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Rivalry causes us to overemphasize old opportunities and slavishly copy what has worked in the past.

Peter Thiel

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Peter Thiel
Age: 56
Born: 1967
Born: October 11
Banker
Chess Player
Computer Scientist
Entrepreneur
Financier
Writer
Frankfurt/Main
Peter Andreas Thiel
Opportunity
Overemphasize
Past
Slavishly
Rivalry
Copy
Copies
Opportunities
Worked
Causes

More quotes by Peter Thiel

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People don't want to believe that technology is broken. Pharmaceuticals, robotics, artificial intelligence, nanotechnology - all these areas where the progress has been a lot more limited than people think. And the question is why.
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Recruiting is a core competency for any company. It should never be outsourced.
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Competition is overrated. In practice it is quite destructive and should be avoided wherever possible. Much better than fighting for scraps in existing markets is to create and own new ones.
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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.
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For Hamlet, greatness means willingness to fight for reasons as thin as an eggshell: anyone would fight for things that matter true heroes take their personal honor so seriously they will fight for things that don’t matter.
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We might describe our world as having retail sanity, but wholesale madness.
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Under perfect competition, in the long run no company makes an economic profit.
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Customers won’t care about any particular technology unless it solves a particular problem in a superior way. And if you can’t monopolize a unique solution for a small market, you’ll be stuck with vicious competition.
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Today's 'best practices' lead to dead ends the best paths are new and untried.
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All failed companies are the same: they failed to escape competition.
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Consider the trivial but revealing hallmarks of urban hipsterdom: faux vintage photography, the handlebar mustache, and vinyl record players all hark back to an earlier time when people were still optimistic about the future. If everything worth doing has already been done, you may as well feign an allergy to achievement and become a barista.
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American government is not dominated by engineers, it is dominated by lawyers. Engineers are interested in substance and building things lawyers are interested in process and rights and getting the ideology correctly blended. And so there is sort of no really concrete plan for the future.
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If you can identify a delusional popular belief, you can find what lies hidden behind it: the contrarian truth.
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Higher education holds itself out as a kind of universal church, outside of which there is no salvation.
Peter Thiel
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Every university…seem[s] to reassure you that ‘it doesn’t matter what you do, as long as you do it well.’ That is completely false. It does matter what you do. You should focus relentlessly at something you’re good at doing, but before that you must think hard about whether it will be valuable in the future.
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If people were super-optimistic about technology there would be no reason to be pessimistic about the future.
Peter Thiel
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If you think about basic science or coming up with new theories of mathematics, these are not the kinds of things which are necessarily a well-defined market to pay people.
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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.
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In the most dysfunctional organizations, signaling that work is being done becomes a better strategy for career advancement than actually doing work (if this describes your company, you should quit now).
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I believe we are in a world where innovation in stuff was outlawed. It was basically outlawed in the last 40 years - part of it was environmentalism, part of it was risk aversion.
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