from musk

 the sort of five step process

first make your requirements less dumb

your requirements are definitely dumb

does not matter who gave him to you

it’s particularly dangerous if a smart person gave you the requirements

because you might not question them enough yeah

no matter who you are everyone's wrong some of the time

make your requirements less dumb

then try very hard to delete the part or process

this is actually very important

if you're not 

occasionally 

adding things back in you are not as deleting enough

the bias tends to be very strongly towards

let's add this part of a process step in case we need it

but you can basically make incase arguments for so many things

the third step is simplify or optimize 

the third step not the first step is because it's very common

as possibly the most common error of a smart engineer

is to optimize a thing that should not exist

why would people do that 

well everyone's been trained in high school and college

to that you got to answer the question convergent logic

so you can't tell the professor your question is dumb

you'll get a bad grade

you have to answer the question

so everyone's basically without knowing it

they got like mental straight jacket on that is

they'll work on optimizing the thing

that should simply not exist right

and then finally you get to step 4

which is accelerate cycle time

you're moving too slowly

go faster

but don't go faster until you have worked on the other three things first

and then the final step is automate