How Elon Musk learns Effectively & Faster than everyone
How do Elon Musk manage to study so much in such a short period of time? Many people read books and converse with intelligent people, but he has taken it to another level.
It appears that Elon Musk is extremely knowledgeable in aerospace engineering, mechanical engineering, electrical engineering, software engineering, and all of their subdisciplines (avionics, power electronics, structural engineering, propulsion, energy storage, AI), as well as nearly everything technical.
We all know Elon, read a lot of books and hire a lot of brilliant people and absorb up their knowledge, but Elon has to admit that he seem to have crammed more knowledge into his brain than almost anyone alive.
But, how do he manage to be so good at it? let's try to find out with some of my opinions!
The MYTH of the jack of all trades
If you enjoy learning about new things, you've probably heard the following well-intentioned advice:
"You have to grow up." Concentrate solely on one field."
"I'm a jack-of-all-trades." "I am the master of none."
The underlying premise is that if you study numerous subjects, you'll only learn on a superficial level and never master them.
This is incorrect, as evidenced by the success of expert-generalists throughout history. Because most people focus on just one topic, learning across numerous fields provides an information edge (and thus an innovation advantage).
If you're in the tech sector and everyone else is reading tech journals, but you also know a lot about biology, you'll be able to come up with concepts that nearly no one else can. Vice-versa. If you're a biologist who also understands artificial intelligence, you have an advantage over others who stay in their silos.
Despite this basic understanding, few people truly learn outside of their field.
Each new field we learn that others in our field aren't familiar with allows us to create combinations that others can't. This is what the expert-generalist advantage is all about.
This idea is supported by an intriguing study. It looked at how the top 59 opera composers of the twentieth century honed their skills. The researcher Dean Keith Simonton discovered the exact reverse of the popular narrative that elite performers' success can be explained exclusively by purposeful effort and specialization: "The most successful operatic composers' compositions tended to be a combination of genres... "By cross-training, composers were able to avoid the inflexibility of too much competence (overtraining)," writes Scott Barry Kaufman of the University of Pennsylvania in a Scientific American article.
Musk's superpower is "learning transfer."
According to his brother, Kimbal Musk, Musk began reading two books every day in diverse fields when he was in his early adolescence. To put that in perspective, Musk would read 60 times as many books as you if you read one a month.
Musk's reading ranged from science fiction to philosophy, theology, programming, and biographies of scientists, engineers, and entrepreneurs at beginning. His reading and job interests grew to include physics, engineering, product design, business, technology, and energy as he grew older. Because of his passion for information, he was exposed to a wide range of subjects that he had not necessarily learnt about in school.
Musk is also skilled at a sort of learning that most people aren't even aware of: learning transfer.
Learning transfer is the process of applying what we've learned in one setting to another. It can be as simple as applying a sliver of what we learn in school or from a book to the "real world." It might also mean using what we've learned in one industry to another.
Musk shines in this area. He has a unique two-step technique for facilitating learning transfer, as seen by several of his interviews.
To begin, he breaks down information into essential principles.
Musk explains how he accomplishes this in a Reddit AMA:
Before you go into the leaves/details, make sure you understand the fundamental concepts, i.e. the trunk and huge branches, else there will be nothing for them to hold onto.
Turning your information into deeper, abstract ideas, according to research, aids learning transfer. According to research, one strategy is particularly effective at assisting people in intuiting basic ideas. "Contrasting cases" is the term for this strategy.
The following is how it works: Assume you wish to deconstruct the letter "A" in order to grasp the fundamental principle behind what makes a "A" an A. Let's also imagine that you have two options for accomplishing this:
Which method do you believe would be more effective?
Approach #1: Each A in Approach #1 provides further information about what remains the same and what differentiates between them. In Approach #2, each A provides no information.
When we learn something new, we begin to intuit what is important and even create our own unique combinations by looking at a variety of situations.
What does this imply in our daily lives? We shouldn't only take one technique or best practice when entering a new field. We should investigate a variety of approaches, deconstruct them, and compare and contrast them. This will assist us in identifying fundamental principles.
Then, in new disciplines, he reconstructs the essential principles.
The second step in Musk's learning transfer method is to break down the underlying principles he's acquired in artificial intelligence, technology, physics, and engineering into distinct fields:
SpaceX was created in the aerospace industry.
In the automotive industry, in order to produce a Tesla with self-driving capabilities,
To visualize the Hyperloop, imagine yourself in a train.
To picture electric airplanes that take off and land vertically in aviation,
In order to imagine a neural lace that connects your brain to technology,
In order to assist in the development of PayPal, we have invested in technology.
In order to co-found a company in the field of technology, OpenAI is a non-profit organization dedicated to reducing the likelihood of disastrous artificial intelligence futures.
To improve one's analogical reasoning skills, Keith Holyoak, a UCLA professor of psychology and one of the world's leading theorists on the subject, suggests asking oneself two questions: "What does this remind me of?" and "Why does it remind me of it?"
You strengthen the muscles in your brain that help you form connections across traditional boundaries by regularly looking at objects in your environment and reading material and asking yourself these two questions.
The bottom line is that it isn't magic. It's the ideal learning environment.
Now we can see how Musk has evolved into a world-class expert-generalist:
He read 60 times as much as a voracious reader over a period of years.
He read considerably in a variety of fields.
He was continually putting what he had learnt into practice by breaking down concepts into their underlying principles and reassembling them in fresh ways.
What we can take from Musk's narrative at its most fundamental level is that we shouldn't embrace the assumption that specialization is the best or only path to career success and impact. Buckminster Fuller, a legendary expert-generalist, explains a shift in thinking that we should all contemplate. He said that decades ago, yet it still holds true today:
"We live in a time where narrowing specialization tendencies are assumed to be logical, natural, and good... Meanwhile, humanity has been robbed of a complete understanding. Individuals have experienced emotions of solitude, futility, and perplexity as a result of specialization. It has also led to people delegating their responsibility for thinking and social action to others. Specialization develops prejudices, which eventually coalesce into international and ideological disagreement, leading to war."
Transferring between subjects becomes more easier and faster if we put in the time to study key concepts across fields and always tie those concepts back to our lives and the world.
We gain the superpower of being able to go into a new field we've never learned before and quickly make unique contributions as we build up a reservoir of "first principles" and associate those principles with different fields as we build up a reservoir of "first principles" and associate those principles with different fields.
Understanding Musk's learning abilities gives us some insight into how he might enter an industry that has existed for over a century and completely transform the way it competes.
Elon Musk is unique, but his powers aren't supernatural.
