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If you want to perform at the absolute limit of your ability, you must regularly go past your limits. If you want to bring your whole self to that job, you must
by erikpukinskis 8y ago
If you want to perform at the absolute limit of your ability, you must regularly go past your limits. If you want to bring your whole self to that job, you must push limits in every aspect of your life.
It's not for everyone, but it's the reason why Musk is so successful. He goes right up to the line, and then tries to step just a tiny bit over. Sometimes he ends up flagrantly in the danger zone, but just as often he finds out the line was much further out than anyone suspected.
You can do the same thing socially, by letting crazy people randomly test boundaries, and then using a social network to filter best practices down to you. That way you get the benefit of random testing, without risking any of your personal health or reputation. But that takes decades, whereas Elon's strategy gives immediate feedback.
He has so much privilege that he can be quite risky without actually "betting the farm" so to speak. If he was a little less mentally healthy, a little less white, a little less male, a little less rich parents, a little less educated, etc he'd probably have flamed out with this strategy. Having that intersection of privilege gives him a nice safety net when his experiments blow up. There's a whole other layer of support beyond the business fundamentals.
- aplummer 8y agoThe thing I’ve always liked about him, is he actually did bet the farm when he could have had a very easy life. Not sure I could have done it.
- erikpukinskis 8y agoAnd he keeps betting it!
- Retric 8y agoThat’s demonsratably a bad idea when it comes to exercise and likely most other things in life. Limits are not binary, you are causing harm when you approach them. Going over just means the injury is more noticeable. What’s really interesting is if you study the absolute top athletes is they treat down time as both nessisary and productive. Absolute peak performance is simply not sustainable, you need to adjust to a huge range of tradeoffs.
- therealdrag0 8y agoBut top athletes also exercise far more than other people.
- Symmetry 8y agoMost people don't exercise enough, so that's no surprise. The important thing is that top athletes don't exercise as much as they possibly could because doing so would be counterproductive.
- marvin 8y agoThey have also spent years building up the capacity to exercise as much as they do. If you go straight from an office job lifestyle to top athlete levels of effort, you'll get injured.
- erikpukinskis 8y agoI agree 100%. The expected outcome is not good. But the range of possible outcomes goes higher than being smart about it.
- notahacker 8y agoIf you want to perform at the absolute limit of your ability, then knowing where you might benefit from pushing your limits is far more useful than mere recklessness. And a 47 year old tweeting about "420" and his critics being "pedos" isn't someone with a "strategy" seeking "immediate feedback" where others "take decades", even where their tweets are in a sufficiently harmless space for them not to lose a measure of control over their company and find themself on the end of bad press and lawsuits as a result. It's someone who somehow managed not to learn something the majority of other 47 year olds learned three decades ago and/or someone who has failed to exercise control of their behaviour in an arena where they had little to gain and everything to lose. You can make a case for assholery over details being integral to getting results even at the expense of relationships, but not self-destructive social media tomfoolery Musk didn't even indulge in for most of his career. I guess above all I'm just glad nobody hero worships me enough to rationalise my own acts of utter stupidity as next-level, boundary-pushing genius. (I guess the flip side is I didn't found SpaceX, but you win some, you lose some :-)