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How Elon Musk Learns Faster And Better Than

Everyone Else

Michael Simmons Follow

Dec 7, 2018 · 8 min read

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How is it even possible that Elon Musk could build four multibillion companies
by his mid-40s — in four separate fields (software, energy, transportation, and
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aerospace)?
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To explain Musk’s success, others have pointed to his heroic work ethic (he
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regularly works 85-hour weeks), his ability to set reality-distorting visions for the
future, and his incredible resilience.

But all of these felt unsatisfactor y to me. Plenty of people have these traits. I wanted
to know what he did differently.

As I kept reading dozens of articles, videos, and books about Musk, I noticed a huge
piece of the puzzle was missing. Conventional wisdom says that in order to become
world-class, we should only focus on one field. Musk breaks that rule. His expertise
ranges from rocket science, engineering, construction, tunneling, physics, and
artificial intelligence to solar power and energy.

In a previous article, I call people like Elon Musk modern polymaths. Modern
polymaths:

Follow the 5-hour rule and put at least 5 hours per week into learning.

Study widely in many different fields.

Understand deeper principles and mental models that connect those fields.

Apply those mental models to their core specialty.

Based on my review of Musk’s life and the academic literature related to

learning and expertise, I’m convinced that we should ALL learn across multiple
fields in order to increase our odds of breakthrough success.

Amazingly, the most comprehensive study of the most significant scientists in all of
histor y uncover that 15 of the 20 were polymaths. Furthermore, the founders of the
five largest companies in the world — Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, Warren Buffett, Larr y
Page, and Jeff Bezos — all polymaths (who also follow the 5-hour rule).

The Jack Of All Trade Myth

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“Grow up. Focus on just one field.”
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“Jack of all trades. Master of none.”
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The implicit assumption is that if you study in multiple areas, you’ll only learn at a
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surface level, never gain master y. have an account? Sign in
The success of modern polymaths throughout time shows that this is wrong.
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Learning across multiple fields provides several unappreciated and significant
advantages:

1. Creating an atypical combination of two or more skills that you’re merely

competent can lead to a world-class skill set.

2. Gives you an information advantage(and therefore an innovation advantage)

because most people focus on just one field.

3. It future-proofs Your career.

4. It helps you stand out and compete in the global economy.

For example, if you’re in the tech industr y and ever yone else is just reading tech
publications, but you also know a lot about biology, you have the ability to come up
with ideas that almost no one else could. Vice-versa. If you’re in biology, but you you
also understand artificial intelligence, you have an information advantage over
ever yone else who stays siloed.

Despite this basic insight, few people actually learn beyond their industry.

Each new field we learn that is unfamiliar to others in our field gives us the ability to
make combinations that they can’t. This is the modern polymath advantage.

One fascinating study echoes this insight. It examined how the top 59 opera
composers of the 20th centur y mastered their craft. Counter to the conventional
narrative that success of top performers can solely be explained by deliberate
practice and specialization, the researcher Dean Keith Simonton found the exact
opposite: “The compositions of the most successful operatic composers tended to
represent a mix of genres…composers were able to avoid the inflexibility of too
much expertise(overtraining) by cross-training,”summarizes UPENN researcher
Scott Barr y Kaufman in a Scientific American article.

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Musk’s “learning transfer” superpower
SignMusk
Starting from his early teenage years, up withwould
Google read through two books per day

in various disciplines according to his brother, Kimbal Musk. To put that context, if
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you read one book a month, Musk would read 60 times as many books as you.

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At first, Musk’s reading spanned science fiction, philosophy, religion, programming,
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and biographies of scientists, engineers, and entrepreneurs.As he got older, his
reading and career interests spread to physics, engineering, product design,
business, technology, and energy. This thirst for knowledge allowed him to get
exposed to a variety of subjects he had never necessarily learned about in school.

Elon Musk is also good at a ver y specific type of learning that most others aren’t
even aware of — learning transfer.

Learning transfer is taking what we learn in one context and applying it to another.
It can be taking a kernel of what we learn in school or in a book and applying it to
the “real world.” It can also be taking what we learn in one industr y and applying it
to another.

This is where Musk shines. Several of his inter views show that he has a unique two-
step process for fostering learning transfer.

