The Importance of Being Useful

Nugget by Elon Musk

Julio Froment

Jul 18, 2025

👋 Hey friend,

Today I bring you a great insight from Elon Musk.

I picked it from an interview he gave a few weeks ago on Y Combinator.

Enjoy!

👤 Doers

💡Nugget

🟠 Elon Musk:
I generally think [you should] try to be as useful as possible.
It may sound trite, but it's so hard to be useful, especially to be useful to a lot of people.
The area under the curve of total utility is like… How useful have you been to your fellow human beings times how many people?

It’s almost like the physics definition of true work.
It’s incredibly difficult to do that.
And I think if you aspire to do true work, your probability of success is much higher.
Like… Don't aspire to glory; aspire to work.

"Don't concern yourself with the money. Be of service: build, work, dream, create. Do this and you'll find there's no limit to the prosperity and abundance [that] will come to you."

- Earl Nightingale (Video Source)

[Garry Tan]:
How can you tell that it's true work?
Is it external?
Is it what happens with other people or, you know, what the product does for people?

[Elon Musk]:
I guess in terms of your end product, you just have to say like:
“Well, if this thing is successful, how useful will it be to how many people?”
And whether you're CEO or any role in a startup, you do whatever it takes to succeed.
And always be smashing your ego.
Internalize responsibility.
A major failure mode is when ego to ability ratio is double greater than sign one.
You know, if your ego to ability ratio gets too high, then you're going to basically break the feedback loop to reality…
You do whatever the task is, no matter whether it's grand or humble.
That's kind of why I actually prefer the term engineering as opposed to research.
And I actually don’t want to call X-AI a lab. I just want it to be a company.
You want to just close the loop on reality hard. That’s a super big deal.
Source → Elon Musk’s Speech on YC (2025)

🟠 Mohnish Pabrai:
In an interview he [Charlie Munger] gave about a month before he passed away, they asked him:
“What would you like on your gravestone? — if someone would put something in your gravestone…”
And he said:
“I tried to be useful.”
And the “I tried to be useful” is a simple idea that he took very seriously…
Source → YPO Mosaic Chapter

📙 Doers Notebook

All the nuggets I’ve picked for the past 5 years are saved and classified in a searchable Database, which (as of July 2025) contains 2,600+ timeless ideas (sourced directly from the most influential doers and entrepreneurs — captured on books, interviews/podcasts, tweets, and articles).

I call this Database The Doers Notebook, and it’s open for anyone who wants it.

🤔 Why did I build this?

Well, as the Latin motto goes, “A chief part of learning is simply knowing where you can find a thing.” And since it’s all 🔎 searchable, we only need to type a keyword to immediately get a list of insights related to it!

For instance, if I’m unsure about how to get more sales in my business, I can simply type the word “sales” and immediately get 105 insights! (search results that contain the keyword “sales”). In this case from Jim Edwards, Peter Thiel, Naval Ravikant, Paul Graham, Sam Altman, Balaji Srinivasan, Nassim Taleb, and many other remarkable individuals.

It’s like having a second brain 🧠 from which we can pull wisdom on demand, to help us significantly decrease the error rate in our judgment and also get new ideas on how to solve specific problems.

“In an age of infinite leverage [code and media], judgment is the most important skill.”

- Naval Ravikant

If you want to see The Doers Notebook in action, I made a video where I typed the keywords “sales” and “creative”, and I went through the list of insights (that contain those keywords).

But if you want to check out the database directly, just go to DoersNotebook.co