If you want to think like Elon Musk, say goodbye to these 7 mental limitations holding you back
A few years ago, I was sitting in a café in London, working through a chapter of Walter Isaacson’s biography of Elon Musk. At one point, I set the book down and just stared out the window for a while.
What struck me wasn’t the rockets or the billions. It was how differently this man’s mind seemed to operate from most people I knew. And frankly, from my own mind too.
Whether you admire Musk or find him exhausting (and plenty of people feel both at once), there’s something worth examining in how he approaches problems. His thinking patterns have helped him build companies in industries where failure is the norm and success is considered nearly impossible.
So what’s going on in that head of his? And more importantly, are there mental limitations holding the rest of us back that he’s somehow figured out how to bypass?
Let’s dig into seven of them.
1) The assumption that the way things are done is the way they should be done
Most of us inherit our thinking. We look at how something has always been done and assume that’s how it needs to be done. Musk calls this “reasoning by analogy.”
In a TED interview, he put it bluntly: we get through life by essentially copying what other people do with slight variations. It’s efficient. It gets us through the day. But it doesn’t produce breakthroughs.
Musk operates differently. When he wanted to build rockets, everyone told him it would cost $65 million to buy one. Instead of accepting that, he asked a different question: what are rockets actually made of? Aluminium, titanium, copper, carbon fibre. When he calculated the raw material costs, it came to about 2% of the market price.
SpaceX was born from that spreadsheet.
This approach has a name: first principles thinking. It comes from physics and goes all the way back to Aristotle. The idea is to break problems down to their most fundamental truths and build up from there, rather than accepting inherited assumptions.
Growing up, I watched my dad navigate factory politics and union negotiations. One thing he taught me was to always ask why something was done a certain way before accepting it. Most of the time, no one could give a good answer.
2) The belief that failure is final
I’ve mentioned this before, but it’s worth repeating: our relationship with failure often determines our capacity for success.
SpaceX’s first three rocket launches all failed. The first exploded shortly after liftoff. The second and third didn’t make it to orbit. By 2008, Musk had invested around $100 million of his own money. He had enough funding for one more attempt.
If that fourth launch had failed, SpaceX would have been finished.
It didn’t fail. And a few days later, NASA awarded SpaceX a $1.6 billion contract.
Musk has said it plainly: failure is an option. If things aren’t failing, you’re not innovating enough. Most corporate structures punish failure, which is precisely why they struggle to produce anything truly new.
The question isn’t whether you’ll fail. It’s whether you’ll treat failure as information or as identity.
3) The need to know the odds before committing
In 2008, both Tesla and SpaceX were simultaneously on the verge of bankruptcy. Musk was going through a divorce. The global economy was collapsing.
Musk had a choice: split his remaining money between the two companies, or let one die and save the other.
He split it. Both nearly went under. Tesla’s financing closed on Christmas Eve 2008, literally hours before payroll would have bounced.
Musk once admitted he thought there was more than a 90% chance both companies would fail. He did it anyway.
Most of us wait for certainty that will never come. We want to know the odds before we commit. But the most consequential decisions in life rarely come with clear probabilities attached. As Musk has put it: when something is important enough, you do it even if the odds aren’t in your favour.
4) The expectation that hard things should come easily
There’s a certain fantasy in self-help culture that once you find your purpose, everything flows. Work becomes effortless. Success feels natural.
Musk’s reality looks rather different. He has talked openly about working 80 to 100 hours a week, particularly during critical periods at Tesla and SpaceX. During Tesla’s Model 3 production crisis, he reportedly slept on the factory floor.
He’s also admitted this level of intensity has costs. After working 120-hour weeks during one stretch, he said he felt “exhausted” and like he’d “burnt out a bunch of neurons.”
I work out most days now. Running along the Thames, time in the gym. It took a health scare in my forties to get me there. What I’ve learned is that results don’t come from finding the workout that doesn’t feel like work. They come from showing up consistently, especially when you don’t feel like it.
Musk hasn’t succeeded because things are easy for him. He’s succeeded partly because he’s willing to endure difficulty most people would walk away from.
5) The habit of deferring to experts
Experts told Musk that reusable rockets were impossible. That electric cars couldn’t compete with combustion engines. That private companies had no business in space.
He ignored all of it.
This doesn’t mean experts are useless. But Musk has demonstrated something important: expertise often calcifies into orthodoxy. The people who know the most about how things work are sometimes the last to see how they could work differently.
When Musk studied rocket science, he didn’t go to aerospace engineers for permission. He read textbooks. He learned the physics. He did his own calculations.
Richard Feynman, the physicist, had a similar philosophy: do your own homework. Don’t rely on experts or previous work. Approach new problems with the mindset of a novice.
The point isn’t to dismiss expertise. It’s to question whether experts have become captive to the very systems they’re supposed to understand.
6) The assumption that status quo constraints are fixed
When SpaceX started, the aerospace industry operated on a certain set of assumptions. Rockets were expensive. They were used once and discarded. Progress was incremental.
Musk didn’t accept those constraints as fixed. He asked: why can’t we land rockets and reuse them? Everyone said it couldn’t be done. Then SpaceX did it.
The same pattern plays out across his companies. Tesla asked why electric cars had to be slow and ugly. Neuralink is asking why brain-computer interfaces can’t help people with paralysis. The Boring Company is asking why we can’t dig tunnels faster and cheaper.
What constraints in your own life have you accepted as unchangeable? A job situation. A relationship dynamic. A limiting belief about your own capabilities.
Some constraints are real. But many of them are just agreements we’ve made with ourselves and forgotten we made.
7) The tendency to shrink your ambitions to match your circumstances
Most people calibrate their goals to what seems achievable given current circumstances. Musk does the opposite. He sets goals that seem absurd, then works backwards to figure out what would need to be true for them to happen.
Colonise Mars. Make humanity a multi-planetary species. Transition the world to sustainable energy.
These aren’t modest improvement targets. They’re civilisational projects.
The CEO of SpaceX, Gwynne Shotwell, has described what it’s like to work with him: when Musk says something, you can’t just blurt out that it’s impossible. You zip it, think about it, and find ways to get it done.
There’s a kind of ambition that actually constrains us. It says: be realistic. Don’t set yourself up for disappointment. Aim for something achievable.
But as Musk’s example shows, audacious goals can be self-fulfilling. They attract talent, investment, and attention that more modest goals never would.
The bottom line
Look, I’m not suggesting you need to work 100-hour weeks or bet your life savings on a rocket company. Musk’s path isn’t for everyone, and some of his methods have real costs.
But what’s interesting about his mental approach is how much of it involves subtraction rather than addition. He’s not so much adding capabilities as removing limitations that most of us don’t even recognise we have.
The assumption that precedent equals necessity. The belief that failure is fatal. The habit of waiting for certainty. The expectation that meaningful work should feel easy. The deference to expert consensus. The acceptance of artificial constraints. The shrinking of ambition to match circumstance.
These are all mental limitations. And they’re largely invisible until someone demonstrates what becomes possible without them.
You don’t need to become Elon Musk. But asking which of these limitations might be holding you back? That seems worth doing.
Until next time.
