A good friend recently recommended to me the book Elon Musk: Tesla, SpaceX, and the Quest for a Fantastic Future by Ashlee Vance. As a fan of Tesla, SpaceX, and all the things I had heard about Elon as an entrepreneur, I was always interested in his life and learning more about his methods. This book turned out to be an awesome glimpse into all those things.

I really enjoyed the detailed stories and the insider quotes from Elon and many of the people who worked closely with him. It reminded me of my tour of the SpaceX office with my UCLA Anderson Vistage group and the amazing opportunity we had to do a short Q&A with Elon when we were there. I could tell even then that he works extremely hard and thinks everything through "from first principles." His speaking wasn't polished or showy -- he just focused on facts and showed 200% commitment to his wild goals.

Below are my notes on the book. I thoroughly enjoyed it and learned a lot from someone so passionate and working on things that actually matter in the long run and are changing the world.

1 elon's world
Meaningful world view
Saving the human race

2 Africa
Wrote his own computer game
Photographic visual processing in brain
Read 10 hours per day as a child
Went through all books in library and 2 encyclopedias

3 Canada
Romantic
Doesn't take no for answer
Wanted to work on biggest impact areas: renewable energy, Internet, space 

4 elon's first startup
Hardware background
Working 24/7
Living at office
Zip2 bringing businesses online
Quake tournaments
Do or die but don't give up

5 PayPal mafia boss
Banking internship
Reinvested almost all money into X online bank
Coups and issues with leadership and being kicked out

6 space x
Moved to LA for aerospace and to escape valley
Sending mice to Mars
Mars Society
Tried to buy rockets from Russians but was too expensive
Read rocket textbooks and Made spreadsheet that showed could do it a lot cheaper
Making as much as practical at spacex
Engineers sitting next to factory workers and welders
Son died; didn't believe in open grieving and wallowing in sadness
When things go wrong must have all the info and a plan
Work computers to play quake
Lots of failed launches

7 all electric
Straubel believed in Power of lithium ion batteries for solar car at Stanford
Used Silicon Valley tactics instead of Detroit bureaucracy
Sent engineers into field to be able to iterate faster
Fired ppl due to typos
Required extremely hard work
Lots of delivery delays and issues with contractors

8 pain suffering and survival
Team of nannies
7 days of work per week
Worsening financial situation
Divorce
Day away from bankruptcy for both companies

9 liftoff
Huge successes and contracts
Need to understand how mechanical things work
In house manufacturing
Factory inside office with engineers

10 revenge of electric car
Model s success
Prototyped batteries for other car companies and beat their deadline expectations
Faster more iterative testing
Always come to meetings with alternative plan if have difficulties
If something could not be done: only response is to take it down to the physics
Wrote his own public relations responses
Controlling whole product allows creation of lifestyle brand
Not a new idea. All about execution. 

11 unified field theory
Solar energy market
Callous interoffice
Lack of empathy
Cruel stoicism
Obsessing over typos in emails
Intuition on things u don't know isn't very good
Close to Larry page
Good ideas always sound crazy until they're not
Wonders how to raise kids without adversity
Requires more reading time than video game time
No stupid video games allowed. Only those that have physics. 
Smart people need to have more kids

Appendices
Frivolous lawsuits against him
Smartest programmers were in gaming industry and used Microsoft c++ libraries
Thoughts on going public vs selling private stock options

Based on Noah Kagan's recommendation on his interview with Tim Ferriss, I just finished reading Smartcuts: How Hackers, Innovators, and Icons Accelerate Success by Shane Snow.

The book was a fun, quick tour of various techniques used by unconventional "hackers" who achieved success much more quickly than traditionally thought possible.

I liked the beginning of the book more than the end, which seemed too light on new ideas and content. My favorite part of the book was the story of the perseverance of Jimmy Fallon.

