1. Never Give Up
When asked why he didn’t give up after many runs on failure, Elon replied, ” I will never give up, never, I would have to be dead to give up.”
2. Really like what you do
You’ve got to really love what you do. Given that you the best of the best in your chosen field there’s always a chance of failure and it will knock the energy out of you but loving what you do will let you bounce back. Life is short love what you do. If you don’t like what you do you cannot really make it work.
3. Don’t listen to the #littleman
So many people tried to talk me out of starting the right company, it was crazy. One good friend of mine collected a whole series of ideas about rocket blowing up and made me watch those just to let me know I will be losing all my money. We were doing these things that seemed unlikely to succeeded and we’ve been fortunate, thus far they have succeeded.
4. Take a risk
Addressing college students at their graduation, Elon Musk encourage them to take risk and do something bold.
“Now is the time to take risk, you don’t have kids as you get there your obligations increase. And once you have the family you take risk not for yourselves but your family as well it gets much harder to do things that must not work well.”
5. Do something important
Interviewer: How did you figure you’re going to start a car company and be successful at it?
Elon Musk: I didn’t really think Tesla was going to be successful, I thought we will most likely fail. But I thought that at least we could address the false perception that an electric car will be ugly and slow and boring like a golf cart.
Interviewer: But you say you didn’t think Tesla was going to succeeded then why try?
Elon Musk: If something is important enough you should try even if the outcome is failure.
6. Focus on signal over noise
A lot of companies get confused they spend a lot of money on things that actually don’t make the product any better.” For example at Tesla we’ve never spent any money on advertising,” Elon Musk said in an interview. All those monies all channeled into Research and Development and manufacturing to try and make the car as good as possible. Elon believes that that’s the way to go, ” for any company thinking about all of these efforts people are spending on, are they resulting in any better product or service? If they’re not stop those efforts.”
7. Look for problem solvers
When we’re interviewing someone to work in the company and ask them to tell the problems they’ve worked on or solved, if the individual was the problem solver he should be able to answer multiple levels. The will be able to go down to the various task and if they are not, they’ll get stuck. If anyone solve a problem he never forgets it.
8. Attract the great people
If you are creating a company or joining a company the most important thing is to attract great people. Either join a group that’s amazing and you really respect or if you’re building a company you’ve got to get great people. Every great company is a group of people that have come together to create a product or service.
9. Have a great product
Make sure that what ever you’re doing is a great product or service. It has to be really great.
10. Work super hard
what do super hard means? When my brother and I were starting our first company instead of renting an apartment we rented a small office and we slept on the couch. We showered at the YMCA and we were so hard up we had one computer, so the website was up on the day and I was coding at night for seven days a week all the time. I had a girlfriend who frequented and she had to be with me she had to sleep in the office. Work hard every waking hour.
By: Paa Swanzy-Essuman || www.ghanatalksbusiness.com
