I appreciate that Elon laboriously explained one of his great thinking processes that will benefit the researchers and engineers. The summary of this five-step rule of implement rigorously is from a Youtube video when Elon guides a tour of SpaceX’s Starbase facility with Youtuber “Everyday Astronaut”. I made minor revises, but most of them came from Elon.
Five-Step Rule of Implement Rigorously
Step 1: make your requirements (constraints) less dumb.
“Your requirements are definitely dumb. It does not matter who gave them to you. It is particularly dangerous if a smart person gave you the requirements because you might not question them enough. Everyone is wrong, no matter who you are. Everyone is wrong some of the time.”
Step 2: try very hard to delete the part or process.
“This is actually important if you’re not occasionally adding things back in, you are not leading enough. The bias tends to be very strongly towards “let’s add this part of the process step in case we need it”. But you can basically make in case arguments for so many things, and for a rocket that is trying to achieve “trying to be the first fully reusable rocket, there’s never been a fully reusable rocket”. People don’t understand, like this is the holy grail of rocketry, okay.”
Step 3: simplify before optimize. Don’t optimize a thing that shouldn’t exist.
“The reason it’s the third step is cause it’s very common, possibly the most common error of a smart engineer is to optimize the thing that should not exist. Well everyone has been trained in high school and college that you gotta answer the question, convergent logic. So you can’t tell a professor, your question is dumb. You will get a bad grade. You have to ask the question. So everyone is basically, without knowing it, they got like a mental straight jacket on that is they’ll work on optimizing the thing that should simply not exist.”
Step 4: accelerate cycle time.
“If you’re moving too slowly, go faster. But don’t go faster until you have worked on the other three things first. If you’re digging your grave, don’t dig it faster, stop digging your grave. But you can always make me go faster.” I love his sense of humor :-).
Final Step 5: automate.
“I have personally made the mistake of going backward on all five steps multiple times. So I have to repeat this. Yes, multiple times on Model 3, Where literally I automated, accelerated, simplified, and then deleted.”
My thought of using this implement rule in doing research.
I think Elon’s purpose in explaining this rule is to share the right way of the conduct engineering process. I do believe this implement rule will definitely be useful in doing research as well. For example, the first step, making requirements is asking the fundamental question of your study by the first principles thinking. As Elon said: “You boil things down to the most fundamental truths and reason up from there”. Then the next step is not “go faster”, “automate”, or “optimize a thing that you are not sure whether you need it or not”. Instead, you should follow step 2, “try very hard to delete the part or process” to the very bottom.
A special shout-out to Elon Musk and Everyday Astronaut for providing this so helpful sharing of the thinking process.