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At age 12, Elon Musk coded a game in a weekend and sold it, all while navigating family chaos and international moves.
Since this is just for starters from a man who has learned enough to found, co-found and outright purchase multiple companies, the answer to the question, is Elon Musk a polymath is absolutely yes.
Although some people find Musk’s learning to be enigmatic, I believe that a combination of scientific analysis and historical study clarifies precisely how so much learning can take place in one person’s life.
Just as Leonardo Da Vinci sketched flying machines while living in war torn Italy and Nikola Tesla imagined incredible inventions while facing a whole host of problems, Musk has proven he can learn substantially despite many challenges.
Using strategies.
Not luck. Not genetics. But the implementation of various procedures that lend themselves to learning.
Of course, like most innovators, Musk is divisive.
Loved by some and despised during certain political climates, his polymathic accomplishments can teach us a lot despite the latest headlines.
In this post, we’re stripping away the noise to reveal lessons about learning from which anyone can benefit.
So whether you’re friend or foe, let’s dive into the factors that will help you thrive as a learner, no matter what turbulence you face.
I’m going to introduce some concepts and comparable figures you’ve likely never encountered before, so buckle up, dear reader.
You’re about to learn what it really takes to develop mastery across multiple fields.
What is a Polymath & What Makes Elon Musk Part of the Club?
Actually, there is no club.
And although there are aspects to consider, such as a variety of polymath personality traits, nothing quite explains the ability to dream big and fulfil ambitious ideas that require learning the way we’re about to do.
At its core, “polymath” simply means many + learning at the etymological level.
In order to become a polymath, you need only do what other polymaths do.
That way, you’ll easily fulfil the modern definition and be a “person of various learning.”
To do this, you have to go beyond the cliche definitions found elsewhere on the Internet.
Often you hear that polymaths need to be intellectually open. However, as Walter Isaascson’s biography of Musk shows, learning to being closed to a variety of options has been a massive driver of Musk’s success.
This factor directly contradicts scientific findings regarding the benefits of openness to challenge. If anything, stripping away unnecessary challenge is one of the major things Musk has learned and applied to great success.
Apart from that, Musk ticks just about every box that scientists have studied when it comes to polymathy.
- Cognitive flexibility
- Creativity, which scientists have demonstrated can be trained
- Divergent thinking and other forms of critical thinking
- High working memory capacity
- Analogical reasoning skills
- Strategies for handling ambiguity and uncertainty
- Intrinsic motivation
- Self-discipline and mental strength
- Consistency
- Mastery of accelerated learning techniques
- Breadth and depth of learning
- Creative problem-solving using what some scientists call stochastic behavior
Genius or Chaos Agent?
Let’s examine this point about stochastic behavior for clues. It reveals clues that will help you break out of learning ruts that you might find yourself in.
Stochastic behavior refers to introducing randomness and uncertainty on purpose.
Here’s a concrete example.
Musk did reasonably well in school when it comes to mathematics. But he took an autodidactic approach to learning rocket science on his way to founding SpaceX.
Rather than follow a linear and traditional path, he created his own self-education program.
More than merely read books, he learned to fly to help himself visualize aerodynamics better.
When it comes to the books he read, he didn’t rely on libraries alone.
He picked up the phone and asked the best experts to lend him their old engine manuals. These primary documents introduced information to his learning that likely could not have been accessed any other way.
The “Chaotic” Benefit of Holding a Personal Philosophy for Learning
And because Musk’s philosophy involves the conviction that progress is not inevitable, taking these actions make his practice of “first order thinking” faster and more actionable.
The breadth and depth of learning has made Musk’s various arguments and persuasion tactics more successful because he’s able to converse deeply with the best experts in a variety of fields.
As a result, what seems to others as Musk making erratic bets really isn’t anything like that at all.
Rather, Musk deliberately makes stochastic gambles in order to ensure new results lead to new learning. For example, Musk pressed through several Falcon 1 failures and studied them.
Without allowing for these unpredictable setbacks to happen, Musk and SpaceX would not have been able to refine their knowledge or establish what ultimately became a pattern of success.
Nor, as scientists have demonstrated, would his brain have been able to generate the best creative solutions to problems either.
Elon Musk’s Diverse Skill Set: The Top Eight
Supporting the mental resilience needed to deal with the near-collapse of Tesla and many other issues, Musk’s skill set has proven fundamental across his career.
When it comes to our focus on polymathy and the learning needed to become polymathic, I believe these six skills are the most important for all of us to develop.
One: First-Principles Thinking
This form of problem-solving involves breaking complex issues down to their most basic elements.
Musk’s experience with teaching himself BASIC and coding Blastar (which you can play using this HTML5 version) required stripped down logical thinking.
Using a Commodore VIC-20 with no formal training apart from completing BASIC’s training and a conference his parents helped him attend, Musk simply asked a simple question.
How can computer bits become a game?
Later, he would ask similar questions about rockets, populating mars, electric cars, boring tunnels and the role of social media platforms.
Clearly, not everyone agrees with or likes the answers Musk’s approach to first-principles thinking produces.
