We ordered a box of Peter Thiel’s new book Zero to One for the Praxis participants. I pulled out a copy Wednesday night to get a flavor before I hit the pillow. Three and a half hours and the full 195 pages later I couldn’t fall asleep even though it was 2 AM, well past my usual bedtime. There were too many good ideas in the book and I’m still ruminating on it.
I highly recommend it. Here are a few quotes to whet your appetite…
“Elite students climb confidently until they reach a level of competition sufficiently intense to beat their dreams out of them.”
“All Rhodes Scholars had a great future in their past.”
“By the time a student gets to college, he’s spent a decade curating a bewilderingly diverse resume to prepare for a completely unknowable future. Come what may, he’s prepared – for nothing in particular.”
“…institutionalized education traffics in a kind of homogenized, generic knowledge.”
“But life is not a portfolio: not for a startup founder, and not for any individual. An entrepreneur cannot “diversify” herself: you cannot run dozens of companies at the same time and then hope that one of them works out well.”
“[A]n individual cannot diversify his own life by keeping dozens of equally possible careers in ready reserve.”
“The most important things are singular.”
September 19, 2014
