ELON MUSK RUNS THE SAME 5-STEP ALGORITHM ON EVERYTHING HE BUILDS He calls it a mantra. Says he's made every one of these mistakes more times than he cares to remember. Here's the process, in order: 1. Question every requirement. No matter how smart the person who set it, the requirement is still wrong to some degree. 2. Delete the part or the process step. If you're not later forced to add back at least 10% of what you deleted, you didn't delete enough. 3. Simplify and optimize. But only after the first two steps. 4. Speed it up. 5. Automate it. The order is the whole point. His most common mistake from a career of building: "The most common mistake of smart engineers is to optimize a thing that shouldn't exist." Speeding up or automating a step you should have deleted just means you spend effort perfecting something that never needed to be there.