my critical thinking skills, and possible ideas to accelerate my career. The book delivered everything that I expected and a little more! I got some wacky ideas for my website promotion, and early testing seems to show a more positive response than I expected.
This post is part of the #SethGodinDailyChallenge.
Some parts of this post were originally published at https://greatnewreads.com on April 8, 2020.
