Elon Musk’s advice to entrepreneurs, the 1 percent rule, and why OpenClaw went viral

Welcome back to the Z Fellows newsletter! Every Monday we share 3 ideas - to help you build companies, ship products, and create your life's work.

1: Elon Musk’s advice to entrepreneurs

Interviewer: “What are your three pieces of advice to entrepreneurs?”

Elon Musk: “I think certainly being focused on something that you’re confident will have high value to someone else, and just being really rigorous in making that assessment - because people tend to have a natural human tendency toward wishful thinking.

So a challenge for entrepreneurs is to say: what’s the difference between really believing in your ideals and sticking to them versus pursuing some unrealistic dream that doesn’t actually have merit? That is a really difficult thing to tell. Can you tell the difference between those two things? You need to be very rigorous in your self-analysis.

I think certainly being extremely tenacious.

And then just work like hell. I mean, you have to put in 80- to 100-hour weeks every week. A lot of work. All those things improve the odds of success.

If other people are putting in 40-hour work weeks and you’re putting in 100-hour work weeks, then even if you’re doing the same thing, in one year you will achieve what they achieve in four years - or you will achieve in four months what it takes them a year to achieve.“

Source: Elon Musk: Work twice as hard as others

2: The 1 percent rule

“Imagine two women swimming in the Olympics. One of them might be 1/100th of a second faster than the other, but she gets all of the gold medal.

Ten companies might pitch a potential client, but only one of them will win the project.

You only need to be a little bit better than the competition to secure all of the reward.

Not everything in life is a Winner-Take-All competition, but nearly every area of life is at least partially affected by limited resources.

Any decision that involves using a limited resource like time or money will naturally result in a winner-take-all situation.

In situations like these, being just a little bit better than the competition can lead to outsized rewards because the winner takes all.

You only win by 1 percent or 1 second or 1 dollar, but you capture 100 percent of the victory. The advantage of being a little bit better is not a little bit more reward, but the entire reward. The winner gets one and the rest get zero.“

Source: The 1 Percent Rule: Why a Few People Get Most of the Rewards

3: Why OpenClaw went viral

OpenClaw is an open-source AI assistant that saw widespread adoption from going viral, and was recently acquired by OpenAI.

Best of The Week

See you next Monday,

- The Z Fellows Team

New here?

Subscribe here to get our email every Monday.