But we would do well to remember that many people didn’t agree with the physicist Richard Feynman’s use of first-principles thinking either.
Nor with Einstein’s. And to this day some people still disagree with their results, none of which changes the process by which these movers and shakers used their skills with first-principles thinking to shake things up and drive innovation.
Two: Interdisciplinary Knowledge Generation & Integration
The ability to fuse insights from multiple fields is priceless.
Although much of Musk’s learning comes from autodidactic programs he created for himself, his dual-major in physics and economics at the University of Pennsylvania blended hard science with business.
According to Isaacson’s biography, Musk wrote papers on solar power and ultracapacitors.
He continued fusing fields while interning at places like Pinnacle Research Institute.
Combined, these experiences helped fuel (if you’ll forgive the pun), the development of Tesla’s energy software.
Three: Mastery of Memory Techniques
As Musk has shared in a number of interviews, he uses a variety of memory techniques.
I couldn’t find in my research when exactly Musk first discovered mnemonics. But it must have been when he was young. As his mother, Maye Musk, says in her book, A Woman Makes a Plan:
“We called Elon ‘The Encyclopedia’ because he had read the Encyclopaedia Britannica and Collier’s Encyclopedia, and remembered everything. That’s also why we called him ‘Genius Boy’. We could ask him anything. Remember, this was before the internet. I guess now we would call him ‘The Internet.’”
Musk describes the basics of the techniques he uses in this interview clip:
Technically, Musk is referring to techniques called:
Practically speaking, Musk’s memory is at the core of his ability to challenge engineers in a variety of fields. He genuinely knows his stuff.
And that kind of knowledge, although perhaps possible without memory hacks, is quite unlikely.
Four: Relentless Research & Reflection
Memory technique are great. I use them all the time myself.
But they’re not going to do nearly as much as they could for you without research and reflective thinking.
Introspection is key, and everyone can take a huge lesson from this episode in Musk’s biography:
After moving to Canada, Musk worked odd jobs. In one case, he cleaned boilers in what sounds like an extremely risky environment.
Nonetheless, Musk used the opportunity to reflect on energy systems.
But how often do we find ourselves thinking about the jobs we don’t really like? Instead of directing our thoughts at positive solutions to big problems?
The lesson here is simple:
No matter what situation you find yourself in, keep your mind focused on solutions.
The ability to direct your thoughts away from problems and towards solutions is a skill, one that can be developed through deliberate practice.
Five: Visualization & Mental Rotation
As we know from studies in mental imagery, it’s difficult to assess how other people visualize.
In fact, there’s still no consensus on exactly how to define visualization.
Nonetheless, Musk, like Einstein, seems to go through a process of “mental rotation.”
For example, he came up with The Boring Company after creating the mental image that cities are dominated by 2D streets.
This led him to conceiving the notion of making city traffic three dimensional.
What many people don’t add to the equation is that Musk’s visualization emerged from spending a lot of time in traffic. He was in the field where the problems existed.
Similarly, his learning to fly helped him visualization the first principles needed to improve rocket development and deployment.
You can tie this back to Einstein’s use of trains in his thought experiments to demonstrate principles related to his theory of relativity.
The common use of trains during his era almost certainly shaped Einstein’s choice of mental image. Had he been stuck in traffic on contemporary roads or a frequent flyer, he might have used those forms of transport instead.
When it comes to mental rotation, this can involve mentally inspecting an object from all angles.
But we know that Musk is very hands-on. When stripping away unnecessary robots from Tesla’s factory, he literally sealed windows himself to determine that the task would be more efficiently performed by people.
As he put it, “Humans are underrated.”
Finally, Musk uses mental metaphors like “the algorithm.”
It’s not really an algorithm, but a rotational list of rules and what Isaacson calls “corollaries.”
One of the most important involves a prompt to imagine the proper role of placing conditions upon progress:
“The only rules are the ones dictated by the laws of physics. Everything else is a recommendation.”
Mentally rotating through all the laws of physics you’re aware of will be a brilliant strategy if you’re developing as a polymath in fields involving design, technology and… just about everything.
The laws of physics may even be shown to apply to memory itself in the end. Although some people consider the idea fringe, Sir Roger Penrose has proposed something much like this with his Orchestrated Objective Reduction – a concept that will stretch your mental rotation and visualization abilities to the nth degree.
Six: Teleological ‘Pataphysics
Just as Musk believes that technological progress is not inevitable, he assumes that human consciousness is under constant threat of extinction.
For this reason, he works hard on developing rockets that will helps us become an interplanetary species and AI tools like Grok to help ensure alignment and compliance.
In other words, he’s making the effort to imagine the end game and imagine solutions that potentially prevent an end to human consciousness taking place at all.
If you’ll allow me to mash together two terms that illustrate my own polymathic efforts, I believe Musk is a teleological ‘pataphysisist.
Huh?
Stick with me. I’ll explain.
In a general way, teleological refers to thinking about the end of things, such as the end of a goal or the result of a process. By imagining the possibility of human consciousness flourishing – or at least existing – forever, Musk is engaged in teleological thinking.
‘Pataphysics is a big topic, but I mean it in the sense of “imaginary solutions in response to imaginary problems.”
