Quote collection
217 quotes — follow a thought to its full quote page.
"Talent is extremely important. It's like a sports team, the team that has the best individual player will often win, but then there’s a multiplier from how those players work together and the strategy they employ."
"Physics is a good framework for thinking. ... Boil things down to their fundamental truths and reason up from there."
"The biggest mistake, in general, I've made, is to put too much of a weighting on someone's talent and not enough on their personality. And I've made that mistake several times. I think it actually matters whether somebody has a good heart, it really does. I've made the mistake of thinking that it's sometimes just about the brain."
"People work better when they know what the goal is and why. It is important that people look forward to coming to work in the morning and enjoy working."
"I think you should always be seeking negative feedback."
"If you get up in the morning and think the future is going to be better, it is a bright day. Otherwise, it’s not."
"The first step is to establish that something is possible; then probability will occur."
"Engineering is the closest thing to magic that exists in the world."
"My motivation for all my companies has been to be involved in something that I thought would have a significant impact on the world."
"If something's important enough, you should try. Even if you - the probable outcome is failure."
"I came to the conclusion that we should aspire to increase the scope and scale of human consciousness in order to better understand what questions to ask. Really, the only thing that makes sense is to strive for greater collective enlightenment."
"I think it's important to reason from first principles rather than by analogy. The normal way we conduct our lives is we reason by analogy. [With analogy] we are doing this because it's like something else that was done, or it is like what other people are doing. [With first principles] you boil things down to the most fundamental truths…and then reason up from there."
"The key test for an acronym is to ask whether it helps or hurts communication."
"I'm glad to see that BMW is bringing an electric car to market. That's cool."
"You shouldn't do things differently just because they're different. They need to be... better."
"For my part, I will never give up, and I mean never."
"You have to be pretty driven to make it happen. Otherwise, you will just make yourself miserable."
"When people really understand it's do or die [and] if we work hard and pull through, it's going to be a great outcome; people will give it everything they've got."
"I read books and talked to people. I mean that's kind of how one learns anything. There's lots of great books out there & lots of smart people."
"Don’t just follow the trend. You may have heard me say that it’s good to think in terms of the physics approach of first principles. Which is, rather than reasoning by analogy, you boil things down to the most fundamental truths you can imagine and you reason up from there."