Get Everything Done

Elon Musk was on a recent Lex Fridman podcast (an 8.5 hour podcast with people involved in Neuralink, including the first human recipient).

Lex asks Elon what makes a good engineering team, as he had witnessed one of Elon's teams constantly driving simplification and improvement of the processes. Elon replies that he works from a 5-step first-principles mantra. The steps are:

Step 1 - Question the requirements. Make the requirements less dumb. Make the question the least wrong possible. This is to avoid getting the perfect answer to the wrong question.

Step 2 - Try to delete a given part or process step. If you're not forced to put back at least 10% of what you delete you're not deleting enough. This is to avoid optimising something which shouldn't exist.

Step 3 - Try to optimise it or simplify it.

Step 4 - Speed it up. Any given thing can be sped up. Whatever speed it's being done it can be done faster.

Step 5 - Automate it.

He said he works to this after going backwards so many times – automating something, speeding it up, simplifying it and then ultimately deleting it anyway.

The podcast is below and has timestamps on YouTube. This part starts at 43:47.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Kbk9BiPhm7o