Elon Musk explains why the CEO must work on the “most pernicious and painful problems”

“A lot of times people think creating a company is going to be fun. I would say it’s really not that fun. There are periods of fun, and there are periods where it’s just awful. Particularly if you’re the CEO of the company. You actually have a distillation of all the worst problems in the company. There’s no point in spending your time on things that are going right. So you only spend your time on things that are going wrong that other people can’t take care of… the most pernicious and painful problems.”

Elon believes founders need to have a “fairly high pain threshold” and explains that starting a company is like “staring into the abyss and eating glass.”

“The staring into the abyss part is that you’re going to be constantly facing the extermination of the company because most startups fail… You’re constantly saying, okay, if I don’t get this right, the company will die. It’s going to be quite stressful. And then the eating glass part is you’ve got to work on the problems that the company needs you to work on, not the problems you want to work on. And so you end up working on problems that you’d really wish you weren’t working on… And that goes on for a long time.”

Full video: Khan Academy “Elon Musk - CEO of Tesla Motors and SpaceX | Entrepreneurship | Khan Academy“ (Apr 2013)

P.S. We’ve put together a YouTube playlist with every Elon Musk insight we’ve ever shared. You can watch it here: "Best startup advice from Elon Musk"