In this case, “imaginary” does not mean fake, or anything less than real. Your brain and its neurochemicals are real, which means that your ideas are material.
So when people imagine problems and imagine solutions to them, they are engaged in ‘pataphysics.
And many products we now use on a regular basis come from this kind of problem solving. When people imagined tablets and communicators for the Star Trek television series, they didn’t imagine them fusing to create the modern cellphone.
But would we, as a species, have been inspired to bring them together without first imagining them in fiction?
I don’t know for sure, but this philosophical question is worth asking, especially when we consider the following interesting example who I hope will make this polymathic skill more clear.
Musk’s Most Interesting Contemporary Polymath
Christian Bök is a polymathic poet with a vast scholarly background.
Like Musk, he puts parts of his talents to use by working to help human consciousness survive the death of our sun.
In Bök’s case, he has worked on getting human consciousness into space via The Xenotext project.
As part of the project, Bök has literally placed poetry inside a deathless bacterium called Deinococcus radiodurans.
If I understand the project correctly, eventually an annihilation-proof poem written by Bök will be sent into space. Possibly even one that can reproduce itself to create new poems.
The idea of sending poetry into space might sound outlandish, but it’s not. It’s ‘pataphysical.
Plus, it’s already happened.
The satellite EIRSAT-1 carries a poem called All Ways Home. It was launched on December 2023.
Projects like these come about when people:
- Allow themselves to dream wildly (even absurdly)
- Invest in integrating multiple disciplines
- Push through obstacles and barriers to implementation
Musk’s ability to dream absurdly big, from the Hyperloop to establishing a colony on Mars is not whimsy.
Exercising this kind of imagination is part of the open secret of genius and Musk is far from alone in thinking at massive scales like these.
Including the ultimate scale, which is seeing consciousness witness eternity.
Seven: Time Management
Multiple sources describe Musk tough on employees and partners, even cruel in his quest for epic goal achievement.
Isaacson lists multiple insults Musk has cast.
Let’s put that aside to focus on the strategies that have allowed Musk and others on his team to maximize their learning.
First, Musk splits his days between companies.
The scheduling itself must require a lot of cognitive shifting and cognitive flexibility to switch between disciplines.
According to this study, the prefrontal cortex and parietal regions of the brain experience high levels of activity when handling task-based decisions.
Although Musk’s habit of time blocking his life in granular increments and holding regular meetings in a disciplined manner might seem rigid, this kind of study tells a different story. His quick problem-solving and adaptability (in some cases) may stem from his strict time management habits..
Of course, Musk has admitted to making many mistakes nonetheless. But I mentioned time management because he’s also shown how he learned to prioritize high-impact work early.
You could consider this protocol macro-time management compared to the micro-time management of daily meetings.
Eight: Installing Feedback Loops
Related to the skill of time management for learning while implementing various projects, consider how quickly Musk has his teams dissect test failures.
Following the SN8 explosion, they immediately adjusted their schedules to address fixes.
By moving constantly between iteration and analysis, Musk keeps his projects moving quickly.
Although other companies and individuals are not necessarily bogging themselves down by prolonged deliberation, the proof is in the pudding.
Having a deliberate system for focusing on problems and prioritizing the discovery of solutions leads to better results.
Although many have criticized Musk’s habit of working long hours, I suspect that it’s the structure behind the time he spends that does most of the heavy lifting.
Unlocking Your Polymathic Constellation of Skills
From integrating multiple disciplines to sharing signs of genius with people like Einstein and Bök, Musk exemplifies extensive research, memory mastery and multiple types of visualization.
As I’ve suggested, we should understand Musk through the lens of ‘pataphysics. Although a lesser known concept, it places Musk in the company of defiant rebels from the past.
I’m thinking specifically of the Renaissance memory master Giordano Bruno. Bruno took mental rotation so far that he re-purposed Ramon Llull’s Memory Wheels for mnemonic purposes.
As a result, he was able to use his memory to envision infinity in ways that inspires and influences astronomy to this day.
Bruno, unlike Musk, portrayed himself as fearless.
But another skill Musk has is calling it like it is.
When he’s afraid, he admits it.
As a philosophical thinker, he also allows for confronting ideas like fatalism to inform him. In other words, he feels the fear and thinks through such ideas anyway.
This helps Musk shoot fear down and make informed leaps.
Not fearless ones.
We can all learn from how his learning adventures have played out. We don’t have to cheer every move to see the roads he has traveled.
But you can come to see every barrier you’ve bumped into as a call to adventure.
If you’re willing to start small and work with the materials you have at hand, like coding a game using BASIC, you can dream past the noise.
And if you’d like help with the memory training aspect so essential to retaining the things you learn as you develop polymathic abilities, feel free to grab my free course here:
It gives you four video tutorials and three worksheets that will help you rapidly develop better retention.
That way, you won’t forget the lessons in Musk’s learning life, or those found in the lives of other inspiring polymaths I’ve profiled.
So what do you say?
Are you ready to start taking just one of these tactics and putting it into action?
Test them all one at a time. Before you know it, the turbulence in your own life will transform into triumph.
