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As Max Levchin drily puts it, “One of Elon’s greatest skills is the ability to pass off his vision as a mandate from heaven.”
“It’s not how well you avoid problems,” Mueller says. “It’s how fast you figure out what the problem is and fix it.”
A pattern was set: try new ideas and be willing to blow things up. The residents in the area got used to explosions. The cows, however, did not. Like pioneers circling the wagons, they would run in a circle protecting the young calves in the center when a big bang happened. The engineers at McGregor set up what they called a “cow cam” so they could watch.
“In most people’s vocabularies, design means veneer,” Jobs once explained. “Nothing could be further from the meaning of design. Design is the fundamental soul of a man-made creation that ends up expressing itself in successive outer layers.”
His way of dealing with his mental problems, he says when I ask, “is just take the pain and make sure you really care about what you’re doing.”
Requirements from smart people are the most dangerous, because people are less likely to question them. Always do so, even if the requirement came from me. Then make the requirements less dumb.
The only rules are the ones dictated by the laws of physics. Everything else is a recommendation.
When NASA had awarded SpaceX the contract to build a rocket that would take astronauts to the Space Station, it had, on the same day in 2014, given a competing contract, with 40 percent more funding, to Boeing. By the time SpaceX succeeded in 2020, Boeing had not even been able to get an unmanned test flight to dock with the station.
Twitter, like many media and educational institutions, narrowed the definition of what was acceptable discourse. “The people in charge of these institutions enforced the new parameters by expanding the definitions of words like ‘violence,’ ‘harm,’ and ‘safety.’ ”
“This is how civilizations decline. They quit taking risks. And when they quit taking risks, their arteries harden. Every year there are more referees and fewer doers.” That’s why America could no longer build things like high-speed rail or rockets that go to the moon. “When you’ve had success for too long, you lose the desire to take risks.”
