Peter Thiel: Find a frontier and go for it
This year PayPal founder and visionary entrepreneur Peter Thiel offered a new class at Stanford called “Computer Science 183: Startup.” It was intended to provide entrepreneurs with a high-level strategic overview of the challenges they face and must overcome, to succeed not only in business but in advancing human progress - in an era when real progress has, in fact, been slowing down for decades.
Stanford law student Blake Masters attended the course and offered detailed essay-style notes from all 18 courses. They’re well worth reading. Check out the first one, “The Challenge of the Future,” for a taste of Thiel’s brand of visionary teaching.
Or you can read a summary of the ten major points in article form at Forbes, though this really skims the top of the trees and fails to offer sufficient context.
Here is an inspiring excerpt from Thiel’s final lecture:
There is something importantly singular about each new thing. There is a mini singularity whenever you start a company or make a key life decision. In a very real sense, the life of every person is a singularity.
The obvious question is what you should do with your singularity. The obvious answer, unfortunately, has been to follow the well-trodden path. You are constantly encouraged to play it safe and be conventional. The future, we are told, is just probabilities and statistics. You are a statistic.
But the obvious answer is wrong. That is selling yourself short. There are still many large white spaces on the map of human knowledge. You can go discover them. So do it. Get out there and fill in the blank spaces. Every single moment is a possibility to go to these new places and explore them.
There is perhaps no specific time that is necessarily right to start your company or start your life. But some times and some moments seem more auspicious than others. Now is such a moment. If we don’t take charge and usher in the future - if you don’t take charge of your life - there is the sense that no one else will.
Originally published at Mudita Journal. Please leave any comments there.