After flipping through the 400 page Book of Elon, I found that it answered a very practical question: How can ordinary people live a meaningful and influential life? The core answer is also the essence of the book: Success=finding a sense of mission x first principles x ultimate execution x willpower to overcome death The following text will carefully break down each one and explain how to apply it to life and investment. Welcome to share and bookmark it one ⃣ How to find a sense of mission? When it comes to finding destiny, most people will first think 'what do I want'. The general answer found is: money, status, and some kind of life. Musk's starting point is different. What he asked was: What is useful? Why? What you want is often just something you have already seen and understood - wealth, status, a certain way of life. These are all 'results', not' causes'. This kind of thinking is a reversal of cause and effect. When you ask 'what is useful', you are forced to observe the gaps in the real world rather than your own desires. At this moment, you stand from the perspective of the world's producers, transforming from a slave of results to a master of action. Once you create something useful, wealth and status are natural consequences. two ⃣ The first principle is to dare to ask 'why?'? Breaking down the problem to the level of physical reality and rebuilding it from scratch is first principles. Elon Musk broke through existing understanding by starting from first principles and said, "Why are rockets so expensive? It's because no one has redesigned them from the bottom Most people have a kind of laziness when doing things: I will do what others do, which is a kind of 'analogical thinking'. I dare not break through conventions, and the ceiling is obvious. Why not start practicing first principles thinking from now on, find something you think is "impossible", and think about whether it is a physical constraint or an inertial constraint? The boundaries of thinking begin to break through from this moment on. three ⃣ Ultimate Execution Musk's ultimate execution has several very specific operating systems. (1) Speed is strategy, not tactics SpaceX's rocket development cycle is one order of magnitude faster than NASA's. Is it because they are smarter? Not necessarily, the key is that they accepted the explosion as a good learning process. This is the essence of speed: repeated verification, repeated improvement, and repeated iteration. Compress the learning cycle to its limit. (2) Breaking down the big goal When a goal seems impossible, a feasible solution is: Break it down into sufficiently small sub problems until each sub problem becomes' this should be achievable '. Sometimes genius people don't see the essence at a glance, it's because they are good at breaking down problems. (3) Five step process In the book, Musk provides a very specific execution algorithm, which is one of the few things he explicitly summarizes into steps: Step 1: Doubt the demand - is it necessary to seek truth? Step 2: Delete - It's better to add it back later and delete it first. Step 3: Simplify - Confirm necessary before optimizing Step 4: Acceleration - Increase cycle speed Step 5: Automation - Consider it Finally This five step algorithm must not be in a disorderly order. four ⃣ The willpower to overcome death Previously, I mentioned that investing is more about 'psychological flexibility' - the ability of a person to move towards their goals even when faced with obstacles. https://(x.com)/yilicong/status/2041060286170566699? s=20 Pure willpower is a consumable, but what keeps Musk going is the willpower to cross the death line: it doesn't necessarily have to be successful. I accept the possibility of failure, with a win rate of only 10%, but the expectations for this matter are high enough to be worth betting on all the chips. To do it with all your might and accept failure with equanimity is to approach the world with a worldly heart. Gritting one's teeth and persevering is a method that consumes one's will. The real problem is how to redesign the situation and make persevering a natural choice. The same applies to investment: The decline of targets and market noise often make people doubt themselves. How to determine if it is really wrong? There is a practical solution: has the anchor changed, or has the situation changed? If you want to stop losses because 'the logic you used to buy is no longer valid' - the anchor point has wavered, then it may really need to be reassessed. But if the logic is still there, the book loss is just market sentiment, not evidence of your misjudgment. If it is falsified, leave immediately, no matter how much you lose. So, things go back to the beginning: why you buy determines whether you can hold onto it or not. Replacing strong willpower with clear judgment is not just a compulsory course in investment. It is the level that every person who wants to live a clear life must pass. A clever book list