Elon Musk is known all over the world, but not why he leads a lifestyle of any ‘influencer’: Tesla’s founder doesn’t like sport, doesn’t spend much time sleeping, and healthy food has little to do with it. Let’s see how he combines these habits with his stellar career.
Musk is the son of a dietitian, but that was never worth instilled in the entrepreneur healthy eating habits. As a young man, when he was still a student, the physicist decided to try to spend only a dollar a day on food to see if he could live on minimal expenses.
The experiment worked: the young Musk could devote the minimum time and money to his food and thus leave more space in his life for his big projects or ambitions. Eventually, he quit the habit of spending little, but he keeps skipping breakfasts and having lunch in five minutes.
That, however, does not mean that he does not know how to enjoy the food: the entrepreneur loves barbecues and French gastronomy. In fact, Musk says that “the food is great. The truth is, I’d rather eat delicious things and live a shorter life.”
The same can be said of alcohol: the billionaire has a weakness with the Whiskey. The CEO of SpaceX believes that a little alcohol a day, far from being harmful, is even beneficial to live a longer life. As he says, “one of the longest-serving people was a woman from France who drank one glass of wine a day.”
When it comes to the sport, Elon doesn’t like excesses: he has a personal trainer with which he admits he hasn’t seen him for a long time and runs on the treadmill or does bodybuilding exercises once or twice a week… And because he takes it as an obligation. “Being totally honest, if I could, I wouldn’t train anything,” admits the entrepreneur.
Sleep is also not a priority for this entrepreneur. We go back to Elon Musk’s student days and see that the young man was missing hours in the day to carry out his projects.
So much so that it replaced hours of sleep with up to eight light-tailed cans and good bowls of coffee. And it is that founding Zip2, one of its first companies, was before anything else. The entrepreneur’s philosophy was this: “If others spend 40 hours a week at work and you dedicate 100 to it, you’ll get in four months what they’ll take a year to get.”
However, as is evident, this rhythm of life is unsustainable and affects productivity, and the tycoon soon had to review his sleep routine. Now he sleeps six to six and a half hours a day, and if necessary he turns to the sleeping pill Ambien. He himself is aware that lack of sleep “affects mental acuity.”
All these habits are aimed at optimizing productivity indirectly, but when it comes to work, Musk has even more surprising habits. The entrepreneur is very clear about his priorities and works in five-minute blocks: he divides each day into these short time-spaces in which he completes all his tasks.
The most surprising thing is that even at those intervals he does several tasks at once: even play with his kids while sending emails. It is the method known as batching, which proposes to eat and perform other daily activities while still working. That’s the price of getting to the top and becoming one of the richest people on the planet.