Polytopia Life Lessons

Taken directly from the new book Elon Musk by Walter Isaacson (big fan of both).

Theses are the rules Elon Musk felt that were necessary not just for the game Polytopia but also the rules needed to be a CEO in real life. 

Empathy is not an asset. "He know that I have an empathy gene, unlike him, and it has hurt me in business," Kimbal [Musk] says. "Polytopia taught me how he thinks when you remove empathy. When you're playing a video game, here is no empathy, right?"

Play life like a game. "I have this feeling," [Shizon] Zillis once told Musk, "that as a kid you were playing one of these strategy games and your mom unplugged it, and you just didn't notice, and you kept playing life as if it were that game."

Do not fear losing. "You will lose," Musk says. "It will hurt the first fifty times. When you get used to losing, you will play each game with less emotion." You will be more fearless, take more risks.

Be proactive. "I'm a little Canadian pacificist and reactive," Zillis says. "My gameplay was a hundred percent reactive to whatever everyone else was doing, as opposed to thinking through my best strategy." She realized that, like many women, this mirrored the way she behaved at work. Both Musk and Mark Juncosa told her that she could never win unless she took charge of setting the strategy.

Optimize every turn. In Polytopia, you get only thirty turns, so you need to optimize each one. "Like in Polytopia, you only get a set number of turns in life," Musk says. "If we let a few of them slide, we shall never get to Mars."

Double down. "Elon plays the game by always pushing the edge of what's possible," Zillis says. "And he's always doubling down and putting everything back in the game to grow and grow. And it's just like he's just done his whole life."

Pick you battles. In Polytopia, you might find yourself surrounded by six or more tribes, all taking swipes at you. If you just swipe back at all of them. Musk never fully mastered that lesson, and Zillis found herself coaching him on it. "Dude, like, everyone's swiping at you right now but if you swipe back at too many, you'll run out of resources," she told him. She called that approach "front minimization." It was a lesson she also tried and failed to teach him about his behavior on Twitter.

Unplug at times. "I had to stop playing because it was destroying my marriage," Kimbal says. Shivon Zillis also deleted Polytopia from her phone. So did Grimes. And, for a while, Musk did so as well. "I had to take Polytopia off my phone because it was taking up too many brain cycles," he says. "I started dreaming about Polytopia." But the lesson about unplugging was another one that Musk never mastered. After a few months, he put the game back onto his phone and was playing again.

Strongly recommend the book Elon Musk by Walter Isaacson.