The Goal of This Post

This post shares some of my favorite passages and ideas from The Book of Elon by Eric Jorgenson.

The book is a curated collection of ideas and insights from Elon Musk—focused on building useful things, thinking from first principles, and working toward a better future. It’s not a traditional narrative. It’s a set of mental models and philosophies centered around impact, engineering thinking, and long-term optimism.

—

Be Useful

• The measure of success in my life is: “How many useful things can I get done?”
• It’s hard to be useful, to contribute more than you consume.
• The goal of an organization should be usefulness to society.

Building something that makes a big difference to a small number of people is just as great as something that makes a small difference for a vast number of people.

Fight for the Future

• Fight for the things that make you excited about the future.
• Look at the future from the standpoint of probabilities. Actions we can take now affect those probabilities.
• Accelerate something, slow down another thing, or maybe introduce something new.

You have to ask: What are we doing to move toward the paths likely to make for a good future?

That is what I care about.

Obsess for Success

• What is a useful thing you could build that you wish existed in the world?
• Find things that need to happen, and try to make them happen.
• Find an overlap of your talents and what you’re interested in.
• Find work that is a good combination of things you are inherently good at but also like doing.
• Have an obsessive nature about the quality of the product.

If you’re creating something you love and think other people will love, it’s much easier to sacrifice the time and effort.

Life is too short to spend it doing something you don’t like.

Create More Than You Consume

• The economic pie is not fixed.
• Make sure you’re not operating from a zero-sum mindset.
• Work on adding to the economic pie. Create more than you consume.

Work Like Hell

• You must be extremely tenacious. Work like hell.
• If you’re starting a company, you need to work super hard.
• Nobody ever changed the world on forty hours a week.

Feel the Fear; Do It Anyway

• Look fear straight in the eye and it will disappear.
• When something is important enough and you believe in it enough, you do it in spite of fear.
• Feel it and let the importance of your mission drive you to do it anyway.

Seek the Nature of the Universe

• We must expand humanity and consciousness to the point where we are able to answer that question.
• We need to figure out what questions to ask about the answer that is the universe.
• We need to expand the scope and scale of consciousness in order to understand what questions to ask of the universe.

---

All content credit goes to the author(s). I’ve shared the bits I’ve enjoyed the most and found most useful.

Cheers ’til next time! Saludos!
Alberto