It's good to test yourself and develop your talents and ambitions as fully as you can and achieve greater success; but I think success is the feeling you get from a job well done, and the key thing is to do the work.
Peter ThielRead
A conventional truth can be important - it's essential to learn elementary mathematics, for example - but it won't give you an edge. It's not a secret.
Interpretation
Basic knowledge is necessary but not sufficient for success.
In this quote, Peter Thiel emphasizes the distinction between conventional knowledge and the innovative thinking that sets a person apart. While fundamental skills, like elementary mathematics, are essential for a solid foundation, they do not necessarily confer a competitive advantage in today's complex and dynamic world; true success often requires unique insights and creative approaches beyond established truths.
In practice
In a presentation about entrepreneurship, one could reference this quote to highlight the value of innovative thinking.
It's good to test yourself and develop your talents and ambitions as fully as you can and achieve greater success; but I think success is the feeling you get from a job well done, and the key thing is to do the work.
The first question we would ask if aliens landed on this planet is not, 'What does this mean for the economy or jobs?' It would be, 'Are they friendly or unfriendly?'
People working on bigger ideas on a more protracted timeline will be more on the stealth side. They arenβt releasing new PR announcements every day. The bigger the secret and the likelier it is that you alone have it, the more time you have to execute. There may be far more people going after hard secrets than we think.
What is it about our society where anyone who does not have Asperger's gets talked out of their heterodox ideas?
Every time you write an email, it is in the public domain. There are all these ways where security is not as good as people believe.
Creating value isn't enough - you also need to capture some of the value you create.
I can find in my undergraduate classes, bright students who do not know that the stars rise and set at night, or even that the Sun is a star.
The important thing is not so much that every child should be taught, as that every child should be given the wish to learn.
When the child begins to think and to make use of the written language to express his rudimentary thinking, he is ready for elementary work; and this fitness is a question not of age or other incidental circumstance but of mental maturity.
To teach a man how he may learn to grow independently, and for himself, is perhaps the greatest service that one man can do another.
It is better to teach a few things perfectly than many things indifferently...
A child rightly trained may be a world-wide blessing, with an influence reaching onward to eternal years. But a neglected or misdirected directed child may live to blight and blast mankind, and leave influences of evil which shall roll on in increasing volume till they plunge into the gulf of eternal perdition.
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