Friday🔥06: Musk's Meteoric Rise, Doing Less to Get More

Welcome to the 3 new additions to our Friday 🔥 community who have joined us since last week! If you aren't subscribed, join >100 smart & curious folks here:

Welcome to this week's edition of Friday Fire, an end of week newsletter recapping notable insights and inspirations from the past week. Below I'm highlighting my top notices from reading the book Power Play and also unpacking how I recently re-discovered the power behind sometimes choosing less to get more. Let's jump in!

Musk's Meteoric Rise

Here are a handful of stories, lessons and observations which grabbed my attention while reading the book "Power Play" which is a chronicle of the rise of Tesla and Elon Musk. If you want to skim all my notes from the book, there is a full post on that here. My favorites are summarized below:

Rapid Decision-Making - Throughout the origin story of Tesla and Musk's meteoric rise, short-hand ideas and decisions were regularly prioritized over more elaborate planning processes. Musk truly operates under the notion that it is better to be directionally right (and move with speed) than be precisely wrong (and move slowly).

Follow the Money - Any idea who Martin Eberhard is? Exactly, me neither before reading this book. Martin Eberhard is the Co-Founder of Tesla (along with Marc Tarpenning) and was the one who recruited Elon Musk to be an early investor in the Company. Despite the enormous progress realized under Eberhard's stewardship, each subsequent capital raise (i.e., each check stroked by Musk), Eberhard increasingly lost control of the Company. 3 1/2 years after Tesla's start, Eberhard was ousted from the very Company he helped launch, with nothing to show for it... Regardless of how great an idea is, you can't ignore the realities of financial ownership which ultimately take the day.

Convince the Best in Order to Work With the Best - Musk was able to attract remarkable talent to Tesla and accelerate the Company's growth thanks in large part by (i) the ability to convince others of the Tesla vision (largest EV company in a gasoline world) and (ii) backing that vision up with a fantastic product. Most skeptics relented and became a Tesla loyalist after taking their first test drive of the early Roadster.

Human Ingenuity is Hard to Quantify - There were countless of intelligent individuals who stood up throughout Tesla's adolescence and cited thoughtful reasons why the Company would fail. Between the anecdotes cited in the book and in this post, I genuinely believe their assessment of risks at the time were well founded... BUT, ultimately those risks were mitigated by an x-factor, Ingenuity. Its difficult to factor the impact that human ingenuity and resourcefulness has on the rate of improvement. The skeptics of Tesla saw a current state of affairs which was extrapolated into potential future realities. These projections were linear and ignored the ability of intelligent individuals to solve problems in creative new ways. These projections couldn't estimate the ability of humans to re-write the rules.

Go Fast but Acknowledge the Costs - Musk showed particular distaste when hearing excuses about time constraints. In the middle of a meeting where a timing limitation was raised, he would stop the dialogue and dig into the assertion (ex: a part couldn't be made in time). He'd regularly ask - "why couldn't this supplier speed things up?". These challenges from Musk encapsulated a consistent battle against the limiting beliefs of his team. The cost of this approach? A de-motivated team which feels like they are consistently asked to do the impossible will ultimately lead to high employee turnover (which is what happened).

Problems Are Not Actually Problems - Musk had a chief of staff named Sam Teller. Teller was one of the few people that had a transcendent picture of what was going on across the various domains of Musk's empire (Tesla, SpaceX and Solar City). She shared an insightful piece of advice for newly hired senior executives looking to get the inside scoop on Musk. She said - "For Musk... problems are not actually problems. They're normal. Musk spends all of his time solving things that are broken. Surprises are the problem. Musk doesn't like to be surprised." What a powerful perspective - what if we didn't really see problems in the way they are customarily defined. What if we just saw them as a rudimentary part of our human experience. What would that empower us to do? What hurdles could we clear?

Set Big Goals and "Fail" On A Worthwhile Target - While outlandish targets set by Musk were regularly missed, the commitments and action organized towards outsized targets catalyzed resourcefulness from the Tesla teams and still led to tremendous outcomes.

Less is More

"My energy levels right now are crap!"

This is what you would regularly hear coming out of my mouth in the last 12 months if you were around. It seemed like everyday I would hit these mystifying and insurmountable walls of low energy which I couldn't 'bio-hack' my way out of. As someone who prizes the amount of energy I am able to pour into a task this was a nagging problem.

Typically in these moments of waning energy and focus I would run towards a fresh cup of joe! Nothing can warm the body and mind like a nice little caffeine blitz. And it was effective!... for about 45 minutes, upon which I was then visited by even lower energy troughs and than I had experienced pre-coffee.

This process is what a friend described to me as "porpoise-ing" - yea like a dolphin (porpoise). I would experience this short burst of energy followed be a deep retreat of lethargy.

While I can't pinpoint the moment where I decided to try this - I ultimately embarked on a radical experiment (for me) of "no coffee". Long story short, in the past three weeks I have experienced ridiculous improvement in the consistency of my energy levels! The difference is night and day - I no longer have to run to the coffee maker when I feel the 'scary sleepies' approaching. This is resulting in better raw performance on a daily basis!

Let me be clear, the point of this post is definitively NOT to try and convince people to cut caffeine. I'm simply using this story to illustrate a point.

When confronted with something we want to change, our default problem solving mechanism is usually to do "more" of something.

• Go to the gym (more)
• Be in the office (more)
• Buy another ___ fill in the blank (more)

My challenge and encouragement for those reading is next time you notice a gap between what you want and where you currently are, try asking yourself the following question:

Cutting is sometimes easier than adding. Use little experiments to see what potentially small reductions may powerfully unlock more (energy, happiness, wealth, peace) in your life!

Weekly Gratitude

Gratitude helps cultivate a sense of joy and appreciation along the way, and need not be reserved for the big or elaborate happenings in life.

This week I'm grateful for beautiful sunsets at a later time in the evening (thank you day light savings!)

What are you grateful for this week?

Update on Stock Picks:

Weekly performance update for active stock picks

If you enjoyed this, please share with 1 person you think may enjoy it too! It'd mean a lot to me!

Until Next Week,

Ryan ✌️