Zero to One by Peter Thiel EPUB & PDF – eBook Details Online
- Status: Available for Free Download
- Author: Peter Thiel, Blake Masters
- Publish Date: September 16, 2014
- Genre: Business
- Language: English
- Format: PDF / EPUB
- Size: 2.52 MB
- Pages: 224
- Price: Free
THE CHALLENGE OF THE FUTURE
WHENEVER I INTERVIEW someone for a job, I like to ask this question: “What
important truth do very few people agree with you on?”
This question sounds easy because it’s straightforward. Actually, it’s very hard to
answer. It’s intellectually difficult because the knowledge that everyone is taught in
school is by definition agreed upon. And it’s psychologically difficult because anyone
trying to answer must say something she knows to be unpopular. Brilliant thinking
is rare, but courage is in even shorter supply than genius.
Most commonly, I hear answers like the following:
“Our educational system is broken and urgently needs to be fixed.”
“America is exceptional.”
“There is no God.”
Those are bad answers. The first and the second statements might be true, but
many people already agree with them. The third statement simply takes one side in
a familiar debate. A good answer takes the following form: “Most people believe in
x, but the truth is the opposite of x.” I’ll give my own answer later in this chapter.
What does this contrarian question have to do with the future? In the most
minimal sense, the future is simply the set of all moments yet to come. But what
makes the future distinctive and important isn’t that it hasn’t happened yet, but
rather that it will be a time when the world looks different from today. In this sense,
if nothing about our society changes for the next 100 years, then the future is over
100 years away.
If things change radically in the next decade, then the future is
nearly at hand. No one can predict the future exactly, but we know two things: it’s
going to be different, and it must be rooted in today’s world. Most answers to the
contrarian question are different ways of seeing the present; good answers are as
close as we can come to looking into the future.
ZERO TO ONE: THE FUTURE OF PROGRESS
When we think about the future, we hope for a future of progress. That progress can
take one of two forms. Horizontal or extensive progress means copying things that
work—going from 1 to n. Horizontal progress is easy to imagine because we already
know what it looks like. Vertical or intensive progress means doing new things—
going from 0 to 1. Vertical progress is harder to imagine because it requires doing
something nobody else has ever done. If you take one typewriter and build 100, you
have made horizontal progress. If you have a typewriter and build a word processor,
you have made vertical progress.
At the macro level, the single word for horizontal progress is globalization—
taking things that work somewhere and making them work everywhere. China is
the paradigmatic example of globalization; its 20-year plan is to become like the
United States is today. The Chinese have been straightforwardly copying everything
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