Introduction
IN ON DAY According to his younger brother, Kimbal Musk, it was not unusual for him to Elon Musk read for 10 hours a day in his childhood. 10 hours! That’s a lot, even for an adult!
There are two tricks to read very quickly and understand complex concepts immediately.
One bit of advice: it is important to view knowledge as a semantic tree — make sure you understand the fundamental principles, ie the trunk and big branches before you get into the leaves/details or there is nothing for them to hang on to.”
Second (this is how I do it, but I am pretty sure Elon Musk does the same)
Reading” and “learning” are not what most people think it is. You don’t read or learn as a passive receptacle of information. You can’t just neutrally read stuff – you have to THINK while you are reading.
In high school and college, I was quite effective in very quickly understanding complex philosophical and natural science concepts. In some cases, I picked up the concept in a significantly shorter time than it would take me to read the page(s).
That made me wonder how this could work. The answer is a blend of what Elon Musk says, but more importantly, the thinking concept:
I found out that when I read new stuff, I very early on form a hypothesis of what the author could say. I then scan the text for confirmation or falsification of this hypothesis.
So, if you read Kant about the structure of knowledge and read about empirical and theoretic knowledge, you can very quickly derive that one likely thing he is going to say is:
we perceive information from the world and then apply principles to introduce causality. Information is “true”, principles are “hypothetical”; and so on.
When you form this hypothesis, you can’t be sure Kant will say this in the following text; but the more you read, the exponentially higher is the chance you predict it correctly, and your possible error rate goes down exponentially.
The same is true when I read about how to detect DNA fragments in blood samples. A scientific paper is always full of blabla, but I am looking for very few specifics: what’s the median and average length of fragments / do these folks know it or not; what methods (1.2.3.) are the best?
Bottom line: don’t read; think and create hypotheses about the world, and then quickly verify or falsify them by scanning the document. You don’t read; you have a specific question in mind and look for the fastest way to answer the question in the text.
The most striking part of Elon’s character as a young boy was his compulsion to read. The family went on numerous shopping excursions in which they realized mid-trip that Elon had gone missing. Maye(His mom) or Kimbal(His brother) would pop into the nearest bookstore and find Elon somewhere near the back sitting on the floor and reading in one of his trancelike states.
This is what it looks like(Trancelike state):
In his school days, he would take himself to the bookstore when school ended at 2 p.m. and stay there until about 6 p.m. He plowed through fiction books and then comics and then nonfiction titles.
Sometimes they(school authorities and librarians) kicked him out of the store, but usually not” Elon Musk said.
His favorite books are:
1 The Lord of the Rings,
2 Issac Asimov’s Foundation Series,
3 Robert Heinlein’s “The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress
4 And The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy.
Elon Musk was maybe in the fourth or fifth grade when he ran out of books to read at the “School Library and Neighborhood Library.”
“I tried to convince the librarian to order books for me. So then, I started to read the Encyclopedia Britannica. You don’t know what you don’t know. You realize there are all these things out there” Elon Said.
And when Elon Musk was very young and his family used to go on a vacation, the children looked relaxed as they sat in folding chairs, legs crossed, and reading books.
“If we had a question, Tosca would always say, ‘Just ask a genius boy,” Maye said. No doubt, Elon Musk cemented his bookworm reputation through his clumsy ways. But he seemed awkward to other kids. And that’s how Elon Musk eventually took on the role of elder and chief instigator among them.