Elon Musk USC Commencement Speech Transcript.
Alright, thank you. | |
So, I’ve got about apparently I’ve got about five to six minutes to say the most useful things I can think of. | |
I’m gonna do my best. | |
It was suggested that I distill things down to 3 items. | |
I think I’ll go with four. | |
And I’ll try, I think, I think these are pretty important ones. | |
Some of it may kinda sound like, well you’ve heard them before. | |
But, you know, worth reemphasizing. | |
I think the first is, you need to work, if you, depending on how well you want to do, | |
particularly if you want to start a company, you need to work super hard. | |
So what is super hard mean? | |
Well, when my brother and I were starting our first company, instead of getting an apartment, | |
we just rented a small office and we slept on the couch and we showered in the YMCA. | |
We’re so hard up that we had just one computer. | |
So the website was up during the day, and I was coding at night. | |
7 days a week, all the time. | |
And I, sort of briefly had a girlfriend in that period and in order to be with me, | |
she had to sleep in the office. | |
So, work hard, like, every waking hour. | |
That’s the thing I would say, particularly if you’re starting a company. | |
And I mean, if you do the simple math, you say like somebody else is working 50 hours a week and | |
you’re working 100, you’ll get twice as done, as much done, in the course of the year as the other company. | |
The other thing I’d say is that if you’re creating a company, or if you’re joining a company, | |
the most important thing is to attract great people. | |
So either be with, join a group that’s amazing, that you really respect. | |
Or, if you’re building a company, you’ve got to gather great people. | |
I mean, all a company is is a group of people that have gathered together to create a product or service. | |
So depending upon how talented and hard working that group is, | |
and to the degree in which they are focused cohesively in a good direction, | |
that will determine the success of the company. | |
So, do everything you can to gather great people, if you’re creating a company. | |
Then, I’d say focus on signal over noise. | |
A lot of companies get confused. | |
They spend a lot of money on things that don’t actually make the product better. | |
So, for example, at Tesla, we’ve never spent any money on advertising. | |
We’ve put all the money into R and D and manufacturing and design to try and make the car as good as possible. | |
And, I think that’s the way to go. For any given company, keep thinking about, | |
“Are, these efforts that people are expending, are they resulting in a better product or service?" | |
And if they’re not, stop those efforts. | |
And then the final thing is, is to sort of, don’t just follow the trend. | |
So, you may have heard me say that it’s good to thinking terms of the physics approach, the first principles. | |
With is, rather than reasoning by analogy, | |
you boil things down to the most fundamental truths you can imagine, and then you reason up from there. | |
And this is a good way to figure out if something really makes sense, or is it just what everybody else is doing. | |
It’s hard to think that way, you can’t think that way about everything. | |
It takes a lot of effort. But if you’re trying to do something new, it’s the best way to thing. | |
And that framework was developed by physicists to figure out counter intuitive things, like quantum mechanics. | |
It’s really a powerful, powerful method. | |
And anyways, so that’s, and then the final thing I would encourage you to do is now is the time to take risks. | |
You don’t have kids, you’re obligations, well! Some of you… Hahaha, you probably don’t have kids. | |
But as you get older, your obligations start to increase. | |
So, and, once you have a family, you start taking risks not just for yourself, but for your family as well. | |
It gets harder to do things that might not work out. So now is the time to do that. | |
Before you have those obligations. So I would encourage you to take risks now, and to do something bold. | |
You won’t regret it. Thank you.... | |
...I don’t know if it was helpful. Great. |
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