Rick Rubin on the power of creating something truly for yourself

Elon Musk has said that Rick Rubin’s philosophy of creating something truly for yourself is how Tesla creates products.

Rick elaborates on this philosophy in the clip below:

“My only goal is to make something that I like, and I know that I can keep working on it until I like it. So in some ways there’s no pressure.”

Rick doesn’t consider the audience at all:

“The audience comes last… I’m not making it for them. I’m making it for me. And it turns out that when you make something truly for yourself, you’re doing the best thing you possibly can for the audience.”

He argues that this is why there are so many bad movies today:

“So many big movies are just not good. It’s because they’re are not being made by a person who cares about it. They’re being made by people who are trying to make something they think someone else will like. And that’s not how art works.”

Former Google CEO Eric Schmidt argues a similar point:

"If you think about the greatest products, they've almost always been designed for the benefit of the people who are actually building them.”

Uber started out as a private timeshare limousine service for Garrett Camp and his friends. Microsoft started when Bill Gates and Paul Allen wrote a Basic interpreter for the Altair so they didn’t have to write machine language to program it. Drew Houston built Dropbox to make his files live online after forgetting his USB stick. Larry Page and Sergey Brin built Google for Stanford—and particularly for themselves—with the first server in Larry’s dorm room.

Full video: Lewis Howes “Rick Rubin Reveals His Secret to UNLOCK Your Creativity!“ (Nov 2023)