1. “There’s no reason to compare ourselves to others as it diverts your precious focus to someone else’s life and the only life you can control is the one you have”
2. “If you go back a few hundred years, what we take for granted today would seem like magic being able to talk to people over long distances, to transmit images, flying, accessing vast amounts of data like an oracle. These are all things that would have been considered magic a few hundred years ago”
3. “Work like hell. I mean you just have to put in 80 to 100 weeks every week. This improves the odds of success. If other people are putting in 40 hours workweeks and you’re putting in 100-hour workweeks, then even if you’re doing the same thing, you know that you will achieve in four months what it takes them a year to achieve”
4. “If you have a hunch about the potential of an emerging market, be prepared to put your money where your mouth it”
5. “You won’t always be the only person to have come up with a great idea”
6. “Sometimes even the sky isn’t the limit”
7. “Money alone doesn’t buy you credibility. You need to do your research, plan, and bring in the right level of expertise”
8. “I think it is a mistake to hire huge numbers of people to get a complicated job done. Numbers will never compensate for talent in getting the right answer. (Two people who don’t know something are not better than one). It tends to slow down progress, and will make the task incredibly expensive”
9. “If you want to make the very best products, you have to hire the very best people in the field”
10. “A failure is an option here. If things are not failing, you are not innovating enough”
11. “The best ideas aren’t necessarily new ideas. Be prepared to take products or services that already exist and rework and improve them for the modern world”
12. “I do think there is a lot of potentials if you have a compelling product and people are willing to pay a premium for that. I think that is what Apple has shown. You can buy a much cheaper cell phone or laptop, but Apple’s product is so much better than the alternative, and people are willing to pay that premium”
13. “When Henry Ford made cheap, reliable cars, people said, ‘Nah, what’s wrong with a horse?’ That was a huge bet he made, and it worked”
14. “There’s a tremendous bias against taking risks. Everyone is trying to optimize their ass-covering”
15. “People will always try to rain on your parade. Keep your head down, keep working and ignore idle gossip”
16. “Apply your expertise to real-world problems if you want to have a positive impact on the world in which you live”
17. “If you’re co-founder or CEO, you have to do all kinds of tasks you might not want to do. If you don’t do your chores, the company won’t succeed. No task is too menial”
18. “The characteristics that make you successful in business are not necessarily characteristics which will serve you well in other aspects of your life”
19. “I think ordinary people can choose to be extraordinary”
20. “You should take the approach that you’re wrong. Your goal is to be less wrong”
21. “When something is important enough, you do it even if the odds are not in your favor”
22. “If you get up in the morning and think the future is going to be better, it is a bright day. Otherwise, it’s not”
23. “Persistence is very important. You should not give up unless you are forced to give up”
24. “The first step to establishing something is a possibility; then probability will occur”
25. “People work better when they know what the goal is and why. People must look forward to coming to work in the morning and enjoy working”
26. “Constantly think about how you could be doing things better and questioning yourself”
27. “I think the profit motive is a good one. Profit just means that people are paying you more for whatever you are doing than you are spending to create it. That’s a good thing. And if that’s not the case, then you will be out of business, and rightfully so. Because you are not adding enough value”
28. “A successful company is very much more about ‘how quick are you to fix the mistakes? Not, ‘will you make mistakes?'”
29. “A failure is an option also because you can fail as many times as you want. And it’s never game over unless you say so”
Hope these quotes inspire you in some way. Feel free to share this post with anyone who you think will be uplifted with these inspirational quotes.
I have taken these quotes from two Books I read about Elon Musk (Success Secrets By George Lilian & An (in) complete guide – by Michal Adam Dominiczak). Both are available on Amazon Kindle if you like to read more about Elon Musk. Both books sum up his life pretty well.
Please share your suggestions/feedback on this post. I would love to hear from you.
Muzammil