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Most engineers love solving problems. The trickier the problem, the better. But according to Elon Musk, one of the biggest mistakes smart engineers make is optimizing something that shouldn’t even exist in the first place.
Think about that for a second. How many times have you seen people spend months—sometimes years—trying to make something more efficient, only to later realize the entire thing was unnecessary?
Musk’s advice is simple: Before you jump into solving a problem, make sure it’s the right problem.
The Engineer’s Biggest Trap: Fixing What Should Be Eliminated
"One of the biggest traps for smart engineers is optimizing a thing that shouldn't exist."
Let’s break this down with a real-world example.
In the early 2000s, BlackBerry was the king of smartphones. They had the best keyboards, the best email system, and the most secure messaging. Their engineers were constantly optimizing the keyboard—making it slimmer, more tactile, and more efficient.
Meanwhile, Apple was asking a different question: Do we even need a physical keyboard?
The iPhone launched in 2007 with no keyboard at all—just a touchscreen. And BlackBerry? Their engineers had been so focused on making the best keyboard that they never considered that the keyboard itself might be obsolete.
That’s exactly the mistake Musk is talking about. Smart people get caught in the trap of refining things that should be scrapped altogether.
The Tesla Windshield Wiper Dilemma
Consider a hypothetical scenario at Tesla: Engineers might spend months optimizing a traditional windshield wiper system, making it more efficient, lighter, and more durable. They could produce the world's best conventional wiper system—but what if the right approach was to reimagine windshield clearing entirely?
This actually happened in Tesla's development process. Rather than perfecting traditional wipers, the company explored alternatives like using air flows, hydrophobic coatings, and even laser-based systems that could clear debris without mechanical movement.
The point wasn't to build a better wiper—it was to question whether wipers as we know them should exist at all.
Reality Is Not a Textbook Problem
Musk explains where this mindset comes from:
"When you go through college, you have to answer the question that the professor gives you. You don't get to say, ‘This is the wrong question.’"
In school, students are trained to solve problems as they are presented. If a physics professor gives you a problem about calculating the trajectory of a rocket, you solve that problem—you don’t question whether launching that rocket is a good idea in the first place.
But real life is different. In business, engineering, and innovation, the best thinkers don’t just solve problems—they redefine them.
Take Henry Ford as an example. If he had simply asked, “How do we breed faster horses?”, he would have never built the automobile. Instead, he challenged the entire premise and asked, “Is there a better way to travel?”
The most groundbreaking ideas don’t come from making small improvements. They come from questioning the problem itself.
Why This Mindset Matters in Business
If you’re running a startup, this mindset is even more critical.
A common mistake founders make is spending years building a product without questioning if people even need it. They optimize, tweak, and improve—without ever stepping back to ask, “Should this product even exist?”
Example: In the early days of PayPal, the team initially built a system for beaming money between Palm Pilots. It was a brilliant piece of technology—engineers worked tirelessly to make it seamless.
But there was just one problem: almost nobody wanted to send money between Palm Pilots.
Instead of continuing to refine a useless product, they scrapped it and focused on something people actually needed—email-based payments. The rest is history.
If they had been too attached to their original vision, they would have spent years optimizing a dead-end idea.
How to Avoid the Optimization Trap
So how do engineers avoid this common pitfall? Here are some strategies Musk and other innovative thinkers employ:
1. Question First, Build Later
Before diving into solutions, take a step back and question the premise of the problem. Ask "why" five times to get to the root issue. Often, what seems like the problem is merely a symptom of a deeper challenge.
2. Focus on First Principles
Musk is famous for his first principles thinking—breaking down problems to their fundamental truths and reasoning up from there. This approach helps avoid getting trapped in conventional thinking about how something "should" be done.
"I think it's important to reason from first principles rather than by analogy. The normal way we conduct our lives is we reason by analogy... With first principles, you boil things down to the most fundamental truths... and then reason up from there."
3. Embrace the Blank Slate
Sometimes the best approach is to imagine you're starting from scratch. If this problem emerged today, with current technology and no historical baggage, how would you solve it?
4. Value Naive Questions
Newcomers to a field often ask the most important questions because they haven't yet been conditioned to accept industry assumptions. Smart teams create space for these questions rather than dismissing them.
5. Reward Question-Askers
In organizations truly committed to innovation, questioning premises isn't just tolerated—it's actively rewarded, even when it's uncomfortable or challenges established projects.
The Future Belongs to Question-Askers
As we face increasingly complex global challenges, from climate change to healthcare to artificial intelligence, our success will depend not just on finding answers but on asking better questions.
The innovators who will lead us forward aren't those with the most technical expertise but those who combine technical knowledge with the wisdom to question fundamental assumptions—those who can identify and avoid optimizing things that shouldn't exist.
In Musk's vision, the future belongs not to those who can build the perfect version of yesterday's solutions, but to those brave enough to question whether those solutions should exist at all.
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