The Elon Musk Blog Series: Wait But Why

by Tim Urban

“The CEO receives the distillation of all the worst problems in the company, only spending time on the things that are going wrong, and you get all the stuff other people can’t take care of, so you have a filter for the crappiest problems in the company.”↩

But along with many more factories came the need for many more factory workers, so our education system was redesigned around that goal. He explains: The deal was: universal public education whose sole intent was not to train the scholars of tomorrow—we had plenty of scholars. It was to train people to be willing to work in the factory. It was to train people to behave, to comply, to fit in. “We process you for a whole year. If you are defective, we hold you back and process you again. We sit you in straight rows, just like they organize things in the factory. We build a system all about interchangeable people because factories are based on interchangeable parts.”

In the 1960s, a creative performance researcher named George Land conducted a study of 1,600 five-year-olds and 98 percent of the children scored in the “highly creative” range. Dr. Land re-tested each subject during five year increments. When the same children were 10-years-old, only 30 percent scored in the highly creative range. This number dropped to 12 percent by age 15 and just 2 percent by age 25. As the children grew into adults they effectively had the creativity trained out of them. In the words of Dr. Land, “non-creative behavior is learned.”

Just say you have an overbearing mother who insists you grow up with her values, her worldview, her fears, and her ambitions—because she knows best, because it’s a scary world out there, because XYZ is respectable, because she said so. Your head might end up running your whole life on “because mom says so” software. If you play the Why? game with something like the reason you’re in your current job, it may take a few Why’s to get there, but you’ll most likely end up hitting a concrete floor that says some version of “because mom says so.” But why does mom say so? Mom says so because her mom said so—after growing up in Poland in 1932, where she was from a home where her dad said so because his dad—a minister from a small town outside Krakow—said so after his grandfather, who saw some terrible shit go down during the Siberian Uprising of 1866, ingrained in his children’s heads the critical life lesson to never associate with blacksmiths.

The best friend of a blind Us is a nemesis Us—Them. Nothing unites Us like a collectively hated anti-Us, and the blind tribe is usually defined almost as much by hating the dogma of Them as it is by abiding by the dogma of Us.

Being a chef isn’t being like Elon Musk—it’s being yourself.

That’s what Stephen Hawking meant when he said, “The greatest enemy of knowledge is not ignorance, it is the illusion of knowledge.” Neither

And if thinking about all of that ends with you drowning in some combination of self-doubt, self-loathing, and identity crisis, that’s perfect. This first epiphany is about humility. Humility is by definition a starting point—and it sends you off on a journey from there. The arrogance of certainty is both a starting point and an ending point—no journeys needed. That’s why it’s so important that we begin with “I don’t know shit.” That’s when we know we’re in the lab.

When you grow up, you tend to get told the world is the way it is and your life is just to live your life inside the world. Try not to bash into the walls too much. Try to have a nice family life, have fun, save a little money. That’s a very limited life. Life can be much broader once you discover one simple fact. And that is: Everything around you that you call life was made up by people that were no smarter than you. And you can change it, you can influence it, you can build your own things that other people can use. Once you learn that, you’ll never be the same again.

I’m a huge believer in taking feedback. I’m trying to create a mental model that’s accurate, and if I have a wrong view on something, or if there’s a nuanced improvement that can be made, I’ll say, “I used to think this one thing that turned out to be wrong—now thank goodness I don’t have that wrong belief.”

Failure is simply the opportunity to begin again, this time more intelligently. —Henry Ford

I have not failed 700 times. I’ve succeeded in proving 700 ways how not to build a lightbulb. —Thomas Edison

We talked about the chef’s courage actually just being an accurate assessment of risk—and

We’re more afraid of public speaking than texting on the highway, more afraid of approaching an attractive stranger in a bar than marrying the wrong person, more afraid of not being able to afford the same lifestyle as our friends than spending 50 years in a meaningless career—all because embarrassment, rejection, and not fitting in really sucked for hunters and gatherers.

We discussed why scientists expect plenty of their experiments to fail. But when you and the experiment are one and the same, not only is taking on a new goal a change of identity, it’s putting your identity on the line. If the experiment fails, you fail. You are a failure. Devastating. Forever.

Being trapped in your history means you don’t know how to change, you’ve forgotten how to innovate, and you’re stuck in the identity box the world has put you in.

It’s for this reason that Steve Jobs looks back on his firing from Apple in 1986 as a blessing in disguise. He said:14 “Getting fired from Apple was the best thing that could have ever happened to me. The heaviness of being successful was replaced by the lightness of being a beginner again. It freed me to enter one of the most creative periods of my life.” Being fired “freed” Jobs from the shackles of his own history.

The challenge with this last epiphany is to somehow figure out a way to lose respect for your own fear. That respect is in our wiring, and the only way to weaken it is by defying it and seeing, when nothing bad ends up happening, that most of the fear you’ve been feeling has just been a smoke and mirrors act. Doing something out of your comfort zone and having it turn out okay is an incredibly powerful experience, one that changes you—and each time you have that kind of experience, it chips away at your respect for your brain’s ingrained, irrational fears.

When I look at the amazing chefs of our time, what’s clear is that they’re more or less treating real life as if it’s Grand Theft Life. And doing so gives them superpowers. That’s what I think Steve Jobs meant all the times he said, “Stay hungry. Stay foolish.”

So if we want to think like a scientist more often in life, those are the three key objectives—to be humbler about what we know, more confident about what’s possible, and less afraid of things that don’t matter.