Omar Usman – 3 Things I Learned from Zero to One Peter Thiel

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,

please make sure you hit the thumbs up.

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that you want me to do in this

format, the 3 things I learned, please leave

a comment below. Otherwise, I'll try to see

you next week. Thanks.