Thoughts On "Founder Mode" Elon Musk is known to go into a period of intensity when he starts a business called "founder mode". It’s all about time management and focus. In this Billboard Mastery podcast we're going to review what “founder mode” is and you how can adopt its attributes to further your billboard business.
Episode 106: Thoughts On "Founder Mode" Transcript
Everyone knows who Elon Musk is. He's the founder of PayPal, Tesla, SpaceX, Starlink. So many other companies in America have been founded by one guy, Elon Musk. And Elon Musk is notorious when he starts all these different ventures of using what he calls a mindset called founder mode. This is Frank Rolfe, the Billboard Mastery Podcast. We're gonna discuss what founder mode is and how you can use some of the attributes that Musk uses to greater advance your billboard business. Now, what is founder mode? What is Elon Musk even talking about? What he does is he goes into a zone when he starts a business, which he is so intensely focused that he puts all of his time and energy on the business and it translates to where he never even goes home. When Musk started Tesla, he delighted in always being in his office 24 hours a day. He wanted every shift at Tesla, all three shifts daily to when they got there to see him in his office with the lights on. Now, of course, he'd have to sleep at some periods in there, but he was known to sleep right in his office. Just sleep right on the sofa, maybe on the floor, because he wanted to send the word to everybody that, "Oh my gosh, we better work hard 'cause look at old Elon, he's never even going home. He is all over it".
Now I'm not advocating that you can be like that. I don't know that you have the ability, the freedom to work 24 hours a day. You probably don't have to impress people coming in on a night shift with whatever you're doing, but there are some attributes to a founder mode mentality that are worthy of discussion. Let's first get serious about time. In a typical week, you have 168 hours, that's just 24 times seven. And from that 168 hours, let's subtract 40 hours of that for your day job and another 56 hours of that with sleep. But after you take out the 40 hour work week and the 56 hours of eight hours a night sleep time, that still leaves you 72 hours a week of free time. Time that's not dedicated to any certain endeavor that you can use and apportion to whatever it is that you want to do. That's a huge amount of time. Now, if you take the 40 hours of a week of work and the 56 hours of sleep, that's 96 hours. You've got almost as much free time at 72 hours as you do in all of your commitments of sleep and work. So you have a vast amount of time that you can reallocate to the billboard industry or whatever you want to do. So it's never right to say, Oh, I don't have time". No, you definitely have time. It's simply how you allocate it. And it's very important if you wanna have more of a founder mode mentality, you've got to eliminate all the waste. All the time that you waste on stuff that doesn't matter at all.
Back when I was at Stanford University as an undergraduate, there was a guy in my dorm who was in pre-med and he was also the captain of a sports team. And he was making straight A's pre-med and he was also the captain of this team. And one time I asked him, I said, "How do you do it? How in the world do you have straight A's in pre-med, the hardest discipline at Stanford, and you're also the captain of a sports team?" And I'll never forget what he told me. He said, "You know, here's how I do it. I work hard and I play hard and I cut out everything in between. I don't watch TV. I don't chit chat with people. I don't just hang out. I'm either studying or I'm doing something else meaningful". That was his playbook. And I thought, you know what? That's true. If I looked at my day or anyone looked at their average day and you said, "Okay, now, what if this time is really getting me somewhere?" So much of it isn't. If you spend an hour a day watching TV, that's not really getting you anywhere. But if you reallocated that hour to something else that's meaningful, then your life would be advanced a whole lot better.
Another thing you gotta think about in the founder mentality is working smarter. Now, Elon Musk is a master at cutting through the BS and getting to what is a real key driver to success and focusing on that. That's how he took Tesla from the idea of an EV vehicle and was able to springboard that ahead of everyone else in the world who manufactured cars to create his own new kind of car because he kind of thinks outside the box. He kind of cuts out all the other distractions that stop people. He says, "No, I think I'll give this a fresh approach". And there was a book written not that long ago called the 4-Hour Workweek. And the truth is there is a lot that most people can do to work smarter so they have to put in less time. I'm not saying you can get your work week condensed to four hours, but definitely all of us can look back on what we do and see if there's greater time efficiency. If we could change things up a little bit to cut out waste, to cut out time to spend on things that we don't really need. Sometimes it's just about organizing your time. If you go to the grocery store and you have to go five times in one week because you don't write down what you need and then you realize if you just write down what you need at the grocery store and then condense that into one trip, how much time did you just save? Probably several hours a week of time we all waste doing things 'cause it's just simply not organized.
Also, if you wanna have a founder mentality, you have to live by a simple mantra that you know, I only live once and I don't wanna have any regrets on my deathbed of things I didn't do, so I wanna maximize my time. I wanna get the most out of it. It's been said that most of us at the end, we don't regret things we did, what we regret are things that we didn't do, and often we didn't do them because we thought to ourselves we don't have the time to do it but that's because we potentially has squandered our time. Finally, if you wanna have a founder mode for most people, you need to try and turn your use of time into a game. People generally have more fun when things are in the form of a game and we all like playing video games and ping pong and different sports, but why not turn your time into that too? Turn your achievements into that. Start off every year with a lengthy list of goals that you wanna hit and then focus on a regular basis how am I doing on hitting that goal. That makes life so much more pleasurable when you can follow along with your success or failure as we go and modify your result. It's kind of like a GPS system for your life.
You know what the goals are you're trying to attain. If you get off the track, you can reorient and get back on the track. Bottom line to it is there's a lot to learn about Musk and his concept of the founder mode. Maybe you're not going to go ahead and start an electric vehicle company or Starlink, but you definitely can make great inroads, an additional stream of income or even a career change in the billboard industry, and you definitely do have the time. This is Frank Rolfe, the Billboard Mastery podcast. Hope you enjoyed this. Talk to you again soon.