40+ Quotes From Elon Musk About Success And His Life Philosophy

After I read the Book- Rocket Man: Elon Musk in His Own Words, edited by Jessica Easto, I have picked 40+ the most inspiring quotes by Elon Musk. I reread them many times. I hope you find them useful as well!

1. “The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy taught me that the tough thing is figuring out what questions to ask, but that once you do that, the rest is easy. I came to the conclusion that we should aspire to increase the scope and scale of human consciousness in order to better understand what questions to ask. Really, the only thing that makes sense is to strive for greater collective enlightenment.”- Bloomberg, September 14, 2012
2. “When I was in college, I just thought, “Well, what are the things that are most likely to affect the future of humanity at a macro level?“ And it just seemed like there would be the Internet, sustainable energy, making life multiplanetary, and then genetics and AI. I thought the first three, if you worked on those, they were almost certainly going to be good, and then the last two are a little more dodgy.”– STVP Future Fest, October 7, 2015
3. “ Do you have the right axioms, are they relevant, are you making the right conclusion based on those axioms? That’s the essence of critical thinking, and yet it is amazing how often people fail to do that. I think wishful thinking is innate in the human brain. You want things to be the way you wish them to be, and so you tend to filter information that you shouldn’t filter.” -CLEAN-tech Investor Summit, January 19, 2011
4. I think a good framework for thinking is physics, you know, the first principles reasoning. What I mean by that is boil things down to their fundamental truths and reason up from there as opposed to reasoning by analogy. Through most of our life, we get through life by reasoning by analogy, which essentially means kind of copying what other people do with slight variations. And you have to do that, otherwise mentally you wouldn’t be able to get through the day. But when you want to do something new, you have to a apply the physics approach. Physics has really figured out how to discover new things that are counterintuitive, like quantum mechanics; its really counterintuitive. -TED Talk, February 27, 2013
5. “ Frankly, though, I think most people can learn a lot more than they think they can. They sell themselves short without trying. One bit of advice: 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 on to.”– Reddit AMA, January 6, 2015
6. “ I care a lot about the truth of things and trying to understand the truth of things. I think it’s important. If you’re going to come up with some solution, then the truth is really, really important.” -AutoBild.tv, November 6,2014
7. “ I had to learn how you make hardware. I’d never seen a CNC machine or laid out carbon fiber. I didn’t know any of these things. But if you read books and talk to experts, you’ll pick up pretty quickly…. It’s really pretty straightforward. Just read books and talk to people- particularly books. The data rate of reading is much greater than when somebody’s talking.” – in conversation with Bill Gates, Boao Forum for Asia, March 29, 2015
8. “It’s better to approach this [building a company] from the standpoint of saying- rather than you want to be an entrepreneur or you want to make money- what are some useful things that you do that you wish existed in the world?”- in conversation with Bill Gates, Boao Forum for Asia
9. “The ability to attract and motivate great people is critical to the success of a company because a company is a group of people that are assembled to create a product or service. That’s the purpose of a company. People sometimes forget this elementary truth. If you’re able to get great people to join the company and work together towards a common goal and have a relentless sense of perfection about that goal, they you will end up with a great product. And if you have a great product, lots of people will buy it, and then the company will be successful.” – AutoBild.tv, November 6, 2014
10. “ A small group of very technically strong people will always beat a large group of moderately strong people.” – Fast Company, February 1, 2015
11. “ I really just ask them to tell me the story of their career and some of the tougher problems that they have dealt with, how they dealt with those, and how they made decisions at key transition points. Usually that’s enough for me to get a very good feel about someone, and what I’m really looking for is evidence of exception ability. Did they really face really difficult problems and overcome them?… Usually the person who’s has to struggle with the problem, they really understand it and they don’t forget if it was very difficult. You can ask them very detailed questions about it, and they’ll know the answer, whereas the person who was not truly responsible for that accomplishment will not know the details.”- AutoBild.tv, November 6, 2014
12. “ Establish an expectation of innovation, and the compensation structure must reflect that. There must also be an allowance for failure because if you are trying something new, necessarily there is some chance it will not work. If you punish people too much for failure, then they will respond accordingly, and the innovation you get will be very incrementalist. Nobody’s going to try anything bold for fear of getting fired or being punished in some way. The risk-reward must be balanced and favour taking bold moves. Otherwise, it will not happen.” – Offshore Northern Seas, August 2014
13. “ Start somewhere and then really be prepared to question your assumptions, fix what you did wrong, and adapt to reality.”- Vanity Fair New Establishmnt Submit, October 2015
