Peter Thiel’s Religion

The rate of technological progress is slowing. The only major exceptions are semiconductors, DNA sequencing, and communications technology. Side effects of slow growth plague the economy [...] In response, we’ve lowered our efficiency standards.

Optionality is a means to an end, not the end itself. Our obsession with optionality can backfire.

Thiel encourages people to ask themselves: “How do I become less competitive in order that I can become more successful?”

 When I left after seven months and three days, one of the lawyers down the hall from me said, ‘You know, I had no idea it was possible to escape from Alcatraz.’ Of course that was not literally true, since all you had to do was go out the front door and not come back. But psychologically this was not what people were capable of. Because their... See more

Thiel opposes the idea that luck is all-powerful. He encourages human agency and believes in the power of a single individual to bend the future to their will. Thiel believes we attribute too much to luck, which stops us from actually doing things.

After all, if people fight on social media, they won’t fight on the streets. Like a boiling kettle, we have to let out steam somewhere. Better to cool the pot on social media than in the streets. In the words of Thiel, “social media proved to be more important than it looked.”

Picking a path reduces optionality, so people stay in limbo and don’t make commitments. This language doesn’t only apply to career planning. Some students talk about marriage as the death of optionality. But life is not like options trading.

Thiel says a bad plan is better than no plan at all. Having no plan is chaotic. He supports people who trade the shiny mirage of short-termism for the calm, controlled grace of a long time horizon. Like Capablanca, they are the kinds of people who study the end-game and work backwards from there.

“Peter Thiel is a contrarian, first and foremost. You just have to remember that contrarians are usually wrong.”In an email to Ryan Holiday, Peter responded as such: “Contrarians may be mostly wrong, but when they get it right, they get it really right.”