Omar Usman – 3 Things I Learned from Zero to One Peter Thiel
AI: Summary ©
The founder of PayPal and other companies emphasized the importance of finding the best practices and building upon what is already there in order to find the best answers to the contrarian question. The most powerful pattern in finding the right answers is identifying the true cause of motivation and building monopolies, rather than just money and gains. The importance of competition and empowerment is emphasized, as technology is seen as vital in a globalized world and companies need to blend the human and technology elements.
AI: Summary ©
In this video, I'm sharing 3 things I
learned from the book 0 to 1 by
Peter Thiel. Peter Thiel was the famous billionaire
founder of PayPal and other of other companies.
And the book 0 to 1 is a
book about innovation. It's a book about how
to think about the future. And the title
to me was really interesting.
He says, we normally think about going from
1 to n, meaning one to any other
variable.
And when we go from 1 to any
other variable, meaning innovating, iterating, getting to, you
know, a higher level,
What we're doing is we're building upon what's
already there. We're looking for best practices.
He says best practices lead to dead ends,
but the best pads are those that are
untried. Hence, the title 0 to 1. Because
when you go from 0 to 1, you're
building something completely brand new. Ace says that
the most powerful pattern that he's found in
successful people
is their ability to find and extract value
from places that was completely unexpected. And the
way that they're able to do this is
by approaching things from a principle based perspective
instead of formulaic perspective. You know, a formula
is the best practice. A formula is here's
how things have always been done. But the
other way, the zero to one way is
looking for looking for things that haven't maybe
been tried, they haven't been tested, and being
the one that kind of unearths
that. So the first thing that I learned
was it was a it's a really a
reflective question that is, what is my answer
to the contrarian question?
Peter Thiel says that in job interviews, he
always asks people, what's your answer to the
contrarian question?
Meaning, what are you convinced of so strongly
that other people think is not true? Or
what are most people convinced of as true
that you think is not true? He says
a lot of people give answers like, well,
I think the educational system is completely messed
up. It needs to be overhauled. And he
says, okay. Well, that might be
somewhat of a minority opinion maybe, but it's
something that a lot of people say. So
it's it's not that out of the realm
of normalcy.
And what he is looking for is someone
that's really going out on a limb on
putting a stake in their own beliefs and
in their own conviction.
Because to articulate something that's relatively accepted doesn't
take any courage.
There's a lot of brilliant people but they
don't have the courage to speak up.
The answer if you have a strong answer
to the contrarian question,
what it's displaying is both a level of
brilliance and intelligence,
but also a level of courage that most
other brilliant people might not have.
A great example of an answer to the
contrarian question is out of Dan Pink in
his TED Talk on motivation, which I'll link
to in the description below.
But Dan Pink says that we you know,
we're normally convinced
that employees are motivated by money and by
material gains, but that actually the true cause
of motivation, the true cause of motivation in
the workplace
is autonomy, mastery, and purpose,
and things that aren't necessarily tied to finances.
And so he's saying that here's what most
people believe, but here's what I believe instead.
The reason that this is important
is because
to understand the future, we have to understand
the past. The reason that the Contrarian Question
is important is it is because it gives
us a different way of assessing the present
and the past.
And that helps to shape the future. You
know, if we if we go back and
we say, well, what are the conventional beliefs
that might need to be challenged? We can
always look back at things that were popular.
For example,
the dotcom bust of the late nineties. We
know what the conventional thinking was, but we
see later that it was a bubble. And
it's always easy to identify the bubble in
hindsight.
The contrarian is the one who's able to
identify that at the time that it's actually
happening, and that's something that's really valuable.
The trick though is making sure that you're
not just looking for, well, let me find
what everyone thinks is true, and just automatically
take a contrarian approach for the sake of
being contrarian.
The true goal, he says, is to actually
it's not that type of thought, but it's
developing your own independent thought of everybody else.
The second lesson I learned was that competition
is an ideology.
Look for look for building monopolies instead. Now
when you understand competition is an ideology, see
competition is assumed to be the way that
we do things. So we we talk in
these war metaphors all the time. We have
headhunters, and we're gonna, you know, make a
killing on this, and there's competition and that.