Intro
Smart shortcuts to doing stuff way faster
Lateral thinking
Not following rules
Smartcuts not just shortcuts which can be amoral
Smartcuts are shortcuts with integrity
Short
Leverage
Soar

Part 1 short

1 hacking the ladder
Presidents younger than senators
BYU scavenger hunt game bigger or better
Psychology of small wins
Just keep the game going
Pivoting accelerates growth
Ladder switching in career
Use credibility to switch ladders to bypass dues

2 training with masters
Jimmy Fallon
Justin bieber had the best mentors who brought him up
Doctors learning patient handover from racing pit crews
Formal mentorship bad idea; informal personal relationships better
Learn and copy from masters yourself from books and videos of masters
Learn attention to detail
Study videos of masters obsessively and memorize facts and details of them

3 rapid feedback
Startup funeral: Funerals for startups to share what learned when failed
Past failure does not help with future ones according to studies
But succeeding makes you more likely to succeed
Failures caused more of own failures
Seeing others fail makes u do better
Doing well makes u do better
Failure paradox, attribution theory of failures to external things but success to internal things 
When others fail we attribute failure to others but when others succeed we attribute success to luck
Separate ego when you get feedback
Rapid scientific experiments

Part 2 leverage

4 platforms: the laziest programmer
Abstraction
Selective slacking
Ruby on Rails
Teaching kids how to learn instead of what to learn and memorize

5 waves
Waiting for the right wave
Pattern recognition 
Fast follower

6 superconnectors
Giving

Part 3 soar

7 momentum
Progress makes u happy
Big success needs u to continue progress even after big winning
Just keep moving
Build up potential energy so can leverage it when u get big break

8 simplicity
Innovation is about doing something different or simpler not just bigger
Simplify decisions to avoid unnecessary ones

9 10X thinking
Elon musk

Epilogue

Last year I enjoyed reading Abundance by this same pair of authors, and earlier this year I heard that the "sequel" was coming out soon. And now I just finished reading that sequel, Bold: How to Go Big, Create Wealth and Impact the World.

I actually liked this second book a lot more as it went into much greater depth on a few important advances and actually gave lots of details and advice on how to execute on big ideas step by step. I also really enjoyed the specific anecdotes and transcripts of launch announcements, emails, blog posts, etc. that people have used successfully in the past. The book does a great job cataloguing the best practices and tools people use to get stuff up and running quickly and inexpensively; it's a great inspiration to kick your butt in gear and just work on SOMETHING.

I enjoyed learning more about the founding ideas behind Google X and other corporate skunk works in the past. I also liked the enumeration of Peter's own personal collected wisdom and sayings ("Peter's Laws"). I was personally really impressed with what I learned about the state of 3D printing, what's been achieved, and how it's even feasible leveraging the cloud and the crowd. I really want to investigate that further myself and tinker in that space.

Below are some of my notes and takeaways.

Intro: birth of exponential entrepreneur
Exponential technology is like an asteroid threatening the dinosaurs
The worlds biggest problems are the biggest business opportunities
Manual for exponential entrepreneur

Part 1 exponential technology 

1 goodbye linear thinking 
Kodak intended modern photography
Its inventors created digital camera but buried and ignored it
Cornered by the market
Didn't realize what exponential growth would do
6 d
Digitalization
Spreads ideas
Free to reproduce and share
Deception
Initial progress seems slow because numbers small
But doubling quickly overcomes this with patience 
Disruption
Breaks old businesses
Demonetization
Removal of money from equation
Free
Give stuff away
Shadow economy
Dematerialization
Disappearance of actual old physical goods
Democratization
Hard costs drop so low that available for everyone 
Exponential organization 
Leverage networks and crowd
Instagram
The question is scale
Quirky: crowd sourced product development and invention
Air bnb
Über 

2 exponential technology
Finding tech at cusp between deceptive and disruptive
Public sentiment initially drops
Nice new interface helps accelerate development
3d printing
Tools created subtractive manufacturing
Invention of addictive manufacturing 
Fully customized products
Cubesats
Made in Space
Printing on ISS
MakeU labs
Cloud printing on others' 3d printers
Customized products

3 five to change the world
Networks and sensors
Infinity computing and beauty of brute force
Autodesk
Computing not scarce
Ai: expertise on demand
Watson on cloud
Modernizing medicine app for derm
Jarvis user interface
Robotics
Robo jockeys for camel racing
Genomics and synthetic biology

