Elon Musk on how to choose what to work on

“I don’t think everything needs to change the world. There’s lots of useful things that people do, and I think it should really be like a usefulness optimization.”

For anyone trying to figure out what to work on, Elon suggests asking yourself, “Is what I’m doing as useful as it could be?”

He continues:

“Even if something isn’t changing the world but it’s making people’s lives better, I think that’s great.”

Elon gives the example of an app that makes people’s lives only slightly better - the area under the curve of the usefulness optimization is quite good if it’s affecting a lot of people.

Full video: Stanford eCorner “Elon Musk: Elon Musk's Vision for the Future [Entire Talk]“ (Oct 2015)

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"