Hisham Sarwar
With worth over 11 billion dollars, Elon Musk has created game-changing businesses such as PayPal, Tesla Motors and now SpaceX.
Rule # 1 – Never Give Up
I don’t ever give up. I’d have to be dead or completely incapacitated.
Rule # 2 – Do What you really like to do
Rule # 3 – Don’t pay heed to all the advice you get
His two companies were highly unlikely to succeed but he started those because he was not afraid of the failure. For SpaceX, his friend brought a whole bunch of rocket blowing videos because he never wanted Elon to lose his hard earned money. Elon went on, created the company and rest is history. SpaceX is a force to reckon with in the space industry.
We’re doing these things that seem unlikely to succeed and we’ve been fortunate and these thus far have succeeded.
Rule # 4 – Take a Risk
The best time to take risk is when you are in college, you don’t have kids so therefore there is not much responsibility. With family comes obligations, responsibility and you can not take risk. As a student, now is the time to take risk. Do something bold you won’t regret in your life. Be a risk taker.
Rule # 5 – Work on something important
I didn’t really think Tesla would be successful. I thought we would most likely fail but I thought we could at-least address the false perception that people had about an electric car that it has to be ugly, slow and boring like a golf cart.
Rule # 6 – Focus on signal over noise
You focus on signal over noise, a lot of companies get confused. They spend money on things that don’t make the product better. For example at Tesla, we’ve never spent any money on advertising. We put all the money into R&D, manufacturing and design. We try to make the car as good as possible. I think that’s the way to go, if we’re for any given company just keep thinking about, are these efforts people are expending resulting in a better product or service?. If they’re not, stop those efforts.
Rule # 7 – Always surround with problem solvers
When we interview someone to work for our companies, we ask them to tell about the problems that they worked on and how they’ve solved them?
Any one who struggled hard with a problem never forgets it.
Rule # 8 – Attract great people
if you’re creating a company or if you’re joining a company, the most important thing is to attract to great people so either they would join a group that’s amazing, one you really respect or if you’ve building a company; you’ve got to gather great people. Remember, company is a group of people that have gathered together to create a product or service.
Do everything you can to gather great people; if you’re creating a company.
Rule # 9 – Offer a great product
You have got to make sure that whatever you’re doing is a great product or service. it has to be really great and if you’re entering an existing market place against lodge and trenched competitors, then your product or service needs to be much better than theirs.
it just can’t be little bit better because then you put yourself in the shoes of the consumer and they say why should they buy from you as a consumer?. You’re always going to buy the trusted brand unless there’s a big difference.
Rule # 10 – Work Super Hard
Work hard, nothing can beat that.
Content is picked from a YouTube video by Evan Carmichael
Elon Musk’s Top 10 Rules For Success in Life
