Help your kid learn like Elon

Love him or hate him, Elon Musk is an expert learner.

He built four billion-dollar companies in industries he had no previous experience in.

How?

He soaks up knowledge like a sponge.

We all have a tendency to look at ridiculously successful people and think that they’re somehow special — that their minds are a unique treasure, locked away and totally inaccessible to the rest of us.

That’s a fallacy. All they’ve done is perfected a formula for learning.

And luckily, Elon has revealed his formula to us.

Here are his three biggest learning techniques, and why they’re important for your kid:

Plant a learning tree 🌲 

Elon refers to his learning method as a metaphorical tree:

👉️ Why this is important for kids:

You know how it’s so hard to remember someone’s unusual name? You just can’t get it to stick in your head, and you feel terrible about it, right?

That’s what it’s like for kids when we try to sprinkle leaves of knowledge on them before they’ve grown their branches. It’s like asking them to remember the French word for paperclip before they know what a paperclip is in English.

It’s le trombone by the way. Not to be confused with the musical instrument.

See what I mean? 🤔

Embrace failure 🤦 

Every failure is a learning opportunity.

When SpaceX began its Falcon program, its first three Falcon 1 launches failed miserably, nearly bankrupting the company. If their fourth launch hadn’t been successful, they would have been finished.

Fast forward to today — the Falcon 9 rocket has an incredible 99.4% success rate over 314 launches.

This would not have been possible without the invaluable learnings from their earlier failed missions.

👉️ Why this is important for kids:

All of us, kids included, are naturally afraid of failure. It’s hard to appreciate the importance of the lessons when you’re in the thick of it.

But if they’re provided with the mental framework early on to assess and learn from their mistakes and failures, they’ll develop the most crucial skills for success — resilience and improvement. 👊

Learn by doing 🛠️ 

Hands-on experience is a far better teacher than books.

Elon likes to use the example of learning about how an engine works:

• You can teach the scientific principles behind it.

• You can list out the tools needed to fix it.

• You can draw pictures and show models.

But the best way to truly absorb the knowledge is take the engine apart and put it back together again.

👉️ Why this is important for kids:

Way too much of their curriculum lives on the pages of books. It’s your responsibility to give them the opportunity to develop hands-on experience.

This is what Prequel does for middle schoolers in our Apollo program and high schoolers in BETA Camp. These kids build real businesses with real customers.

And if there’s one final lesson we can take from Elon, it’s that entrepreneurship skills are a rocket ship to success. 🚀