“It’s better to live less, but eat tasty food”: what eats, how much sleeps and how Elon Musk works
'07.07.2020'
Source: Reminder.Media
Among successful entrepreneurs who run, meditate, eat only plants and, of course, are proud of their habits, Elon Mask looks like a black sheep: he sacrifices sleep for work, does not like sports, but loves delicious food. How does the Mask manage to survive and maintain productivity? Tells Reminder.Media.
Diet: tasty instead of healthy
Musk admits that it’s becoming more difficult to stay slim with age. Now the entrepreneur is 48 years old. But, it seems, he is still not very concerned about proper nutrition (although his mother has been working as a nutritionist and model for over 50 years).
“The food is great. To be honest, I would rather eat delicious food and live a shorter life. ” - Ilon Mask
In the biography "Elon Musk and the Search for a Fantastic Future" by Ashley Vance, an entrepreneur admits that if he could not eat and work efficiently, he would certainly refuse food. This is easy to believe: in his student days, Musk spent a dollar a day on food and bought cheap products in bulk: hot dogs, green peppers, pasta with tomato paste and oranges.
This gesture was not forced. Musk then just moved from Canada to the United States, was thinking about the future after his studies, and decided to see if the strict spending limit would be met. The successful result of the experiment assured Mask that he did not need a big salary: since he can eat $ 30, he has the freedom to invest time in more valuable things than the pursuit of money.
In 2017, journalist Kathleen Elkins repeated the Challenge Mask: she spent $ 60 per month (taking into account inflation since 1988, she was able to spend not 1, but 2 dollars a day). Elkins found that after the experiment she better understands where the money goes, carefully plans spending and does not make unnecessary purchases - moreover, she does not even feel like doing it.
However, Musk himself quickly got tired of the monotony and stopped saving on food. Moreover, he does not advise repeating his experiment: “I would not encourage anyone to live on $ 1 a day. That would not be very fun, ”he wrote to Elkins when he found out about her challenge.
The experiment ended, but the habit of refusing food for more important occupations remained. So, Musk usually does not have breakfast, but if he eats in the morning, he prefers the Mars bar - but he is trying to reduce the amount of sweets and is trying to replace chocolate with an omelet with coffee. Lunch also means little: an assistant brings food, and Musk eats it in five minutes.
Favorite food Ilona Mask - French cuisine and barbecue. Perhaps the addiction to the latter explains the flamethrowers that Musk released in 2018, offering them to light fireplaces and barbecue.
As for alcohol, Mask's favorite drink is whiskey, with which we see him on the Joe Rogan show (and that, like marijuana, NASA doesn't particularly like). However, Musk believes that a small amount of alcohol will not harm at least and may even contribute to longevity: “One of the most long-lived people was a woman from France who drank a glass of wine every day,” he recalled about Jeanne Kalman in the latest episode Rogan show.
On the subject: The genius of our time and the father of 6 children: how does Elon Musk live and why does everyone talk about him
Sport: involuntary running
Musk has a personal trainer, but they have not trained together for a long time. Now he trains himself, once or twice a week - without much fanaticism. As a rule, this is a power load or classes on a treadmill; Musk combines the latter with a television show, but generally does not like to run.
"To be completely honest, I wouldn't train at all if I could." - Ilon Mask
Perhaps this dislike of sports comes from childhood: Musk lived in South Africa, was the youngest child in school and was regularly beaten “almost to death”. However, now Musk is fond of martial arts: taekwondo, karate, judo and jujitsu - and even sent five sons from his first marriage to classes in jujitsu from the age of six.
Sleep: production need
Elon Musk is one of those who sleeps less than eight hours a day and feels normal. At the dawn of the foundation of Zip2 (today PayPal) he worked all day and slept in the office - however, very briefly to save time for work. Not surprisingly, he had to drink eight cans of diet cola and several large cups of coffee per day.
“If other people devote 40 hours a week to work, and you devote 100 hours, you will achieve in four months what takes them a year.” - Ilon Mask
In the end, such an amount of caffeine made the Mask so disturbing that it seemed to him that it was losing peripheral vision. There is now a decaffeinated cola in the office.
Sleep was also necessary: its deficiency worsened the effectiveness of the entrepreneur during the day. Apparently, that's why he reduced working hours to 80–90 per week and now sleeps six to six and a half hours a day: he goes to bed after midnight and wakes up around seven in the morning.
“The dream is really great. If I do not get enough sleep, I am quite irritable ... If I sleep less than a certain norm, then, although I am awake for more hours, I do less, because it affects the sharpness of my mind. " - Ilon Mask
To fall asleep, Musk sometimes takes sleeping pills - Ambient Z-hypnotic, which is notorious for strange side effects: after taking these pills, people eat pasta in a dream, buy things online, paint doors, walk with a dog and talk - but after waking up, none of this remember. There are suggestions that Ambien does not put Musk to sleep, but contributes to his nightly sessions on Twitter.
Probably the only really healthy advice you can hear from Mask is not to eat or drink 2-3 hours before bedtime: this will significantly improve the quality of sleep and life and relieve heartburn, says the entrepreneur. And it makes sense: science says that eating at night not only causes heartburn, which impairs sleep, but also impairs the metabolic response to food. As for alcohol, it does not combine with good sleep at all, as it violates circadian rhythms, reduces the synthesis of the “sleep hormone” melatonin and changes the architecture of sleep, making it superficial and ineffective.
On the subject: 'Ilon hopped for joy': May Musk - about the launch of Crew Dragon, the new grandson and the wedding of his son with Grimes
Plans: five minutes and no meetings
The mask has to relentlessly prioritize, and this is his key recommendation for others: focus on the “signal” rather than “noise”, and spend time only on what really benefits. The “signal” for Mask is the development of a product, to which it devotes 80% of its time.
How exactly to focus on the "signal" and cut off the "noise"? With this Mask helps his own five-minute schedule system: he pre-breaks the day into temporary blocks of five minutes; each block corresponds to a specific task. At the same time, he combines this strategy with the “batching” method: he specifically groups affairs in such a way as to eat and answer letters, all in five minutes.
Of course, not everything can be done so quickly and in multitasking mode. The mask probably has to reserve several time blocks for one complex business at once. (Or not. At least, he manages to combine communication with children with email.)
Almost all successful entrepreneurs use strict time blocking planning, as this helps to increase productivity and cope with the action of the Parkinson's law, which states: work grows to fill all the time that is before it is completed. But no one has such tough intervals as Elon Mask. This strategy - to set extremely ambitious goals and reduce the time to achieve them - is typical of everything an entrepreneur does. But not the fact that it works for everyone.
So, when the editor of The Entrepreneur tried to live the day “like Ilon Mask,” she noticed not only the positive effects of his planning system (she quickly performed small tasks like checking mail, which often takes an unreasonably long time), but also negative ones. For large-scale tasks, she had to reserve many time blocks at once, which seemed pointless; whenever a five-minute breaks her usual schedule, she felt the degree of stress increase, and a short five-minute lunch with her colleagues simply made her sad.
The more working principle of Ilon Mask, which probably saved him many hours and is useful to everyone, is the reduction of meetings and meetings. According to the entrepreneur, they are terrible by definition, as they happen when people do not work.
Here are the meeting rules Musk promotes among his employees:
- No frequent meetings: “Get rid of them, unless it's an extremely urgent matter. The frequency of meetings should quickly decrease after solving urgent issues. ”
- No to big meetings: “Refuse them if you are not sure that they are useful for the whole audience, and make them very short.”
- If you do not add value to the meeting, leave: "Leaving is not rude, rude - to force someone to stay and spend their time."
