It’s not new for me to be reading biographies, in fact they are the only kind of book that I complete and naturally internalise - it’s always fascinating to me, that I have a chance to read about some extraordinary people, their lives, and learn from it. Jesse Livermore, John Carmack, Nikola Tesla, Alan Turing (his papers), Paul Graham (his articles), Sam Altman (mostly articles) and finally Elon Musk, are some people and their biographies which have hugely impacted my life and me.
This weekend, I started reading Ashley Vance’s biography on Elon Musk, and it’s just blowing my mind. What’s different this time is the parallel my brain is establishing between Elon Musk’s biography and some other writings I have read in the last two years. This hasn’t happened before, and I guess the reason is that this is the only biography that relates to my life - the same field, the same time etc. Enumerated are some parallels I am documenting for my future reference:
a) Nerd lives become better as they progress:
Elon was bullied a lot in school, so much so that even those who became friends with him were beaten very badly. But as he went to college, he found some good friends; but the real change came when Zip2, (his first company) become a success. He was a lot more confident, and nobody bullied him after that. This has happened with all nerds I know personally or have read about, it happened with me too. School was the worst time, college was good, but work is definitely the best phase of my life so far. Paul Graham talks about how you should not bully a nerd, there are high chances that you will end up working for them. I think the reason is simple - the world admires intelligence and dedication which nerds have, and hence they thrive in the information age. If you are a nerd and reading this, just hang in their buddy, life will only get better for you :).
b) Outlier intelligence:
Elon was not an expert in the banking system when he started X.com (which later become Paypal), but he had the right mental models to understand any system. Two of them are:
a) To hack the brains of the best people in the field, learn from them and question them as much as you can.
b) That you have to live with it day and night.
This works. There are lots of examples of when real innovation and change in a field/system is done by an outlier working from her garage or from his house in a very remote location. I still remember one line from an article I read in my college library magazine article, a few years back. It was written by a great Chinese programmer, and I paraphrase - “Internet is a network where real change will be brought up by the node which no one expects to even exist in the network”. Paul Graham has a whole essay dedicated to it. This has given a lot of people around world including me, a lot of confidence to just keep working. This also helps in tricking oneself to do a lot of hard work.
c) Super Confidence:
Elon is super confident in everything that he does, and that’s not the only thing. This confidence comes from a recursive loop which runs internally inside the brain. The process according to me works like this - because of confidence, you are able to work 15 hours or more everyday on one thing, as you feel pride in doing that; and the more you work, the more it increases your confidence. Its a psychological game which one plays. Prasanna Shankarnarayan has written an outstanding article on something along these lines, where how Mohammad Ali and Alexander the great had the same narration. Elon considers Alexander to be one of his influencers.
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