谦卑胜于自傲。
Polytopia Life Lessons
Empathy is not an asset. “He knows that I have an empathy gene, unlike him, and it has hurt me in business,” Kimbal says. “Polytopia taught me how he thinks when you remove empathy. When you’re playing a video game, there is no empathy, right?”
Play life like a game. “I have this feeling,” Zilis once told Musk, “that as a kid you were playing one of these strategy games and your mom unplugged it, and you just didn’t notice, and you kept playing life as if it were that game.”
Do not fear losing. “You will lose,” Musk says. “It will hurt the first fifty times. When you get used to losing, you will play each game with less emotion.” You will be more fearless, take more risks.
Be proactive. “I’m a little bit Canadian pacifist and reactive,” Zilis says. “My gameplay was a hundred percent reactive to what everyone else was doing, as opposed to thinking through my best strategy.” She realized that, like many women, this mirrored the way she behaved at work. Both Musk and Mark Juncosa told her that she could never win unless she took charge of setting the strategy.
Optimize every turn. In Polytopia, you get only thirty turns, so you need to optimize each one. “Like in Polytopia, you only get a set number of turns in life,” Musk says. “If we let a few of them slide, we will never get to Mars.”
Double down. “Elon plays the game by always pushing the edge of what’s possible,” Zilis says. “And he’s always doubling down and putting everything back in the game to grow and grow. And it’s just like he’s just done his whole life.”
Pick your battles. In Polytopia, you might find yourself surrounded by six or more tribes, all taking swipes at you. If you swipe back at all of them, you’re going to lose. Musk never fully mastered that lesson, and Zilis found herself coaching him on it. “Dude, like, everyone’s swiping at you right now, but if you swipe back at too many, you’ll run out of resources,” she told him. She called that approach “front minimization.” It was a lesson she also tried and failed to teach him about his behavior on Twitter.
Unplug at times. “I had to stop playing because it was destroying my marriage,” Kimbal says. Shivon Zilis also deleted Polytopia from her phone. So did Grimes. And, for a while, Musk did so as well. “I had to take Polytopia off my phone because it was taking up too many brain cycles,” he says. “I started dreaming about Polytopia.” But the lesson about unplugging was another one that Musk never mastered. After a few months, he put the game back onto his phone and was playing again.
— Elon Musk by Walter Isaacson
There they played Elon’s favorite new video-game obsession, Polytopia, and binge-watched Cobra Kai, a Netflix series based on the Karate Kid movie.”
— Elon Musk by Walter Isaacson
This was particularly pronounced when Bezos bought the Washington Post. When the paper contacted Musk about a story it was reporting in 2021, he sent an email that simply said, “Give my regards to your puppet master.”
— Elon Musk by Walter Isaacson
Ozempic
The Algorithm
- Question every requirement. Each should come with the name of the person who made it. You should never accept that a requirement came from a department, such as from “the legal department” or “the safety department.” You need to know the name of the real person who made that requirement. Then you should question it, no matter how smart that person is. Requirements from smart people are the most dangerous, because people are less likely to question them. Always do so, even if the requirement came from me. Then make the requirements less dumb.
- Delete any part or process you can. You may have to add them back later. In fact, if you do not end up adding back at least 10% of them, then you didn’t delete enough.
- Simplify and optimize. This should come after step two. A common mistake is to simplify and optimize a part or a process that should not exist.
- Accelerate cycle time. Every process can be speeded up. But only do this after you have followed the first three steps. In the Tesla factory, I mistakenly spent a lot of time accelerating processes that I later realized should have been deleted.
- Automate. That comes last. The big mistake in Nevada and at Fremont was that I began by trying to automate every step. We should have waited until all the requirements had been questioned, parts and processes deleted, and the bugs were shaken out.
— Elon Musk
Hearing his French accent, I realized he was the same Ben—Ben San Souci—who had asked Musk about content moderation at the coffee-bar visit. An engineer by demeanor, he wasn’t a natural networker, but he was suddenly being swept into the inner circle. It was a testament to the value of serendipity—and of showing up in person.
— Elon Musk
Serendipity: the occurrence and development of events by chance in a happy or beneficial way.
A serendipity is an unplanned fortunate discovery. They are common occurrences throughout the history of product invention and scientific discovery.
— https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Serendipity
I share my feeling with Linus about how noisy Twitter is, and how it is not designed to record thoughts, which I may want to occasionally share, but have no mean to get other people's thoughts on.
Why don't you just use Twitter, then? I hear you asking. I could, but there are a few problems with Twitter. First, Twitter is extremely noisy. There's a million other people vying for your attention next to what I have to say. Twitter is also quite limiting, not just in the character count, but also in that they only let you write in plain text, without any formatting unless you resort to ugly Unicode hacks. Lastly, Twitter is great for "in the moment" discussion in public, but it's not so great as a reference you can link to from the future, and as a historical record of my thinking and work. I wanted a place more purpose-built, more focused, and more permanent for my less permanent thoughts and updates.
That's the reason why I set up this stream instance.
Hello World.