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What Can We Learn From the Desks of Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg?

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How a person leaves their office desk can tell you a lot about them.

Is it organized chaos, bursting with new plans and ideas to take the world by storm? Do sentimental photos of family and moments adorn the area surrounding the workspace? Is the desk organized, meticulously cleaned, and orderly?

The structure of a person’s work environment, along with the routines they use for enhancing productivity while at the office, can help give us insight on how they work best – and this becomes especially interesting when we look at the strategies and tactics used by some of the world’s most extraordinary people.

Famous Desks and What We Can Learn

Today’s infographic comes from the Pens.com, and it highlights the work habits, routines, and desks from extraordinary people like Albert Einstein, Ernest Hemingway, Arianna Huffington, Elon Musk, and Mark Zuckerberg.

Let’s see what we can take away from these examples:

What Can We Learn From the Desks of Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg?

Each approach above is unique – and each set of tactics helps that extraordinary person in getting closer to reaching their objective.

Lessons from the Greats

Here are some of our favorite lessons that we thought were the most tangible:

Mark Zuckerberg
Consistent with his grey t-shirt and jeans approach to his wardrobe, Zucks also keeps his workspace simple. He doesn’t have an office, and instead works with the same desk setup as every other Facebook employee.

Lesson: As a leader, the way you dress and set up your work environment also communicates your values to the organization and the outside world. Mark Zuckerberg keeps his environment simple to help him focus on the bigger problems, and this vision shines through crystal clear to inspire the people around him.

Elon Musk
At the Tesla office, Elon Musk set his desk up at the end of the Model X assembly line so he could personally inspect each finished vehicle.

Lesson: When doing something bold and visionary, there must be constant attention to detail to ensure that the end product meshes with the vision. Elon could have put his desk somewhere with a nice view, or in a corner office. Instead, by setting up his desk in this strategic position, it gave him assurance that the vehicles coming off the line were going to meet his uncompromising quality standards.

Albert Einstein
Einstein believed that cluttered desks were the sign of a cluttered brain, with lots of things going on. As such, he wondered what was going on in the brains of people with perfectly tidy workspaces!

Einstein also thought that combining unrelated concepts to generate new, creative ideas was a secret of genius.

Lesson: Studies have shown that messy desks are linked to creativity – something that Einstein needed when solving “outside the box” physics problems like relativity.

Arianna Huffington
For anyone that has read her book, Sleep Revolution, it’s clear Arianna Huffington believes that people are generally quite sleep-deprived. For these reasons, she encourages naps to boost productivity in the workplace.

Lesson: Arianna Huffington has “owned” the discussion around sleep, and how proper habits can help with work productivity. It’s no surprise she walks the talk, as well.

Ernest Hemingway
Hemingway thought he did his best work standing up, and he also kept a tally of his daily word count in front of him.

Lesson: While studies show working while standing up can enhance productivity by 10% – more importantly, Hemingway did what works best for him, even though it was unconventional. He also knew that monitoring his most important KPI, and keeping that metric right in front of him, would allow him to best gauge his progress on achieving his vision.

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Demographics

Mapped: Population Growth by Region (1900-2050F)

In this visualization, we map the populations of major regions at three different points in time: 1900, 2000, and 2050 (forecasted).

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Map of Population Growth by Region

Mapping Population Growth by Region

This was originally posted on our Voronoi app. Download the app for free on iOS or Android and discover incredible data-driven charts from a variety of trusted sources.

In fewer than 50 years, the world population has doubled in size, jumping from 4 to 8 billion.

In this visualization, we map the populations of major regions at three different points in time: 1900, 2000, and 2050 (forecasted). Figures come from Our World in Data as of March 2023, using the United Nations medium-fertility scenario.

 

 

Population by Continent (1900-2050F)

Asia was the biggest driver of global population growth over the course of the 20th century. In fact, the continent’s population grew by 2.8 billion people from 1900 to 2000, compared to just 680 million from the second on our list, Africa.

Region190020002050F
Asia931,021,4183,735,089,7755,291,555,919
Africa138,752,199818,952,3742,485,135,689
Europe406,610,221727,917,165704,398,730
North America104,231,973486,364,446679,488,449
South America41,330,704349,634,344491,078,697
Oceania5,936,61531,223,13357,834,753
World 🌐1,627,883,1306,149,181,2379,709,492,237

China was the main source of Asia’s population expansion, though its population growth has slowed in recent years. That’s why in 2023, India surpassed China to become the world’s most populous country.

Southeast Asian countries like the Philippines and Indonesia have also been big drivers of Asia’s population boom to this point.

The Future: Africa to Hit 2.5 Billion by 2050

Under the UN’s medium-fertility scenario (all countries converge at a birthrate of 1.85 children per woman by 2050), Africa will solidify its place as the world’s second most populous region.

Three countries—Nigeria, Ethiopia, and Egypt—will account for roughly 30% of that 2.5 billion population figure.

Meanwhile, both North America and South America are expected to see a slowdown in population growth, while Europe is the only region that will shrink by 2050.

A century ago, Europe’s population was close to 30% of the world total. Today, that figure stands at less than 10%.

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