[ . . . He soon became a wildly successful serial entrepreneur and investor, starting and leading Paypal beginning in 1998. This company defined a new era of fast and secure online commerce. He followed Paypal with Palantir Technologies, a company that has empowered human analysts in fields as disparate as national security and global finance. He has profited as a venture capitalist, investing as a partner with Founders Fund in Facebook, LinkedIn, Yelp, SpaceX, and Airbnb among others. Thiel is also a notable philanthropist. He has ignited national debate with one of his most important philanthropic projects, the Thiel Fellowship. This fellowship pays young people to leave college to pursue a passion or ambition. Another project, the Thiel Foundation, works to advance technological progress and long-term thinking about the future. ... [If youve read this much, I suggest you just link to the full article! :) ] In short, building the future requires a coherent, compelling, encompassing vision of it and a plan to reach for it. We cannot do that with a life that “looks like a portfolio,” with dozens of equal options kept in reserve. To build the future, Thiel argues, means focusing on executing a specific plan and its specific demands. Unfortunately, much of our modern educational system works against these goals. Thiel writes: Our schools teach the opposite: institutionalized education traffics in a kind of homogenized, generic knowledge. Everybody who passes through the American school system learns not to think in power law terms. Every high school course period lasts 45 minutes whatever the subject. Every student proceeds at a similar pace. At college, model students obsessively hedge their futures by assembling a suite of exotic and minor skills. Every university believes in “excellence,” and hundred-page course catalogs arranged alphabetically according to arbitrary departments of knowledge seem designed to reassure you that “it doesn’t matter what you do, as long as you do it well.” That is completely false. It does matter what you do. You should focus relentlessly on something you’re good at doing, but before that you must think hard about whether it will be valuable in the future. He is not arguing for narrow specialization per se, nor is he dismissing the value of a broad education in other spheres.What he is arguing, rather, is that, if the goal of America’s primary schooling is to prepare students for the workforce, successful workers will need to have a valuable skill that the student pursues to a level of excellence, or a compelling problem they are working directly towards solving. Imagination is a critical component to this definite optimism. Thiel finds imagination lacking in America for a reason: the death of “secrets,” or undiscovered knowledge, uninvented tools. He writes, “Contrarian thinking doesn’t make any sense unless the world still has secrets left to give up.” But for Thiel, that belief in undiscovered knowledge has waned. Two hundred years ago, there were still unmapped places to go and this oriented our thoughts about the unknown. But the concept of adventure slowly died as those blank spaces on the world map were filled in. There is a sense that there is nothing left to learn. The illusion of perfect flatness and globalization has convinced rising generations that all the low hanging fruit have been plucked, and that smart and hungry kids from elsewhere are vacuuming up all of the good ideas. Others will build the future; perhaps we can just charge them rent. Better to never make a mistake in life, to conform and be safe, rather than dedicate your life to something that no one else believes in. As Thiel writes, “The prospect of being lonely and wrong can be unbearable.” It can be so unbearable that today the life of a contrarian startup founder often only attracts oddballs. Thiel’s “Paypal Mafia” was a team of strange, eccentric, and gifted people. They were obsessed with creating a digital currency that individuals—not governments—would control. According to Thiel, “Of the six people who started PayPal, four had built bombs in high school. Five were just 23 years old— or younger. Four of us had been born outside the United States. Three had escaped here from communist countries.” But in theory the work of building the future is open to everyone. “A great company is a conspiracy to change the world,” Thiel writes. A successful conspiracy to change the world requires only a “secret,” a plan, and a small group of people brought together by a founder. Not everyone can be a founder of a multibillion-dollar technology startup, but everyone can be a founder in the small worlds around us that are in need of our work and service. That requires rejecting the kind of “indefinite optimism” that has become orthodoxy in our schools, industries, and political institutions. Thiel exhorts us, “Only by seeing our world anew, as fresh and strange as it was to the ancients who saw it first, can we both re-create it and preserve it for the future.” Zero to One is ostensibly about startups —but in the end, it is really about how to improve the world we find ourselves in. There are secrets left for us still.] - See more at: mercatornet/articles/view/a_guide_to_building_the_future_from_the_founder_of_paypal#sthash.cPl8Mk9B.dpuf
Posted on: Fri, 12 Dec 2014 03:36:15 +0000
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