Elon Musk: The mind behind Tesla, SpaceX, SolarCity ...

"Boil things down to their fundamental truths, and reason up from there, as opposed to reasoning by analogy.   Through most of our life – we get through life by reasoning by analogy, which essentially means kind of copying what other people do with slight variations.  And you have to do that – otherwise it’s mentally—you wouldn’t be able to get through the day.  When you want to do something new – you have to apply the physics approach.  Physics is really about how to discover new things that are counter-intuitive like quantum mechanics – it’s really counter-intuitive.  So I think that’s a really important thing to do and then also, to really pay attention to negative feedback – and solicit it – especially from friends.  This may seem like rather simply advice – but hardly anyone does that!  And it’s incredibly helpful."