HTSAS Lecture 5
If you translate all of Thiel’s advice about developing a product and going on to enter a market to your own life, you get decent life advice for free. After all, you can certainly consider yourself a product that you’ve been improving and perfecting from the very start, with every bit of knowledge and skill you’ve accrued up to this point. (You can even take this metaphor further since much of your knowledge and personality are a result of the people who interact with you, who are your “users” from whom you receive feedback. (This is a really rough metaphor)).
While the idea that you should be different from others in order to have an impact is a cliche piece of advice, Thiel backs it up even more with his ideas about monopolizing markets. Globalization (going from 1 to n) certainly has its merits, but it is the innovation going from zero to 1 ideas that will add real value to the world. People, whose greatest products are arguably themselves, should not follow well-beaten roads and add just one more to n, but they should try to make themselves ever more novel. Thiel is, in a way, telling us to ignore what other people say about traditional paths and aim to be an order of magnitude better. (To note, one of the easiest and best ways to do this is arguably through startups).
I want to extend this analysis to a specific example. The typical pre-med path seems to be a fairly typical example of a traditional path, and there are two ways of looking at it. If you want to practice medicine, you basically have to follow some kind of traditional path (MD, DO, RN, etc) mainly because of legal reasons. But if you are like me and want to get an MD for the sole purpose of making a greater impact on the healthcare industry, you are sorely missing an opportunity to go from zero to one. Of course, people respect practicing physicians more in the industry, but that has certainly not stopped many successful health entrepreneurs. This seems to be a textbook example in which following the norm can seem to provide some kind of safety net when it can really potentially end up as four years better spent actually doing the startup.
