“Just as we develop our physical muscles through overcoming opposition, such as lifting weights, we develop our character muscles by overcoming challenges and adversity.”—Stephen Covey
ELON MUSK
Creative challenges are complicated to solve. This makes the need for a sound plan to attack these challenges even more pressing. This is where the idea of mental systems step in.
Mental systems serve as scaffolding for your thoughts. They help you break down complex challenges into simpler ones, allowing your mind to work through them rather than drowning in anxiety. Think of them as ways to protect yourself from mental noise to make the best decisions possible with limited knowledge. This concept helped Elon Musk. Elon went from being a self-taught scientist to founding arguably the most important and profitable companies of our era—PayPal, Tesla, SpaceX, and Neuralink.
In 2002, Elon Musk had the ambitious idea to send humanity’s first manned-rocket to Mars. The first thing he needed for this mi…