How to turbocharge something?

Walter Isaacson’s biography of Elon Musk offers a masterclass on building world-beating companies from nothing. It’s tremendously inspiring to aspiring entrepreneurs. We get inspired to start something ourselves, devoting our entire being into the venture just like Musk has done for his ten businesses. Boiling down the actionable insights resulted in the following:

Stay close to the edge: One of Elon’s rules was “go as close to the source as possible for information.” For example, the book gives a SpaceX example, “‘When he was overseeing the development of the Dragon capsule that carries the Falcon 9 payload into orbit, he was chided by SpaceX quality assurance manager for not filing the proper paperwork. “I told the dude that we didn’t have time to paper our work orders and quality checks, we were just going to build it and test it at the very end.”

Fail fast whenbuilding: “Take risks. Learn by blowing things up. Revise. Repeat. If we design to eliminate every risk, we will never get anywhere.”

Convey clear metrics: Musk believed that innovation was driven by setting clear metrics, such as cost per ton lifted into orbit or average numbers of miles driven on Autopilot without human intervention.

Continually take risks: “This is how civilizations decline: They quit taking risks. And when they quit taking risks, their…