Concerning Elon Musk and Potato Chips

The easy choice is often the lesser choice.

I was fortunate enough to wake up a week ago Sunday in time to watch the “chopsticks catch” of the latest Starship rocket booster, an event which thrilled the world. The sheer improbability of it was mind-boggling. It’s hard to remember, now that SpaceX has made rocket landings seem normal; but only a few years ago all the experts assured us that landing a rocket intact, “as God and Robert A. Heinlein intended,” was physically impossible and a fool’s errand. And with Starship, SpaceX was not just landing a gigantic flying skyscraper, but catching it with tweezers!

For it to work, a lot of talented, skilled, driven people working together had to stretch their abilities to the very maximum. Reflecting on that, especially when contrasted with the gelatinous somnolence of certain parts of our governing apparatus, I commented to a friend that the world would be a much better place if more people refused to settle for anything less than excellence.

That reminded me of my Potato Chip Analogy, which I formulated several years ago. It goes like this:

You’re hungry. But you’re not feeling up to cooking a real meal, and there’s a large bag of potato chips sitting close by. So you eat a handful of potato chips. Potato chips are designed to stimulate a lot of the pleasurable sensations connected to eating: they are crunchy, salty, and fatty. More than that, they are easy, so it’s easy to choose them over the effort of making a nourishing meal. Yet they’re not really nourishing, so you’re still hungry after you’ve eaten your handful.

But—and this is a key point—because potato chips are meant to imitate the sensations connected with good food, you feel like the potato chips almost satisfied you. Maybe if you eat some more, you’ll stop being hungry. So you eat another handful. Again, it feels like it almost did the job; so you eat some more. Yet you are not truly hungry for potato chips. Potato chips are a pale substitute for what you really want, but because they feel so close, you keep eating them instead of real food. The very fact that the potato chips don’t quite hit the spot drives you to keep eating them. (Apparently, compulsive gamblers can experience something like this, called “dark flow.”)

Finally, you end up having eaten the whole bag, your hands greasy, your stomach bloated—and still not satisfied! Because in the end, potato chips are not nourishing food. But they did distract you from what could have truly satisfied your hunger, because they seemed so much easier.

When you look at it, our world is full of potato chips. For some people, games are a potato chip for life achievement. For some people, shopping is. Pornography is a potato chip for sex. Sex can be a potato chip for relationships. Fast food can be a potato chip for healthy food. In another way, so can vitamin tablets. TikTok drama is a potato chip for compelling stories. The potato-chipness of something is always relative to something else, something realer and more vivid and more effortful, that the potato chip imitates.

This is not, necessarily, a moral evaluation. Some of these things have their uses. And sometimes you just want a potato chip. But it remains true that because they are easy, potato chips can displace the truly meaningful things they are designed to mimic. Before you know it, you can look at your life and find that you have been engrossed in potato chips instead of the things you truly yearn for.

Say what you will about Elon Musk, but he has a maniacal focus on the things that really matter to him. His ambitions are vast. Once he decides that something is conceivable according to the laws of physics, he spurs his companies to achieve that thing, and damn the torpedoes.

This does not mean that Musk is immune to potato chips. His personal life is something of a train wreck, his understanding of geopolitics is deficient (and his companies have suffered some blowback due to this, unfortunately), and he loves gaming as much as any gamer who ever gamed.

Still, Musk stands as an example of what can be achieved if you consciously strive for excellence, and nothing less. Catching rockets with chopsticks was possible, if bonkers. Musk did the math, understood that it was possible, and then SpaceX made it happen.

For myself, Starship is a challenge to put down the potato chips and put in the work to do what really matters.

Imagine if in our lives, each of us refused to compromise our excellence. Refused to settle for pale imitations. Embraced the conscious personal investment of cooking a juicy satisfying steak instead of automatically reaching for the potato chips again.

What bonkers things could we bring forth into the world?