ELON MUSK'S 5 STEPS TO SOLVE ANY PROBLEM. Most smart people skip straight to step 5. That is why they are busy but not building anything that matters. STEP 1 — QUESTION THE REQUIREMENTS Make the requirements less dumb. Every requirement is dumb to some degree no matter how smart the person who gave it to you. You could build the perfect answer to the wrong question. Start here or waste everything that comes after. STEP 2 — DELETE IT Try to delete the part entirely. If you are not forced to put back at least 10% of what you deleted you did not delete enough. Most people think they succeeded because they did not have to add anything back. They did not. They were just too conservative. STEP 3 — SIMPLIFY IT Only now do you optimize. The most common mistake of smart engineers is to optimize something that should not exist. Do not simplify until after you have tried to delete. STEP 4 — SPEED IT UP Any given thing can be done faster than you think. But do not speed it up until you have deleted and simplified it first. Otherwise you are just moving faster toward the wrong destination. STEP 5 — AUTOMATE IT This is the last step. Not the first. THE REASON THE ORDER MATTERS Elon said it himself. "I have gone backwards so many times where I automated something, sped it up, simplified it and then deleted it." "I got tired of doing that." Most people automate chaos and call it efficiency. The best builders question whether the thing should exist before they spend a single hour making it faster. Apply this to your Claude workflows. Apply this to your N8N automations. Apply this to everything you are building this weekend. Delete first. Optimize second. Automate last. Follow @cyrilXBT for the exact systems and AI workflows I build using this exact thinking every single week.(CyrilXBT)