How Elon Musk Taught Himself Rocket Science?
He went from knowing next to nothing about rockets to becoming the ceo of the world's largest private space exploration company with spacex now valued at over 100 billion dollars he has built a net worth of 185 billion making him the wealthiest man on the planet former engineer at spacex robert zubrin describes just how quickly musk was able to learn and absorb information in order to make the transition from rocket science rookie to becoming an industry-leading expert in just six years he wrote he did not know anything about rockets nothing that was in 2001 by 2007 he knew everything about rockets he really knew everything in detail what elon musk was trying to do essentially create a space company to compete with nasa the biggest space organization in the world there was a whole graveyard of dead bodies that musk had to step over that tried to do this before him billionaire businessman andrew beale spent 100 million dollars trying to do exactly what musk was aiming to do and he went bankrupt so at the time space exploration was considered a government domain that nobody really dared to step into but elon's approach was different he defined a goal and he put a lot of effort into understanding what that goal was and why it was a goal worthy of spending the vast majority of his lives pursuing his goal back in 2001 a year before spacex was formed was to make mankind a multi-planetary species and the first problem he had to solve was the transportation problem and to this day that goal has not changed once he had his goal his next step was to learn as much about the subject area as possible and in this article we're gonna go through four main ways he was able to learn and process vast amounts of information in such short periods of time and he used learning methods that all of us every single one of us both me and you can implement into our lives to learn faster and become an expert in any field and before i go on a lot of people watching are probably thinking elon musk is more of a businessman right he's more of a businessman than an engineer.
He doesn't really get that involved in the building and engineering of the rockets right well not exactly you probably don't remember this a very long time ago many many years you took me on a tour of spacex and the most impressive thing was that you knew every detail of the rocket and every piece of engineering that went into it my time is almost entirely with the engineering team working on improving the falcon 9 and the dragon spacecraft and developing the mars colonial architecture and there's an interesting post on korra from tim walstahl who is a journalist and at the time he was a global expert in a very rare type of metal it was an aluminium scandinave which the russians had developed to compete with nasa's aluminium lithium and a number of years back he received an email from a guy called elon musk he was very vaguely aware of who he was but back then he was nowhere near as well known as he is now and he gets an email asking whether the aluminium skating room will actually make his rockets lighter and tim replied back that it wouldn't make them lighter but it would make them easier to weld and that was pretty much the end of the exchange so when people ask whether musk is involved in the engineering side of spacex at least to me it's pretty obvious that he is he managed to track down a one-man company that knew the straight answer to the question he needed answering so the first and arguably the most efficient way that elon musk became an expert in rocket science was that he surrounded himself with experts in 2001 he would cold call industry leaders in the aerospace field just hoping that they would pick up the phone jim cantrell was an experienced aerospace engineer and an expert in russian rockets having joined the french space agency back in 1990 and going on to work at the joint french soviet mass program then musk ended up cold calling control back in 2001 just before spacex was launched and cantrell explained i had the top down on my car so all i could make out was that some guy named ian musk was saying that he was an internet billionaire and needed to talk to me i'm pretty sure he used that phrase internet billionaire he also wrote in a quora post answering someone's question of how did elon musk actually learn enough about rockets to create and run spacex and he replied he literally sucks the knowledge and experience out of people that he is around we also hired as many of my colleagues in the rocket and spacecraft business that were willing to consult with him learning from people much better at that particular area is such an incredibly effective way of learning far more efficient than reading books or watching youtube videos or listening to podcasts because when you're talking one-on-one to someone you can receive direct feedback in real time you can ask specific focused questions and elon's mother mae musk noticed this specific trait in him from a young age saying in an interview even at an early age he would always migrate to the most successful person in the room and he would just stand there and listen and then ask very pointed questions they were always highly intelligent and highly directed and it made sense when i was studying economics at university i noticed something interesting we would be taught in a matter of a couple of hours things that the best economists in the world noble prize-winning economists took decades to develop and leading the way is easy but being the first one is far more difficult musk employed the people that had already cut the path through the jungle and he constantly asked them questions