“Bottom line: It’s not magic. It’s just the right learning process

Now, we can begin to understand how Musk has become a world-class expert-generalist:

He spent many years reading 60 times as much as an avid reader
He read widely across different disciplines
He constantly applied what he learned by deconstructing ideas into their fundamental principles and reconstructing them in new ways
At the deepest level, what we can learn from Musk’s story is that we shouldn’t accept the dogma that specialization is the best or only path toward career success and impact. Legendary expert-generalist Buckminster Fuller summarizes a shift in thinking we should all consider. He shared it decades ago, but it’s just as relevant today:

“We are in an age that assumes that the narrowing trends of specialization to be logical, natural, and desirable… In the meantime, humanity has been deprived of comprehensive understanding. Specialization has bred feelings of isolation, futility, and confusion in individuals. It has also resulted in the individual’s leaving responsibility for thinking and social action to others. Specialization breeds biases that ultimately aggregate as international and ideological discord, which in turn leads to war.”

If we put in the time and learn core concepts across fields and always relate those concepts back to our life and the world, transferring between areas becomes much easier and faster.”

How Elon Musk learns faster and better than everyone else
https://qz.com/968101/how-elon-musk-learns-faster-and-better-than-everyone-else/
via Instapaper