Here’s one of the most common questions I get asked:
“What is Maverick?”
According to Dictionary.com, a maverick is a lone dissenter, as an intellectual, an artist, or a politician, who takes an independent stand apart from his or her associates. Therefore, a Maverick is a nonconformist, an individualist; a free thinker and a loner.
If by any chance you are rebellious in nature or like to disrupt conventional policies or ideas, chances are that you are a Maverick!
So when we Add “Think” to the word Maverick to make up Think Maverick, we literally want every individual here at thinkmaverick.com to Think Like A Maverick!
Why Think Like A Maverick?
The World’s Best Entrepreneurs, Artists, Actors, Actresses and Athletes are Maverick Thinkers…. Just think about it!
- Steve Jobs wouldn’t have made a comeback after being kicked out of his own very own company…
- Bill Gates, Will Smith, Oprah Winfrey, Michael Jordan, Bruce Lee, Anthony Robbins…. Just To name a few.
I won’t go into details here as I’ve dedicated a special article on “So what is a Maverick?”
Among all the successful Maverick Thinkers, Elon Musk intrigued me the most. That’s the MAIN reason why we choose Elon Musk – the world’s most maverick billionaire as our ThinkMaverick Magazine Logo on Itunes!
I truly believe Elon Musk is a Game Changer for your business and dreams.
If you believe he is, the price of admission to get to the top of your game is just a few minutes of your time.
Follow my series as we unravel the secrets to his universe.
Day 1: How to Stay Motivated Like Elon Musk
Day 2: How to Learn Like Elon Musk: 4 Tips to learn faster and better than everyone else
Day 3: Elon Musk Leadership Model: 5 Tips to Manage an Effective Team for Your Business
Day 4: Elon Musk’s Advice for Starting a Business
Day 5: How Elon Musk Overcomes Challenges
Day 6: How to Work as Hard as Elon Musk in a World of Lazy Dreamers
Day 7: How Elon Musk Work 100 hours a Week
Day 8: 9 things I learned from Elon Musk
How to Learn Like Elon Musk: 4 Tips to learn faster and better than everyone else
1. Question Yourself:
No, this does not pertain to the questionnaire/feedback you get from your customers. That part comes later. This is about self-realization!
In a world where yesterday’s technology becomes outdated today, you should be constantly evolving with times. Elon keeps this cycle going by constantly thinking about how the products, which are best to start with, could be made even better.
He has invested in more than 30 companies and the only way these companies can show a result is when they constantly re-invent themselves. It is not an issue of starting from the scratch but rather a question of how something could be made better for tomorrow.
As per Elon, it is also vital to foresee how the people of tomorrow would react and start making preparations to satisfy those customers. One handsome example of such a vision is undoubtedly – “TESLA”.
2. Know As Many Details As Possible:
Usually, the word “CEO” or a “Director” gets you to a post where you have to oversee operations. Though you would be in the midst of many departments, your primary objective would be to keep the company glued together and to bring in more sales.
There is nothing wrong about it. However, if you wish to go beyond the meaning of such adage you have to be much more than someone who is just monitoring a company.
To start with, Musk never did any studies in rocket engineering. Yet he handles SpaceX and actively gives out his opinions among the midst of rocket scientists.
This was possible only because he didn’t restrict himself to governing the company. He self-learned many aspects of rocket engineering by reading books and consulting with people who have been there already.
He could have easily delegated the job to someone who is more experienced than him. Yet he did not! He opted to go for the tougher way and chose to learn everything from scratch. This characters the hallmark of a true founder.
As an entrepreneur, your knowledge base should never be restricted. You have to know the inner workings of your product as your backhand.
3. Learn From People Who Did It Before:
Experience is something that never can be taught up in any business school. As a matter of fact, every other book teaches you to go out there and get yourself experienced to avoid the mistakes.
In many instances experiences/failures make you get better and you would be in a much more robust frame of mind to avoid those instances at all costs.
Not Elon Musk. Rather than experimenting, he simply decided to go ahead in the other way and that is to learn from other people’s experiences.
While it is true that Musk’s chosen field does not have many pioneers before him, it still does have a handful bunch of people who have made the mark. This is the field where people have traveled in space and invented future-ready cars.
Elon’s knowledge base apart from books is by simple interactions with the people who have made it happen. By this way, he is aware of the possibilities – the possibility of where things can go wrong and avoids them.
Personal experiences no doubt adds to the invaluable understanding about your company. Even better is if you can learn from other people’s life history and avoid the time and effort needed for such learning altogether.
4. Be An Improviser:
In a business world, 9 out of 10 times it is not about an invention but about improvisation.
Many times entrepreneurs bring out words like “invention” and “creation”- when actually it is not about inventing something new but taking hold of something which is already available and packaging it in a better way, which benefits the people. This is the “improvisation” part which any product needs so that it reaches better among the masses.
To make this point more satisfying, Elon is never credited with the invention of the electric car. There were people who have invented it before him.
What Elon did was to take the entire stigma that one associated with an electric car and nullified it. For example, electric cars were thought to be expensive and out of reach for the general public. Elon changed that! Electric cars were associated with unreliability. Elon changed that!
Elon Musk simply made the whole outlook of an electric car that much feasible to the general public and that is where his improvisation lies.
You do not need a million dollar idea to change the course of humanity. Sometimes, all that is required is an existing idea. You just need to polish it better.
Over to You!
Do you have any tips and strategies that I didn’t mention in this post?
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This is day 2 of 8 Days of Maverick Success Tips from Elon Musk.
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