How is it possible that Elon Musk has been able to create four multi-billion dollar companies in its 40 years in four different fields (software, energy, transportation and aerospace)?
To explain Musk’s success, some have pointed to his heroic work ethic (he usually works 85 hours a week), his ability to imagine different scenarios of the future, and his incredible resilience.
But I found all of this unsatisfactory. Many people have these traits. I wanted to know what he did differently. As I continued to read dozens of articles, videos and books about Musk, I noticed a huge piece of the puzzle was missing. Common sense says that to become world class, we should only focus on one field of knowledge. Musk breaks that rule. His expertise ranges from space science, engineering, physics and artificial intelligence to solar power and energy.
In an earlier article, I called people like Elon Musk «generalist experts» (a term coined by Orit Gadiesh, president of Bain & Company). Expert generalists study extensively in many different fields, understand the deeper principles that connect those fields, and then apply those principles to their core expertise.
Based on my own review of Musk’s life and the academic literature related to learning and experience, I am convinced that we must all learn across multiple fields in order to increase our chances of historical success.
The myth of the one who encompasses so much
If you are someone who loves to learn about different areas, you are probably familiar with this well-meaning advice: «He who embraces much presses little.
The implicit assumption is that if you study in multiple areas, you will only learn on a superficial level, you will not be able to gain total mastery of the subject.
The success of generalist experts over time proves this to be incorrect. Learning across multiple fields provides an information advantage (and therefore an innovation advantage) because most people focus on a single field.
For example, if you are in the technology industry and everyone else only reads technology publications, but you also know a lot about biology, you are sure to have the ability to come up with ideas that almost no one else could. Vice versa. If you’re in biology, but you also understand about artificial intelligence, you have an information advantage over everyone else who is in isolation.
Despite this basic concept, few people really learn beyond their industry.
Every new field we learn that is unknown to others in our field gives us the ability to make combinations that they cannot make. This is the advantage of the generalist expert.
A fascinating study echoed this idea. He studied how the best 59 opera composers of the 20th century mastered their art. Contrary to the conventional narrative that the success of the best performers can only be explained by deliberate practice and specialization, researcher Dean Keith Simonton discovered exactly the opposite: As University of Pennsylvania researcher Scott Barry Kaufman summarizes in an article in Scientific American, «the compositions of the most successful opera composers tended to represent a mixture of genres… composers were able to avoid the inflexibility of excessive experience (over-training) through cross-training.
Musk’s superpower: the «transfer of learning”
According to his brother, Kimball Musk, from his early teens, Elon Musk read two books a day about various disciplines. To put this in context, if you read one book a month, Musk would read 60 times more than you.
In the beginning, Musk’s reading covered topics such as science fiction, philosophy, religion, programming, and biographies of scientists, engineers, and businessmen. As he grew, his reading and career interests extended to physics, engineering, product design, business, technology, and energy. This thirst for knowledge exposed him to a variety of subjects he had never learned in school.
Elon Musk is also good at a very specific type of learning that most people are not even aware of: transference of learning.
Transference of learning is about taking what we learn in one context and applying it to another. It can be taking the basics of what we learn in school or in a book and applying it to the «real world». It can also be taking what is learned in one industry and applying it to another.
This is where Musk stands out. Several of his interviews show that he has a unique two-step process to encourage the transfer of learning.
First, it deconstructs knowledge into fundamental principles
Musk’s response in a Reddit AMA describes how he does it:
It is important to consider knowledge as a kind of semantic tree; make sure you understand the fundamental principles, i.e., the trunk and the large branches, before entering the leaves or the details, or there will be nothing to hold them.
Research suggests that turning your knowledge into deeper and more abstract principles facilitates the transfer of learning. This research also suggests that a technique is particularly powerful in helping people intuit underlying principles. This technique is called «case contrasting.
By observing many different cases when we learn something, we begin to intuit what is essential and even make our own unique combinations.
What does this mean in our daily lives? When we change to a new field, we must not only take an approach or better practice. We must explore many different approaches, deconstruct each one, and then compare and contrast them. This will help us discover the underlying principles.
Then reconstruct the fundamental principles in new fields
The second step of Musk’s learning transfer process consists of reconstructing the fundamental principles he has learned from artificial intelligence, technology, physics and engineering into separate fields:
– In the aerospace industry, in order to create SpaceX
– In the automotive industry, in order to create Tesla with self-driving functions.
– In trains, to create Hyperloop.
– In aviation, in order to visualize electric planes that take off and land vertically.
– In technology, in order to foresee the neural links that are connected to the brain.
– In technology, in order to help create PayPal
– In technology, in order to co-found OpenAI, a non-profit organization that limits the likelihood of negative artificial intelligence futures.
Keith Holyoak, UCLA professor of psychology and one of the world’s leading thinkers on analog reasoning, recommends that, to perfect their skills, people ask themselves the following two questions: «What does this remind me of?» and «Why does it remind me of?
By constantly looking at the objects in their environment and the material they read, and asking these two questions, they develop the muscles in their brain that help them make connections across traditional boundaries.
It is not magic. It’s just the right learning process.
Now we can begin to understand how Musk has become a world-class generalist:
– He spent many years reading 60 times more than an avid reader.
– He read extensively on different disciplines.
– He constantly applied what he learned by deconstructing ideas into their fundamental principles and reconstructing these ideas in a different way.
On a deeper level, what we can learn from Elon Musk’s story is that we should not accept the dogma that specialization is the best or only path to professional success and impact. Legendary generalist Buckminster Fuller sums up a shift in thinking that we should all consider. He shared it decades ago, although it is very relevant today:
«We are in an age where the restrictive tendencies of specialization are assumed to be logical, natural and desirable Meanwhile, humanity has been deprived of global understanding. Specialization has created feelings of isolation, futility and confusion in individuals. It has also resulted in the abandonment by the individual of responsibility for thought and social action. Specialization generates prejudices that ultimately add up to international and ideological discord, leading in turn to war.
If we take the time and learn the basic concepts through the fields, and always relate those concepts to our life and the world, the transfer between the areas becomes much easier and faster.
As we build a reservoir of «fundamental principles» and associate those principles with different fields, we will suddenly gain the superpower of being able to enter a new field that we have never learned before, and quickly make unique contributions.
Understanding Elon’s superpowers of learning will help us get a sense of how he was able to enter an industry that has been around for over 100 years and change the basis of how he competes.
Elon Musk is one in a million, but his skills are not magic.