<p>Electric cars, rockets, brain implants, artificial intelligence on the surface, these look like completely different industries. But according to Musk and people who have worked closely with him, they are all outputs of the same underlying thinking process. Strip away the products, and what is left is a method. Here is how that method works.</p><p><b><span style="font-size: 18px;">Start from the laws of physics, not from what already exists</span></b></p><p>Most people solve problems by looking at how things have always been done and making small adjustments. If rockets have always cost a fortune, the assumption is that rockets simply cost a fortune.</p><p>Musk's approach is different. Instead of starting from "how it's done," he starts from "what is this actually made of, and what should it cost." When he looked into rocket components; aluminum, titanium, carbon fiber, he found the raw materials cost a small fraction of what a finished rocket sold for. The huge gap wasn't physics. It was the way the industry had always operated. That gap is what led to building SpaceX's own manufacturing line from scratch.</p><p>The underlying idea is simple: if the laws of physics don't forbid it, it's not impossible, it's just an engineering problem nobody has solved yet.</p><p><b><span style="font-size: 18px;">Learn the trunk before the leaves</span></b></p><p>When picking up a new technical field, it's tempting to dive into the interesting, specific details first. Musk argues this is backwards.</p><p>Think of knowledge as a tree. The trunk and roots are the fundamental principles, the core physics, the basic chemistry, the rules that don't change. The branches are how those principles get applied in practice. The leaves are the specific details and edge cases.</p><p>If you learn the leaves without a trunk to attach them to, the information has nothing to hold onto, and it disappears. Before entering the car or rocket industry, Musk reportedly spent enormous amounts of time reading foundational material on propulsion, thermodynamics, and battery chemistry, not because it was exciting, but because everything else depends on it.</p><p><b><span style="font-size: 18px;">The five-step rule for fixing anything</span></b></p><p>When it comes to improving a process; a factory line, a piece of software, anything, there's a sequence that's said to guide the approach, and the order matters:</p><p>First, question the requirement itself. Every rule should have a specific person attached to it who can explain why it exists, not a vague "that's just how the department does it."</p><p>Second, try to delete the step or part entirely. If you're not occasionally having to add a few things back because you cut too much, you probably haven't cut enough.</p><p>Third, only now should you optimize. A common mistake is spending months perfecting something that shouldn't exist in the first place.</p><p>Fourth, once it's simplified, make it faster.</p><p>Fifth and only fifth automate it. Automating a process that hasn't been fixed just means making mistakes happen faster, at scale.</p><p><b><span style="font-size: 18px;">Be optimistic, but ask people to tell you when you're wrong</span></b></p><p>The final piece is less about engineering and more about temperament. The reasoning goes like this: if you're optimistic and wrong, you've lost some time. If you're pessimistic and wrong, you've lost the chance to try at all. So when looking ahead, it's worth erring toward optimism.</p><p>But optimism without a check on reality becomes wishful thinking. The way to balance that, by this account, is to actively seek out harsh feedback especially from people close to the work and treat criticism not as an attack, but as free information that helps fix problems before they become expensive failures.</p><p><b>The takeaway</b></p><p>None of these ideas are secret or new first principles thinking goes back to ancient philosophy, and "simplify before you optimize" is common advice in engineering circles. What's distinctive is the discipline of applying all of them together, consistently, across very different fields.</p><p>It's a way of thinking that treats every industry the same way: not as a fixed set of traditions to inherit, but as a stack of assumptions worth re-checking against the raw numbers.</p><p><br></p><p>Photo credit: foxnews</p>