Part 2; bold mindset

4 climb on bold
Skunkworks
Kelly Johnson 14 rules of skunk
Business as unusual
High hard goals
Autonomy, mastery, and purposes
Google X
Progress must be measurable
10X goal
Googles eight innovation principles
Focus on the user
Share everything
Look for ideas everywhere
Think big but start small
Never fail to fail: fail fast and forward
Spark with imagination, fuel with data
Be a platform
Have a mission that matters
Flow states have triggers, requires focus
Environmental triggers
High consequences and risks
Rich environment: novelty, unpredictability, complexity
Psychological triggers
Clear goals: sub goals; emphasis on the clear; challenging but manageable
Immediate feedback; daily reviews 
Challenge skill ratio; midpoint between boredom and anxiety
Social triggers: group flow
Serious concentration
Shared clear goals
Good communication and immediate feedback
Equal participation
Element of risk
Familiarity and common language
Blended egos and humility
Sense of control
Closeness and being in real time
Always say yes and
Creative triggers: increase the amount of novelty in your life

5 The secrets of going big
Born above line of super credibility
Want to launch way above line of credibility so obvious to PPl they should get involved 
Shift audience mindset from probabilities to implications
Familiarity matters: start with ppl who already know ur skills
Slow down and study feasibility
Staging ur ideas
Sub goals
How to make stone soup: passion is what starts project and others contribute things they think of
Passionate ppl are beacons attracting others
Asked for rfps and got others to contribute 
Peter's laws: mindset matters; write down your own laws to have external hard drive when ur internal one is guaranteed to crash (to avoid fight/flight/freeze)
If anything can go wrong, fix it
Best way to predict future is to create it yourself
When faced without a challenge, make one; need to be alive to stay alive 
No simply means begin one level higher
When given a choice take both; multiple parallel projects
The ratio of something to nothing is infinite; doing something better than nothing
Expert is someone who can tell you how something can't be done
Multiple projects lead to multiple successes
Start at the top then work your way up
Do it by the book but be the author
When forced to compromise ask for more
If u can't win change the rules
If u can't change the rules then ignore them
Perfection is not optional
Don't walk when u can run
When in doubt, think
Patience is a virtue but persistence to success is a blessing
Squeaky wheel gets replaced
Faster u move, slower time passes, longer u live
U get what u incenticize
If u think it's impossible then it is for u
Day before something is a breakthrough it's a crazy idea
If it was easy it would have been done already
Without a target u miss it every time
Fail early, fail often, fail forward
If u can't measure it u can't improve it
Most precious resource is persistent and passionate human mind
Bureaucracy conquered with persistence, confidence, bulldozer

6 billionaire wisdom: thinking at scale
Elon musk
Passion and purpose
Start with first principles
Loss aversion and narrow framing: think more broadly
Think probabilistically
Richard Branson
Having fun and giving others fun
Experimental customer service
Risk mitigation 
Jeff bezos
Long term thinking, market leadership, focus on what will not change over next 10 years 
Customer centric thinking
Larry page
Why not and why not bigger 
Healthy disregard for impossible
Toothbrush test 
Even when fail to do something ambitious, u end up doing something important

Part 3 the bold crowd

7 crowdsourcing
Size of crowd will double
Comm tech improving exponentially
New tech from before accessible to masses
Case study 1
Freelancer.com: coding and design, science 
Case study 2
Tongl: creative ads
Case study 3
Recaptcha and duolingo
Crowdsourcing tasks
Microtasks and macro tasks
Creative and operational assets
Caddle
Topcoder
Testing and discovering insights
utest
Abundancehub.com
Crowdsourcing.org
Crowdsortium
Establish context and be specific
Prepare your data set
Qualify your workers and give a few a trial run 
Define clear simple roles
Communicate clearly, in detail, and often
Don't micromanage; encourage new ways of thinking
Pay to play; go for quality first, price will be low no matter what 
Prepare for flood of ideas
Be open to new working methodologies

8 crowdfunding
Provides social proof
Donation: charity
Debt: microlending 
Equity
Reward
Pebble watch
Late prototyping stage
Product is community focused and consumer facing
Market validation and real demand measurement
Stepping stone to raising bigger funding
Development of paying customer community
Cheap cac
How to guide for execution
Scarcity in rewards
Key team members
Use language with Reciprocity, social proof, liking, authority
Put faces to ideas in video
Affiliates, advocates, activists
Launch announcement critical
Sample emails to supporters
Live streaming
Trend surfing, keywords
Upselling

9 community
DIY community and exponential community 
Galaxy zoo
Citizen science website
Law of niches: u are not alone in oddball interest 
Locomotors 
Underserved pent up need and fantasy
Topcoder
9 stages of community building

10 incentive prizes
Clear goal
Freedom from bureaucracy
Linked new business opportunity
HeroX