Elon Musk is not reading articles online about how to become Elon Musk

If you Google ‘How to become Elon Musk’, you will come across thousands of articles that address that question in one way or another. Either they are answers on Quora to that specific question itself, or they are indirect answers to that question with titles ranging from ‘10 ways to think like Elon Musk’ (Forbes) to ‘8 things that Elon Musk does before 8am’ (Medium).

You can substitute Elon Musk with any successful entrepreneur, author, sports person, actor, CEO, musician, politician, nobel laureate and you will see similar results.

The Internet is full of literature on how to do things like, how to think like and how to become any of these successful people.

The Internet is full of this literature because it attracts clicks.

People love short cuts. They want to learn how to become successful in their field by reading a five hundred word article. They get their dopamine hit by reading such an article and they can go back to wallowing in their mediocrity for a few more days.

But Elon Musk is not browsing the Internet and clicking on articles that tell him how to become Elon Musk. Neither is Tim Cook or Mark Zuckerberg or anyone else who is actually successful. They weren’t doing this even back when they weren’t yet successful.

Instead, they were busy shipping their art. They were busy doing things that they thought would make a difference. They were busy pushing themselves to the next level and the next by taking on more challenging work each day.

If you really want help and guidance on how to become successful, stop asking how to become Elon Musk and start asking how to become that guy who is just a little bit ahead of you, a little bit better than you. Because that’s a map you can follow and act on today.

But more importantly, just do the work. Keep pushing yourself to get better than what you were yesterday.