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
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.
Interpretation
Peter Thiel suggests that innovation has been stifled by environmental concerns and a fear of taking risks over the past four decades.
In this quote, Peter Thiel argues that for the past 40 years, societal norms and regulations, influenced by environmentalism and a collective aversion to risk, have created an environment where innovation is discouraged or even deemed unacceptable. He implies that these factors have contributed significantly to a stagnation in technological and industrial advancement, calling for a reevaluation of how society views and manages innovation.
In practice
This quote can be used in a discussion about the challenges of modern-day entrepreneurship.
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 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.
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.
Innovation is not born from the dream, innovation is born from the struggle
Predicting innovation is something of a self-canceling exercise: the most probable innovations are probably the least innovative.
My view is there's no bad time to innovate.
Most innovation is not done by research institutes and national laboratories. It comes from manufacturing - from companies that want to extend their product reach, improve their costs, increase their returns. What's very important is in-house research.
When you innovate, you've got to be prepared for everyone telling you you're nuts.
My definition of 'innovative' is providing value to the customer.
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