I found out about Peter Thiel when watching his 2014 lecture from Y Combinator on How to start a startup back in 2020. He is a very seasoned investor and founder of many tech companies in Silicon Valley. I was very compelled by his viewpoint that competition is for losers. I had a somewhat similar thought, but worded differently in another blog post about acceptance. I recently read his book Zero to One entirely and wrote five of my best takeaways down below :
- Unhealthy competition often leads to imitation. If anything in life will have some competitive elements, we should never let ourselves lose sight of what actually matters. Rather we should ask, is the competition even worth winning?
- Do not consider business as a war, because it will make you hallucinate non-existent opportunities. It is a distraction more than anything.
- Companies are not experiments, because they begin in unique circumstances and only once. Statistics do not work when the sample size is one.
- Our voice of doubts already prevents us from searching for secrets because it means we are willing to be wrong. Being right and lonely is already hard, but being wrong and lonely is unbearable to many.
Although he describes a lot of his concepts based on his knowledge about companies and startups, I find that his work transcends very well into any areas of life. I feel like I have a better outlook on my own after reading his book and listening to his talks. Furthermore, his perspectives about secrets were very compelling to me. He mentioned how we often tell ourselves that if there is something to discover, it is likely more talented people around the whole world would have already found it. Such a statement fuels our inner voice of doubt, preventing us from even looking for secrets. This was very profound to me and it made me wonder if I ever avoided certain decisions based on this same narrative.
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