Peter Thiel, the leader of the Rebel Alliance, is a modern business legend known for being a member of the PayPal mafia, the co-founder of Palantir and his very successful investment in Facebook in 2004. But besides his great business success, his legendary status, in my eyes, doesn't come from PayPal, Palantir, or his very successful investments, it's the fact that he's not afraid to speak his mind. None of this PR bullshit, if he has something to say he says it, something I think this world desperately needs more of: People that are (brutally) honest and authentic with themselves and others.
Zero to One represents the quintessential Thiel mentality, it's concise (only around 200 pages, no beating around the bush with useless crap), it's easily digestible, and it's... (for lack of a better word) different you really get an idea of who this guy is; his irreverence, his passion, his discontent with the world... all comes out over the course of this book. A quick Google of his name definitely confirms the sort of personality that leaked between the lines.
This book has made me re-evaluate my own thinking greatly sort of freeing me from my beliefs in conventional wisdom. For anyone who is ambitious, discontent with the world around them, and relentless in the pursuit of bettering themselves should really — no really I'm deadly serious — give Zero to One a read.
Thiel's willingness to criticize widespread beliefs makes this book an invaluable source of uncommon knowledge. His critique of the conventional entrepreneurial mentality, luck, competition, stagnation... all stem from one overarching philosophy. Just think.
Our modern world is noisy. We have information constantly coming at us at all directions, subconsciously affecting what we believe, changing how we act. It's hard to find a unique perspective amidst all the shit that comes at us, it's hard to have conviction in your beliefs and as Thiel puts it it's hard to find secrets but I think holding on to those secrets through all the bullshit is equally hard if not harder. I think Thiel is encouraging or rather demanding us to think for ourselves and to believe.
Belief in secrets is an effective truth.
Only when you think about things can you make well-informed decisions for yourself of your own will.
To say that there are no secrets left today would mean that we live in a society with no hidden injustices.
But don't be so delusional to think there isn't a flipside. Having secrets can be isolating "unless you have perfectly conventional beliefs, it's rarely a good idea to tell everybody everything that you know." Only tell who you need to, and no more. A successful founder is a schemer and conspirator.
This book is quite special to me, it's helped me through times when I wasn't feeling particularly inspired or motivated. It gave me all the confirmation bias I needed to keep swimming. Being different is the only thing that pushes society forward. You'll never get credit for being different. But who cares.
Our task today is to find singular ways to create new things that will make the future not just different, but better — to go from 0 to 1. The essential first step is to think for yourself. 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.
