Elon Musk - How To Learn Anything

our brain has evolved to discard information that it thinks has no relevance you know if you think like what is education like you're basically downloading data and algorithms into your brain and it's it's it's actually amazingly bad in conventional education because like it shouldn't be like this huge chore so i think colleges are basically for fun and to prove you can do your chores but they're not for learning you're self-taught yeah well i self-taught yes meaning um i didn't i don't have an aerospace degree so how did you go about acquiring the knowledge well uh

i i read a lot of books talk to a lot of people and and have a great team it's important to teach uh teach problem solving or teach to the problem not to the tools so this would be like let's say um you're trying to teach people about uh how engines work or you know you could start by a more traditional approach would be to say we're going to teach you all about screwdrivers and wrenches and and you can have a corsa screwdrivers or caution wrenches and all these things and it's this is a very

difficult way to do it a much better way would be like here's the engine now let's take it apart how we're going to take it apart oh you need a screwdriver that's what the screwdriver is for you need a wrench that's what the wrench is for and then a very important thing happens which is that the relevance of the tools becomes apparent you don't need college learning learn stuff okay everything is available basically for free you can learn anything you want for free it is not a question of learning um there there is a value

that colleges have which is like you know seeing whether somebody's is can somebody work hard at something including a bunch of sort of annoying homework assignments and still do their homework assignments uh and and kind of soldier through and get it done you know that's that's like the main value of college and then also you know if you you probably want to hang around with a bunch of people your own age for a while instead of going right into the workforce [Music] so i think colleges are basically for fun and to prove you can do

your chores but they're not for learning generally you want education to be like as close to a video game as possible like a good video game you do not need to tell your kid to play video games they will play video games on autopilot all day so if you can make it interactive and engaging then then you can make education far more compelling and far easier to do so you really want to um disconnect the whole grade level three thing from the subjects allow people to progress at the fastest pace that they can or interested

in in each subject it seems like a really obvious thing um i mean i think like most teaching today is is a lot like vodka where um and it's and as a result just not not that compelling it's like somebody's standing up there and lecturing to you and they've done the same lecture several years in a row they're not necessarily all that engaged or in doing it you know if you're like what is education like you're basically downloading data and algorithms into your brain and it's it's actually amazingly bad in conventional education because like it

shouldn't be like this huge tour like the more you can gamify the uh process of learning the better like for my kids i do not have to encourage them to play video games yeah okay i like pry them from their hands like like crack yes yes like drop that crack needle um in fact i think a lot of things people learn probably there's no point in learning them um because they never use them in the future well you have to say like people i think don't stand back and say well why are we teaching people

these things and we should tell them probably why we're teaching these things because a lot of kids are just in school kind of puzzled as to why they're there and i think if you can explain the why of things then that makes a huge difference to people's motivation yeah then they understand they understand purpose yeah so i think that's pretty important and just make it entertaining but i think just in general like conventional education should be massively overhauled i'm sure you very much agree with that but well people do not think critically enough i mean

there's critical thinking is a skill in short supply where people you people take too many things as they assume too many things to be true without sufficient basis in in that belief um so um it's very important that people closely analyze what what is supposed to be true and and and try to build up try to say let's analyze things from first principles not by not not by analogy or not by convention if you assume things are true by convention which is actually what most people do um then it's difficult to gain insight into what

how things can be bettered so you know in any argument or any sort of train of thinking um you want to make sure that your the underlying premises are valid and applicable and um and you know and and then in reaching a conclusion that the conclusion you're reaching is necessarily driven by the underlying premises and the interconnection between those premises that may seem like a really simple thing to say but most people don't do that um so it's really the foundation of rational thought i think there's maybe there's definitely some good schools out there but

i think the some of the mistakes at least in my opinion that i see being made in education is um that um people the the teachers do not explain why kids are being taught a subject um you know just sort of get dumped into math and like well why are you learning math what's the point of this it seems like some you know some people like maybe it's i don't know why i'm being asked to do these strange problems but you know the why of things is extremely important because you know our brain has evolved

to not to discard information that it thinks is has no relevance so then if on the one hand you uh you're being asked to memorize or learn say formulas but you do not know why this is the case then you have this cognitive dissonance of it seems irrelevant but i'm being told to remember it so i'll be punished so so i better remember it but so the why of things is very important and then uh being able to and then picking kind of a a problem and then uh using various educational tools to solve that

problem like using math or physics or economics to to solve that problem is far more engaging than teaching the tools a university education is often unnecessary um that's not to say it's unnecessary for all people but um i i think you probably learn about as much or the vast majority of what you're gonna learn there in the first two years and most of it is for your classmates now for a lot of companies they they do want to see the completion of the degree because they're looking for um someone who's gonna persevere and see it

through to the end and that's actually what's important to them so it really depends on what somebody's goal is if the goal is to start a company i would say no point in finishing uh college um so i think that's how it should be and it shouldn't be that you've got like these grades where people move in lockstep um and so everyone goes through you know goes like normally you will go through english math uh science and so forth from like fifth grade to sixth grade to seventh grade like it's an assembly line but people

are not objects on an assembly line that's a ridiculous notion