How Elon Musk Learns Faster And Better

Than Everyone Else

Photo Credit: Heisenberg Media

How is it even possible that Elon Musk could build four multibillion companies by his mid40sin
four separate fields (software, energy, transportation, and aerospace)?
To explain Musks success, others have pointed to his heroic work ethic (he regularly works 85hour weeks), his ability to set reality-distorting visions for the future, and his incredible
resilience.
But all of these felt unsatisfactory to me. Plenty of people have these traits. I wanted to know
what he did differently.
As I kept reading dozens of articles, videos, and books about Musk, I noticed a huge piece of the
puzzle was missing. Conventional wisdom says that in order to become world-class, we should
only focus on one field. Musk breaks that rule. His expertise ranges from rocket science,
engineering, physics, and artificial intelligence to solar power and energy.

In a previous article, I call people like Elon Musk expert-generalists (a term coined by Orit
Gadiesh, chairman of Bain & Company). Expert-generalists study widely in many different
fields, understand deeper principles that connect those fields, and then apply the principles to
their core specialty.
Based on my review of Musks life and the academic literature related to learning and expertise,
Im convinced that we should ALL learn across multiple fields in order to increase our odds of
breakthrough success.
The jack of all trades myth
If youre someone who loves learning in different areas, youre probably familiar with this wellintentioned advice:
Grow up. Focus on just one field.
Jack of all trades. Master of none.
The implicit assumption is that if you study in multiple areas, youll only learn at a surface level,
never gain mastery.
The success of expert-generalists throughout time shows that this is wrong. Learning across
multiple fields provides an information advantage (and therefore an innovation advantage)
because most people focus on just one field.
For example, if youre in the tech industry and everyone else is just reading tech publications,
but you also know a lot about biology, you have the ability to come up with ideas that almost no
one else could. Vice-versa. If youre in biology, but you you also understand artificial
intelligence, you have an information advantage over everyone else who stays siloed.
Despite this basic insight, few people actually learn beyond their industry.
Each new field we learn that is unfamiliar to others in our field gives us the ability to make
combinations that they cant. This is the expert-generalist advantage.
One fascinating study echoes this insight. It examined how the top 59 opera composers of the
20th century mastered their craft. Counter to the conventional narrative that success of top
performers can solely be explained by deliberate practice and specialization, the researcher Dean
Keith Simonton found the exact opposite: The compositions of the most successful operatic
composers tended to represent a mix of genres composers were able to avoid the inflexibility
of too much expertise (overtraining) by cross-training, summarizes UPENN researcher Scott
Barry Kaufman in a Scientific American article.
Musks learning transfer superpower

Starting from his early teenage years, Musk would read through two books per day in various
disciplines according to his brother, Kimbal Musk. To put that context, if you read one book a
month, Musk would read 60 times as many books as you.
At first, Musks reading spanned science fiction, philosophy, religion, programming, and
biographies of scientists, engineers, and entrepreneurs. As he got older, his reading and career
interests spread to physics, engineering, product design, business, technology, and energy. This
thirst for knowledge allowed him to get exposed to a variety of subjects he had never necessarily
learned about in school.
Elon Musk is also good at a very specific type of learning that most others arent even aware of
learning

transfer.
Learning transfer is taking what we learn in one context and applying it to another. It can be
taking a kernel of what we learn in school or in a book and applying it to the real world. It can
also be taking what we learn in one industry and applying it to another.
This is where Musk shines. Several of his interviews show that he has a unique two-step process
for fostering learning transfer.
First, he deconstructs knowledge into fundamental principles
Musks answer on a Reddit AMA describes how he does that:
It is important to view knowledge as sort of a semantic treemake

sure you understand the
fundamental principles, i.e. the trunk and big branches, before you get into the leaves/details or
there is nothing for them to hang onto.
Research suggests that turning your knowledge into deeper, abstract principles facilitates
learning transfer. Research also suggests that one technique is particularly powerful for helping
people intuit underlying principles. This technique is called, contrasting cases.
Heres how it works: Lets say you want to deconstruct the letter A and understand the deeper
principle of what makes an A an A. Lets further say that you have two approaches you could
use to do this:

Which approach do you think would work better?