14. “ I do think it’s worth thinking about whether what you’re doing is going to result in disruptive change or not. If it’s just incremental, it’s unlikely to be something major. It’s got to be something that’s substantially better than what’s gone on before.” -SXSW Conference, March 9, 2013
15. “ I don’t think everything needs to change the world, you know… Just say: “Is what I’m doing as useful as it could be?”- STVP Future Fest, October 7, 2015
16. “ Whatever this thing is that you’re trying to create, what would be the utility delta compared to the current state of the art times how many people it would affect? That’s why I think having something that make a big difference but affects a small to moderate number of people is great, as is something that makes even a small difference but affects a vast number of people.”- Y Combinator’s “ How to Build the Future” series, Setember 15, 2016
17. “ What a lot of people don’t appreciate is that technology does not automatically improve. It only improves if a lot of really strong engineering talent is applied to the problem… There are many examples in history where civilisations have reached a certain technology level and then have fallen well below that and then recovered only millennia later.”- International Astronautical Congress, September 27, 2016
18. “ We believe in doing deals where both parties benefit, and, when there is an asymmetry or underperformance on our part, interpreting that in the other party’s favour… Our goal in doing so is to build long-term trust. If people know that we will not take advantage of them and aspire to fairness, even at our own expense, then they are much more likely to want to work with us in the future.”- The House Always Wins,” November 21, 2014
19. “ We have a philosophy of continuous improvement. Every week, there are approximately 20 engineering changes made to the car… Other manufacturing tends to bundle everything together in a model year. In our case, it’s a series of rolling changes, so the model year doesn’t mean as much.”- Tesla Motors Q3 2015 earnings call, November 3, 2015
20. “ Our goal when we created Tesla a decade ago was the same as it is today: to accelerate the advent of sustainable transport by bringing compelling mass market electice cars to market as soon as possible. If we could have done that with our first product, we would have, but that was simply impossible to acheive for a startup conpany that had never built a car and that had one technology iteration and no economies of scale. Our first product was going to be expensive no matter what it looked like, so we decided to build a sports car, as that seemed like it had the best chance of being competitive with its gasoline alternatives.”- “The Mission of Tesla”, Novemeber 18, 2013
21. “ Technology leadership is not defined by patents, which history has repeatedly shown to be small protection indeed against a determined competitor, but rather by the ability of a company to attract and motivate the world’s most talented engineers.”- “All Our Patent Are Belong to You”, June 12, 2014
22. “ Our stores are designed to be informative and interactive in as a delightful way and are simply unlike the traditional dealership with several hundred cars in inventory that a commissioned salesperson is tasked with selling. Our technology is different, our car is different, and, as a result, our stores are intentionally different.”- “ The Tesla Approach to Distributing and Servicing Cars,” October 22, 2012
23. “ Our salespeople are not on commission and they will never pressure you to buy a car. Their goal and the sole metric of their success is to have you enjoy the experience of visiting so much that you look forward to returning again.”- “ The Tesla Approach to Distributing and Servicing Cars,” October 22, 2012
24. “ I have made it a principle within Tesla that we should never attempt to make servicing a profit centre. It does not seem right to me that companies try to make a profit off customers when their product breaks.”- “To the People of New Jersey”, March 14, 2014
25. “ It is super important that Tesla stay focused on the goal of accelerating the advent of sustainable transport and sustainable energy. There are a lot of things that we could do that would be all these awesome social goods, but if we divide our energies over many social goods, we risk accomplishing none of them. We’ve got to stay focused on this fundamental good that we’re trying to achieve as a primary thing, and then once we are over the hump- in particular, once we have a mass-market, affordable electric car that’s great- then I think we can start to try to do other things, but we really need to stay focused on that goal for now.”- 2015 Tesla Annual Shareholders Meeting, June 9, 2015
26. “ I think it’s also one of the most inspiring and interesting things that we could try to do. It’s one of the greatest adventures that humanity could ever embark upon. Life has to be about more than solving problems. If all that life is about solving problems, why bother getting up in the morning? There have to be things that inspire you, that make you proud to be a member of humanity.”- press conference on SpaceX’s commitment to develop fully reusable rockets, September 29, 2011
27. “ I’m not saying we’ll do it [become multiplanetary] for sure. The odds are we won’t succeed. But if something is important enough, then you should do it anyway.”- GQ, December 31, 2008
