The most fundamental question to understand, IMO, is the existential one...What the heck is all this?! Why and how are we here? What are we supposed to do? Elon Musk is an incredibly smart guy - he has a track record of making things happen - both in the physical world (batteries, cars, rockets) and within human society (leading businesses, making money, acquiring a following). He's also a clear, first principles thinker and shares a lot about how he thinks about the world. So I think he can play a part in helping us understand life and the world*. So what is Elon's answer to the foundational question? Elon has two answers - one explicit and another implicit. Elon recalls that at the age of 11 or 12, he had an existential crisis because he didn't understand why or how we are here. He concluded that we may never know but we may be able to find out if we expand the scope and scale of civilization and consciousness , and that's what he wants to do. I like Elon's fra...
I don’t think there are many shoulds in how to live life— because who knows, really? But if there’s one should , it’s this: radically live how you want to . Whatever that means to you. It sounds obvious, yet almost no one actually does it. Most haven’t even thought deeply about why and how they want to live. Let’s step back for a second. We spawned into this mysterious universe with zero instructions. No clear purpose. Just here, suddenly, like magic. And one day—just as suddenly—we’ll be gone. It’s like we all woke up stranded on some cosmic island with strange matter, life, and laws, Lost style. It's quite mind-blowing and absurd, really. And equally bizarre that most of us go through the motions of our lives confidently and seriously, without regular confusion and fascination about the unknown nature of our reality and existence. And even for those who have dwelled on the situation and get it intellectually, there’s a massive gap between knowing life ...
Nearly all companies ossify as they grow larger. Product, organization, and operations become more unwieldy, more complex, less agile, and less innovative, Newer and nimbler competitors slowly steal market share, and the cycle continues. The most resilient and durable companies - say, Apple, Facebook, Google, United Healthcare, LVMH, etc. have one essential quality to outweigh the forces of ossification - powerful and inherent flywheels to get better and more competitive as they scale. These “accumulating advantages” can come in many forms - as network effects, economies of scale, brand and marketing efficiencies, IP, data, deepening product or operational expertise, capital, regulatory capture, etc. Google’s search becomes better as more people search and more publishers follow Google’s standards; Facebook gets better with more people and content; LVMH’s brands become more popular with more customers; and United Healthcare can offer bigger networks and better pricing. ...