"Design toward the platonic ideal, not your current tools Musk identified a near-universal trap in product development: people default to designing what can be built with the tools and methods they already know, which guarantees the result will be constrained by past practice. His alternative: "imagine the platonic ideal of the perfect product" first, then ask what tools and materials would be needed to achieve it. Without this discipline, he warned, "you might fall victim to the momentum of the way things were done in the past" — not through bad intentions but through inertia. Source: Elon Musk, Lex Fridman Podcast, Elon Musk"