Elon Musk on Planning Quotes

"I think it is a mistake to hire huge numbers of people to get a complicated job done. Numbers will never compensate for talent in getting the right answer."

"Speed of innovation is the only thing that matters in the long run."

"Really pay attention to negative feedback and solicit it, particularly from friends."

"The most common error of a smart engineer is to optimize the thing that should not exist."

"When you have a hierarchy, the person at the top can't possibly know everything that is going on."

"Work like hell. I mean you just have to put in 80 to 100 hour weeks every week. This improves the odds of success."

"Every person in your company is a vector. Your progress is determined by the sum of all vectors."

"I tend to approach things from a physics framework. Physics teaches you to reason from first principles rather than by analogy."

"The path to the CEO's office should not be through the CFO's office, and it should not be through the marketing department."

"Constantly seek criticism. A well-thought-out critique of what you’re doing is as valuable as gold."

"Starting a business is not for everyone. Starting a business - I'd say, number one is have a high pain threshold."

"If you’re trying to create a company, it’s like baking a cake. You have to have all the ingredients in the right proportion."

"It's very important to have a feedback loop, where you're constantly thinking about what you've done and how you could be doing it better."

"Failure is an option here. If things are not failing, you are not innovating enough."

"The best part is no part. The best process is no process. It weighs nothing. Costs nothing. Can't go wrong."

"Boil things down to their fundamental truths and reason up from there, as opposed to reasoning by analogy."

"The goal is to be useful, to do things that are a net good for the rest of humanity."

"Any product that needs a manual to work is broken."

"You want to be extra rigorous about making the best possible product you can. Find everything that's wrong with it and fix it."

"I don't create business plans. I just try to figure out what's the most useful thing to do."

"If the schedule is long, it's wrong. If it's tight, it's right. It's better to have a fast, iterative process than a long, drawn-out one."

"Great companies are built on great products."

"The problem is that at a lot of big companies, process becomes a substitute for thinking."

"It is a mistake to hire a lot of people to do a job that can be done by a few people."

"If you don't have a schedule that is aggressive, you're not going to get there as fast as you could."

"You should take the approach that you’re wrong. Your goal is to be less wrong."

"People work better when they know what the goal is and why. It is important that people look forward to coming to work."

"If you give yourself 30 days to clean your home, it will take 30 days. But if you give yourself 3 hours, it will take 3 hours."

"Optimism, pessimism, f*** that; we're going to make it happen. As God is my bloody witness, I'm hell-bent on making it work."

"You shouldn't do things differently just because they're different. They need to be better."

"If you are the CEO, you should be doing the most difficult jobs in the company."

"Make sure you understand the fundamental principles of what you’re trying to do before you get into the details."