28. “ We’ve actually spent a lot of effort on the space suit design- on both the functionality and the aesthetics. It’s actually really hard because if you just optimise for functionality, it’s one thing; if you optimise for aesthetics, it doesn’t work. Those things that you see in movies, they don’t work. So it’s like, “How do we make something that looks cool and works?” with the key goal here being that when people see the space suit, we want them to think, “Yea, I want to wear that thing one day.”- International Space Station R&D Conference, July 7, 2015
29. “ Aspirationally, we’re in pursuit of the perfect car. Who knows what that looks like actually, but you want to try to make every element of the car as flawless as possible. There will always be some degree of imperfection, but we try to minimise that and create a car that is just delightful in every way.”- StartmeupHK Venture Forum, January 26, 2016
30. “ You can train yourself to pay attention to the tiny details; I think almost anyone can. This is very much a double-edged sword because then you see all the little details, and then the little things drive you crazy.”- STVP Future Fest, October 7, 2015
31. “ I also believe in having a right feedback loop between engineering and production. If production is far away from engineering, you lose that feedback loop. Someone who designed the car in a particular way doesn’t realise that it’s difficult to manufacture in a particular way that it’s designed. But if the factory floor is 50 feet away from their desk, then they can go out and they can just see it. It’s obvious. And they can have a dialogue with the people on the floor. And likewise, a lot of people on the manufacturing team have great ideas about how to improve the car, but if they’re far away, they can’t communicate that to the engineers who designed it. I think that it’s something that’s often neglected, but having that strong bidirectional feedback loop between engineering and production is really helpful for making the car better, finding efficiencies, and lowering the cost.”- Export-Import Bank Annual Conference, April 25, 2014
32. “ I’m a big believer in: don’t ask investors to invest their money if you’re not prepared to invest your money. I really believe in the opposite philosophy of other people’s money. It just doesn’t seem right to me that if you ask other people to invest that you shouldn’t also invest… I’d rather lose my money than any of my friends’ money or investors’ money.”- 2016 Tesla Annual Shareholders Meeting, May 31, 2016
33. “ I certainly hope children will work hard. I believe they should be productive contributors to the society. They shouldn’t be trust-fund kids. I’m hopeful they will do things like engineering, or write books, or just, in some way, add more than they take from the world.”- Telegraph, August 4, 2007
34. “ There are three things you look for: You have to look forward in the morning to doing your work. You do want to have a significant financial rewards. And you want to have a possible effect on the world. If you can find all three, you have something you can tell your children.”- Pennsylvania Gazette, November 4, 2008
35. “ The first step is to establish that something is possible; then probability will occur.”- Esquire, November 14, 2012
36. “ Something that can be helpful is fatalism, to some degree. If you accept the possibilities, then that diminishes fear.”- Y Combinator’s “How to Build the Future” series, September 15, 2016
37. “ I tried to figure out what’s the right amount of sleep. I found I could drop below a certain threshold of sleep, and although I’d be awake more hours and I could sustain it, I would get less done because my mental acuity would be affected. So I found, generally, the right number for me is around six to six and a half hours, on average, per night.”- CHM Revolutionaries, January 22, 2013
38. “ As you get older, your obligations increase. And once you have a family, you start taking risks not just for yourself but for your family as well. It gets harder to do things that might not work out. So now is the time to do that- before you have those obligations. I would encourage you to take risks now; do something bold. You won’t regret it.”- commencement address at the University of Southern California, May 16, 2014
39. “ Have recently come to appreciate the awesome, absurdist humour of Waiting for Godot. We so often wait, without knowing why, when or where.”- Twitter, April 17, 2016
40. “ I always try to reserve time for my kids because I love hanging out with them. Kids re really great. I mean, 99 percent of the time, they make you happier… Of anything in life, I would say kids by far make me the happiest. A lot of times, kids are kind of in their own worlds. They don’t want to talk to their dad for hours on end, generally. So I can be in the same room with them, they can talk to me from time to time, but I can get some emails done, get some work done, and then whenever they want to talk to me, they can.”- Code Conference, June 1, 2016
41. “ If something’s important enough, you should try. Even if the probable outcome is failure.”- 60 Minutes, March 30, 2014
42. “ If you’re trying to convince the public to do something, you have to say, “ OK, how’s this gonna read? What message are we going to try to convey? What will people respond to? What would I respond to if I was sort of an objective member of the public?” If you’re trying to change people’s minds or get people fired up about something, then you have to think, “ OK, what’s that message? What’s going to get them really excited?”-STVP Future Fest, October 7, 2017
43. “ Focus is incredibly important. If you have a certain amount of resources, to the degree that you diffuse your focus, you impede your ability to execute.”- 2016 Tesla Annual Shareholders Meeting, May 31, 2016
44. “ I think what matters is the actions, not what people think of me in the future. I’ll be long dead. But the actions that I take, will they have been useful?”- GQ, December 21, 2015