Recover From Your Education In 5 Steps With Peter Thiel ⛑(PayPal Co-Founder)
Summary of Episodes 193-199 of the With Joe Wehbe Podcast
This comes from the next podcast mini-series on Peter Thiel, and the conclusion of Nassim Taleb’s mini-series.
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5 Step Recovery From Your Education
1/ Ask yourself ‘what important truth do very few people agree with you on?’
This is PayPal Co-Founder Peter Thiel’s famous contrarian question. You must go deeper than ‘the education system is screwed’ because lots of people agree with this already.
Galileo Galilei supported heliocentrism — the model where the Earth and other planets orbit the sun. As a result, the Catholic Church imprisoned him via house arrest until his death nine years later.
Ignasz Semmelweiss was the Austro-Hungarian doctor who realised that hand-washing would save one-third of hospital deaths — he was ridiculed by the medical industry and locked in an asylum.
Most education drives consensus, obedience and the precise opposite of originality and independent thought. Remember the great Mr. Jobs and Think Different.
2/ Stop trying to copy the greats
Thiel argues that the next Zuckerburg won’t be starting a social network, the next Bill Gates won’t design computer software, and the next Jeff Bezos won’t build the ‘everything store’.
What makes the greats great is that they did something for the first time — they thought Without-The-Box. If you try too hard to copy them, (which you justify in your mind as ‘learning from them’), you won’t really learn from them.
Elon Musk laughs at Nikola Corporation, who try to compete with Tesla in the electric car market. Their lack of originality is epitomised by their name. Tesla is obviously named in honor of Nikola Tesla. Nikola took the other half…
It’s like creating a computer company and calling it ‘Banana’.
3/ Escape the need for competition. ‘Competition is for losers’
Thiel says there are two types of monopolies — companies that pretend to be monopolies (and certainly aren’t), and companies that are monopolies (and pretend they’re not).
Google wants to pretend they’re not a monopoly. Your local pizza place claims that ‘no one makes a ham and pineapple like ours’. The attempt to short-cut your way to success leads you to copy, and copying leads you to compete.
There’s only one Doorman 😜, only one Joe Rogan, only one Oprah. How can you carve a unique character?
4/ Look to take something from ‘zero to one’
According to Thiel, the first outside investor in Facebook and Co-Founder of PayPal and Palantir, innovation comes from entrepreneurship, and startups have unique advantages — Google is so big, it doesn’t need to worry about money. This gives it room to think about the long-term.
His book is called Zero to One, referring to the process of taking ‘nothing’ (zero) to ‘something’ (one), as in a startup like Facebook. Science, he argues, must start from ‘two’, that is, it needs a basic pattern to already be in place.
5/ Get ready to ignore the past
Thiel says there were four big lessons Silicon Valley learned from the famous tech bubble.
Make small advances, don’t have big visions.
Stay flexible (and unplanned)
Add incremental improvements to what the competition is offering
Focus on product, not sales
He points out that most people are best served ignoring this advice. Grand visions, Without-The-Box ideas and sales are all useful and important.
Seth Godin and Wes Kao’s altMBA was using Zoom for workshops for years before COVID-19 normalised its use. Bitcoin was radical and new and has changed the course of evolution.
Who do you know that needs to read these ideas? Help people recover from their education 🩺
🎙 Recent Episodes
Below I’ve linked to Youtube episodes.
You can also go to your preferred podcast player here like Spotify, Apple Podcasts or anywhere else you listen to podcasts.
#193: Nassim Taleb On Optionality — The No. 1 Career Skill That Everyday People Don’t Understand (17 min 8 sec) 😁 personal favorite episode!
#194: 4 Ways Nassim Taleb’s Ideas Will Give You An Edge (9 min 31 sec)
#195: Is Education An Insurance Policy? PayPal Co-Founder Peter Thiel (15 min 34 sec)
#196: Peter Thiel — 5 Reasons For The Education Bubble (17 min 30 sec)
#197: Why Peter Thiel Calls College ‘An Atheistic Church’ (10 min 36 sec)
#198: How Did ‘The Education Monopoly’ Take Away Your Ability To Think? (15 min 24 sec)
#199: Top 11 Takeaways From Peter Thiel's 'Zero To One' (Part 1 of 2) (8 min 13 sec)
🔄 Not up to these yet? See previous issues
Episodes 185-192 — on why risk-taking is more important than knowledge, and the heart of the Nassim Taleb mini-series. God I love this guy, #lecturingbirdshowtofly
Episodes 178-184 — on how idiots can beat experts. This links to a couple of very deep and meaningful ‘new year, new me’ episodes and then gets into the first of the thought leader series on Nassim Nicholas Taleb!
Episodes 171-177 — about where university is useful, the pressures on education decisions for young people and our suppression of teen entrepreneurs and the creativity of youth.
Episodes 161-170 — about the biases we put into advice and finding our direction.
Episodes 154-160 — why you need a compass, not a map, and why people say ‘one day’.
Episodes 147-153 — broad thinking about careers
Episodes 140-146 — open-mindedness and thinking, an important precursor to discussing any educational or career breakthrough concepts
Episodes 122-139 — foundational ideas about education and learning.
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🖊 Recent articles
These are on the figures in upcoming podcast episodes, including Peter Thiel and Alan Watts!
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