Idea Overload 330
fossil fuels. Both the electric aircraft and the Hyperloop
are so innovative that no one is trying to design something
similar. “The bottom line for me, which I don’t let myself
forget, is that challenges are what drive me above all –
the challenge of creating things that I hopefully will get
a chance to look back on and be proud of,” Elon said.^265
But Elon has nothing against the smaller ideas that
may not affect the world in a similar way as the larger
ideas. “They provide a small amount of value to a lot of
people, and that sums up to something – that’s still good,
it makes their lives better,” he said.^68 He recommended
that if you have the ambition to change the world with
one of these larger ideas, then you should begin with a
smaller idea within the Internet or software industry. New
companies in these industries tend to require little initial
capital. “Unless you’ve got a ton of capital that someone
gave you or you’ve inherited, you have to start a company
that requires a small amount of capital,” Elon said. “It would
have been impossible for me to have done electric cars or
rockets right from the start.”^437
Finding a problem to solve is only step one. Step two is
to find a solution to the problem. “The way I tend to view
problems is from a physics standpoint,” Elon said. “I think
that physics is a good analytical framework. One of the key
things in physics is to reason from first principles. This is
contrary to the way most human reasoning takes place,
which is by analogy [‘We’ll do that because it’s always
been done that way’ or ‘Nobody has ever done that so it
must not be good’]. Reasoning from first principles just