And he says it's ingrained in us from
an early age. So for example, in school
we're competing with one another over our class
ranking and our grades, and you know, who's
smarter than who, and who gets into what
college. Then when we get into higher education,
it's smart people competing with other smart people
very fiercely
over getting into traditional jobs like investment banking
or management consulting or something else. And we
we end up going through a lot of
energy, a lot of money, and a lot
of effort
to basically in the long run become conformist
as he says. He says a different way
of looking at it is that of creating
a monopoly.
And that might sound really strange because a
monopoly has like a very negative undertone to
it. But really what he's talking about is
something that we find discussed in the book
Blue Ocean Strategy if you're familiar with that.
And the idea of the book is this,
is that we should stop, you know, competing
for market share over the same thing
and instead create, you know, the red ocean.
We should instead create a blue ocean where
we're the only thing we dominate or create
a new market that's not already there. If
you want an example, think about when Gatorade
first came out onto the market. There were
no other sports drinks, there was no category,
they created the category,
and therefore they were able to dominate it.
He gives an example of why this
type of competition, or that red ocean competition
is a bad thing.
And he says he gives an example of
his 3 year span in in the, you
know, from 2010 to 2013 or somewhere in
there. And he says at the beginning,
Google and Microsoft
each individually had a higher market cap than
Apple did, But what they were doing is
they weren't engrossed in competition with one another.
So it's Chrome OS versus Windows OS. The
Chrome Browser versus Internet Explorer. Microsoft Office versus
Google Docs and on and on and on.
And in that 3 year time frame where
they're basically just creating
and knocking off one another's products, Google search,
Bing you know, Bing search, so on and
so forth,
Apple ended up having at the end of
3 years a higher market cap than Google
and Microsoft combined.
And one of the reasons for that is
what he calls the last mover advantage.
And the last mover advantage goes like this.
He gives the example of Steve Jobs. He
says when the Ipod came out,
everyone said, oh, that's cute. That's a nice
accessory for Macintosh users.
But what they weren't seeing was that this
was his foray
into portable
devices in a post PC world. And when
you look at it from that perspective and
you see the
the product line that Apple's released and the
trajectory that they've gone down since then, it
becomes very clear. And because they're the last
mover in that category, they dominate the market.
I mean if they they created that category,
they're the last ones standing because they are
so much better than everybody else. And that's
what lets them dominate,
that's what's better than just being in a
competition fighting over percentage points with somebody else.
The third lesson that I learned was the
importance of empowering people and not making them
obsolete. And this is perhaps an answer as
well to the contrarian question.
Peter Thiel says that technology is not going
to make people obsolete.
He says technology is actually something that's very
vital in a globalizing world because without technology
we won't have sustainable resources and things of
that nature, but people's fear always is that
technology is going to displace people and he
says that that's not the case. There There's
certain things that a computer can do better
than a human can do. So a computer
might be able to identify patterns
in a set of data better than a
human being might, but it takes a human
being to be able to compare that pattern
to other patterns, and to be able to
look and figure out a big picture or
look for different insights in that data. There's
still gonna be human element to doing that.
He says the path forward
is understanding how technology and humans complement one
another, and he gives the example of LinkedIn.
See what LinkedIn did, it didn't replace recruiters.
It didn't replace human resources,
but what it did was it gave them
a better way of doing their job. So
now a recruiter is able to go through,
they're able to search and filter candidates by
keywords, by the amount of experience, and it
also gives job seekers or employees
a way of managing their personal brand online
in a much more effective way than maybe,
you know, sending out resumes to 100 of
different companies at one time. But it's it's
combining the human element along with the technology
that gives us the best thing. If they
had come in and tried to just replace
recruiters or replace that HR process,
it probably would have failed as a product.
But it succeeds because it's found a way
to blend the 2 together. That's 3 things
I learned from the book 0 to 1
by Peter Thiel. If you like the video,
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that you want me to do in this
format, the 3 things I learned, please leave
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