to pick their brain and learn from them as much as he could and he used their expertise in the field of aerospace engineering to show him the ropes one former spacex employee said that elon musk would quiz you until he knew 90 of what you knew he even moved from silicon valley to los angeles because he realized that the highest concentration of rocket scientists rocket engineers and experts in that field were mostly congregated in and around the la area and musk has spoken about this in a number of interviews he essentially had two options the first option was to farm spacex in silicon valley and tried to encourage as many space and rocket engineers who lived in and around southern california and la to move up north to silicon valley and the second option was to form the company in la which would benefit his employees too because housing in silicon valley is notoriously expensive so in his own words silicon valley wasn't really a viable option for him and spacex
The second way musk taught himself rocket science links in with what he calls his single best piece of advice in an interview back in 2012 he said i think it's very important to have a feedback loop where you're constantly thinking about what you've done and how you could be doing it better i think that's the single best piece of advice constantly think about how you could be doing things better and questioning yourself the feedback loop is unquestionably part of every successful person's growing process being open to receiving feedback is one of musk's biggest strengths as steve jobs once said it doesn't make sense to hire smart people and tell them what to do we hire smart people so that they can tell us what to do and musk does exactly that he hires smart people that are constantly giving feedback on every part of his business his aim to improve a particular product or business process is to intentionally try not to be the smartest person in the room he hires people with far more experience than himself and solicits consistent feedback to improve himself and his businesses so he is constantly learning and growing the third way elon musk was able to turn himself into an aerospace expert in just a few years was that he read books he read a lot of books and he often credits much of his success to this throughout his childhood books have played a crucial role in fueling his ambition at the age of nine he would read the entire encyclopedia britannica and would pour through science fiction books for 10 hours or more a day and elon's uncle scott holdem and said he never went anywhere without a book in his hand he was always reading and he was often advanced books that was one of the earliest things you started seeing it was this intense reading and there were books about the future and about success according to his brother musk could read through two books a day and if you like the average person read one book a month that means musk would read 60 times as many books as you and they were from a whole range of disciplines from soviet rocket manuals encyclopedias science fiction and biographies.
Most people can learn faster and learn more efficiently more than they actually realize he wrote in a reddit comment i think most people can learn a lot more than they think they can they sell themselves short without trying and reading biographies can help combat that by showing you that if you play your cards right extraordinary things can happen in a reddit thread in 2015 elon musk explained how he learns new information by viewing knowledge as a tree by using this learning method he was able to process and retain so much information in the field of aerospace engineering in such a short space of time musk wrote 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's nothing for them to hang on to and this approach makes sense imagine a child trying to read an encyclopedia when he doesn't even know how to read in the first place it makes more sense for him to start learning with single words and then move on to children's books and slowly progress to more complex books the basics of reading need to be understood before he can move on to the next level and musk's entire career is based on this principle first he learned the fundamentals of economics and physics at the university of pennsylvania where he received a dual bachelor's degree in economics and physics then he deconstructed these ideas and reconstructed them in new ways so for example paypal reshaped traditional banking by allowing for seamless online payments and tesla shook up their car industry by releasing mass-market electric vehicles forcing every other major manufacturer to follow suit and spacex also shook up the once almost entirely government-owned industry by being the first private space flight company to send a crude spacecraft to space something as basic as viewing knowledge as a tree and understanding the fundamental principles before you get into the details can be an incredibly powerful approach to business but also to your studying your work your health your fitness your relationships pretty much every single area in your life and if you are on a journey of growing and learning to develop yourself last week i had written an article on the free books that transformed my life and a few books mentioned over there elon musk steve jobs arnold schwarzenegger's biographies and the richest man in babylon how to win friends and influence people rich dad poor dad just to name a few and if you like this article you're gonna love that one so i'll see you over there.
Thanks for reading: How Elon Musk Taught Himself Rocket Science || Elon Musk: The Scientist Behind the CEO Documentary, Sorry, my English is bad:)