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
Higher education is the place where people who had big plans in high school get stuck in fierce rivalries with equally smart peers over conventional careers like management consulting and investment banking. For the privilege of being turned into conformists, students (or their families) pay hundreds of thousands of dollars in skyrocketing tuition that continues to outpace inflation. Why are we doing this to ourselves?
Interpretation
What this quote means
The quote critiques higher education, highlighting the competition and conformity it fosters among students.
Peter Thiel is questioning the societal values surrounding higher education, pointing out how it often leads students to engage in intense rivalries for traditional careers, while costing them and their families immense financial burdens. He raises a vital concern about the purpose of education and challenges the status quo by urging us to reflect on our choices and the resulting consequences. Thiel's perspective invites us to reconsider whether the conventional path of higher education truly prepares individuals for success or merely conforms them to societal expectations.
Themes
Higher EducationCompetitionConformitySocietyTuition
In practice
Example use cases
In a discussion on educational reform, one might reference this quote to highlight the issues with traditional educational paths.
More from Peter Thiel
All quotes →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?'
Peter ThielRead
People working on bigger ideas on a more protracted timeline will be more on the stealth side. They aren’t 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.
Peter ThielRead
What is it about our society where anyone who does not have Asperger's gets talked out of their heterodox ideas?
Peter ThielRead
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.
Peter ThielRead
Creating value isn't enough - you also need to capture some of the value you create.
Peter ThielRead
Similar quotes
If children have interest, then Education happens
Sugata MitraRead
Children not only have to learn what their parents learned in school, but also have to learn how to learn. This has to be recognized as a new problem which is only partly solved.
Margaret MeadRead
Free curiosity is of more value in learning than harsh discipline.
Saint AugustineRead
I engage my subjects in conversation, patterned after psychiatric questioning, with the aim of discovering something about the reasoning underlying their right but especially their wrong answers.
Jean PiagetRead
Pretending is not just play. Pretending is imagined possibility. Pretending, or acting, is a very valuable life skill and we do it all the time.
Meryl StreepRead
Today it is time for every child to have a right to life, right to freedom, right to health, right to education, safety, the right to dignity, right to equality, and right to peace.
Kailash SatyarthiRead