Why I don’t care what Elon Musk thinks anymore

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Youtube recommended to me what Elon Musk would work on if he was 22 years old today. The video has almost 3 million views. In the past, I would’ve immediately watched the whole video, gotten inspired by what Elon thought were industries important to the future of humanity and then spent a ton of time working on that and telling everyone about it. All because Elon Musk thought it was important. 

This is outsourcing your thinking. This trick served me well in highschool and throughout college, but it’s not sustainable for long term success and happiness. 

There are two problems with outsourcing your thinking. Continuing with the example of past me, there are things I’m already interested in, have specific knowledge about or possess a competitive advantage in, that won’t be mentioned on Elon’s list. Consequently, the first problem is that I will look down on those things as less meaningful and important and not pursue them, despite my better suitability and chances of success in those areas.

The second problem with outsourcing your thinking is that once the novelty of the problem fades away, I’d be faced with navigating difficulty, naysayers and the friction of creating something new, without an internal compass to guide me toward the correct paths to take. Put simply, Elon Musk isn’t there to talk me through what he thinks the path forward to be. This all stems from the issue that I pursued something, not because I had interest in that thing, actually enjoyed it or thought it was important, but because Elon Musk (or whoever else) thought it was important to work on. And I followed his thinking, rather than thinking for myself.

The reason this is important is because most success in business is having product-market-founder fit, not just about working on what’s world changing or hot. It’s about building a product that solves a burning problem for the right market and being the right person, with the right intuition to bring that product to market, operate that company and delight those customers. Even if you’re working on an important problem, if you don’t have conviction that comes from your own mental models, you’ll get burned when chaos hits. Just ask all the crypto ‘experts’ of 2016/17. It’s better to build something that’s an expression of yourself, rather than something others think is smart.

Outsourcing your thinking is a manifestation of the error of trusting others more than we trust ourselves. Josh Waitzkin talks about how this phenomenon of outsourcing your thinking happens all the time in the investing world:

“If you take investors, there might be an investment, which one from the outside we think is objectively good. But it really isn't objectively good. It has to fit into one's portfolio of investments in a way that emerges from one's own mental models. Otherwise, it is not a form of self expression. Then, when you enter volatility, you're not gonna know what to do with it.” - Josh Waitzkin

Elon Musk is a placeholder for anyone telling you what you should do or think. That could be entrepreneurs or VCs you idolize or maybe your parents (especially true if you’re brown). The reality is that you should not care what Elon Musk or anyone else says is important, you should decide for yourself what you should work on, based on following your own curiosity and interest. Do the hard work of experimenting, exploring and thinking for yourself. Don’t outsource your thinking.

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