Approach #1. Each different A in Approach #1 gives more insight into what stays the same and
what differs between each A. Each A in Approach #2 gives us no insight.
By looking at lots of diverse cases when we learn anything, we begin to intuit what is essential
and even craft our own unique combinations.
What does this mean in our day-to-day life? When were jumping into a new field, we shouldnt
just take one approach or best practice. We should explore lots of different approaches,
deconstruct each one, and then compare and contrast them. This will help us uncover underlying
principles.
Next, he reconstructs the fundamental principles in new fields
Step two of Musks learning transfer process involves reconstructing the foundational principles
hes learned in artificial intelligence, technology, physics, and engineering into separate fields:

In aerospace in order to create SpaceX.

In automotive in order to create Tesla with self-driving features.

In trains in order to envision the Hyperloop.

In aviation in order to envision electric aircraft that take off and land vertically.

In technology in order to envision a neural lace that interfaces your brain.

In technology in order to help build PayPal.

In technology in order to co-found OpenAI, a non-profit that limits the probability of

negative artificial intelligence futures.

Keith Holyoak, a UCLA professor of psychology and one of the worlds leading thinkers on
analogical reasoning, recommends people ask themselves the following two questions in order to
hone their skills: What does this remind me of? and Why does it remind me of it?
By constantly looking at objects in your environment and material you read and asking yourself
these two questions, you build the muscles in your brain that help you make connections across
traditional boundaries.
Bottom line: Its not magic. Its just the right learning process
Now, we can begin to understand how Musk has become a world-class expert-generalist:

He spent many years reading 60 times as much as an avid reader.

He read widely across different disciplines.

He constantly applied what he learned by deconstructing ideas into their fundamental

principles and reconstructing them in new ways.

At the deepest level, what we can learn from Elon Musks story is that we shouldnt accept the
dogma that specialization is the best or only path toward career success and impact. Legendary
expert-generalist Buckminster Fuller summarizes a shift in thinking we should all consider. He
shared it decades ago, but its just as relevant today:
We are in an age that assumes that the narrowing trends of specialization to be logical, natural,
and desirable In the meantime, humanity has been deprived of comprehensive understanding.
Specialization has bred feelings of isolation, futility, and confusion in individuals. It has also
resulted in the individuals leaving responsibility for thinking and social action to others.
Specialization breeds biases that ultimately aggregate as international and ideological discord,
which in turn leads to war.
If we put in the time and learn core concepts across fields and always relate those concepts back
to our life and the world, transferring between areas becomes much easier and faster.
As we build up a reservoir of first principles and associate those principles with different
fields, we suddenly gain the superpower of being able to go into a new field weve never learned
before, and quickly make unique contributions.
Understanding Elons learning superpowers helps us gain some insight into how he could go into
an industry that has been around for more than 100 years and change the whole basis of how the
field competes.
Elon Musk is one of a kind, but his abilities arent magical.
Interested in starting your own multi-disciplinary reading habit? I created a report that
highlights the most-recommended books of 60 top CEOs, entrepreneurs, and leaders like
Bill Gates, Mark Zuckerberg, Sheryl Sandberg, and Elon Musk.
P.S.If
you liked this article, youll love this other article we wrote, Bill Gates, Warren
Buffett And Oprah All Use The 5-Hour Rule. It details how top business leaders often spend
five hours per week doing deliberate learning.
P.P.S.You

also may want to join our Facebook Group, Learning How To Learn. It has 7,500
active members and is very active.
Michael Simmons is a serial entrepreneur and writes at MichaelDSimmons.com, and Ian Chew
is a director at Empact.