First, he deconstructs knowledge into fundamental

principles and mental models
Musk’s answer on a Reddit AMA describes how he does that:

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.
The experience of other world-class entrepreneurs suggests that they deconstruct
their knowledge into mental
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Buffett’s long-term business partner, Charlie Munger goes so far as to say:
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“Developing the habit of mastering the multiple models which underlie reality is
the best thing you can do. “ Sign up with Facebook

Self-made billionaire Ray Dalio echoes

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“Those who understand more of them and understand them well [principles /
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mental models] know how to interact with the world more effectively than those
who know fewer of them or know them less well. “

Research suggests that turning your knowledge into deeper, abstract mental
models facilitates learning transfer. Research also suggests that one technique is
particularly powerful for helping people intuit underlying mental models. This
technique is called, “contrasting cases.”

Here’s how the deconstruction process works: Let’s say you want to deconstruct the
letter “A” and understand the deeper principle of what makes an “A” an A. Let’s
further say that you have two approaches you could use to do this:

Which approach do you think would work better?

The answer is Approach #1!

Each different A in Approach #1 gives more insight into what stays the same and
what differs between each A. On the other hand, each A in Approach #2 gives us no
insight.

By looking at lots of diverse cases when we learn anything, we begin to intuit what is
essential and even craft our own unique combinations.
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What does this mean in our day-to-day life? When we’re jumping into a new field, we
shouldn’t just take one approach orSign
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practice. We should explore lots of different
approaches, deconstruct each one, and then compare and contrast them. This will
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help us uncover underlying principles.
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Next, he reconstructs the fundamental principles in new
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fields
Step two of Musk’s learning transfer process involves reconstructing the
foundational principles he’s learned in artificial intelligence, technology, physics,
and engineering into separate fields:

In aerospace in order to create SpaceX.

In automotive in order to create Tesla with self-driving features.

In trains in order to envision the Hyperloop.

In aviation in order to envision electric aircraft that take off and land vertically.

In technology in order to envision a neural lace that interfaces your brain.

In technology in order to help build PayPal.

In technology in order to co-found OpenAI, a non-profit that limits the

probability of negative artificial intelligence futures.

In physics in order to build The Boring Company.

Keith Holyoak, a UCLA professor of psychology and one of the world’s leading
thinkers on analogical reasoning, recommends people ask themselves the following
two questions in order to hone their skills:

1. What does this remind me of ?

2. Why does it remind me of it?
By constantly looking at objects in your environment and material you read and
asking yourself these two questions, you build the muscles in your brain that help
you make
Getconnections across
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Bottom line: It’s not magic.

Sign upIt’s
with just
Google the right learning

process
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Now, we can begin to understand how Musk has become a world-class modern
polymath: Already have an account? Sign in
 He spent many years reading 60 times as much as an avid reader.
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He read widely across different disciplines.

He constantly applied what he learned by deconstructing ideas into their

fundamental principles and reconstructing them in new ways.

At the deepest level, what we can learn from Elon Musk’s stor y is that we shouldn’t
accept the dogma that specialization is the best or only path toward career success
and impact. Legendar y expert-generalist Buckminster Fuller summarizes a shift in
thinking we should all consider. He shared it decades ago, but it’s just as relevant
today:

“We are in an age that assumes that the narrowing trends of specialization to be logical,
natural, and desirable… In the meantime, humanity has been deprived of comprehensive
understanding. Specialization has bred feelings of isolation, futility, and confusion in
individuals. It has also resulted in the individual’s leaving responsibility for thinking and
social action to others.Specialization breeds biases that ultimately aggregate as
international and ideological discord, which in turn leads to war.”

At the most practical level, what we can learn from Elon Musk is the modern
polymath formula:

Put in the time (at least five hours per week)

Learn the core mental models across fields (here’s my list).

Relate those concepts back to our life and the world.

Ferociously apply what you learn.

As we build up a reser voir of “first principles” / mental models and associate them
with different fields, we suddenly gain the superpower of being able to go into a new
field we’ve never learned before, and quickly make unique contributions. It is
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Understanding Elon’s learning superpowers helps us gain some insight into how he
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could go into an industr y that has been around for more than 100 years and change
the whole basis of how the field competes.
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Elon Musk is one of a kind,Already

but hishave
abilities aren’tSign
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in
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WRIT T EN BY

Michael Simmons

I teach people to learn HOW to learn / Serial entrepreneur /

Bestselling author / Contributor: Time, Fortune, and Harvard
Business Review

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