Or you can radically improve an existing solution: once you’re 10x better, you escape competition. - Peter Thiel

once you’re 10x better, you escape competition.

[The media] never takes [Trump] seriously, but it always takes him literally. I think a lot of the voters who vote for Trump take Trump seriously, but not literally.

Finance epitomizes indefinite thinking because it’s the only way to make money when you have no idea how to create wealth. If they don’t go to law school, bright college graduates head to Wall Street precisely because they have no real plan for their careers. And once they arrive at Goldman, they find that even inside finance, everything is indefinite. It’s still optimistic — you wouldn’t play in the markets if you expected to lose — but the fundamental tenet is that the market is random; you can’t know anything specific or substantive; diversification becomes supremely important.

The engineer’s grail is a product great enough that “it sells itself.” But anyone who would actually say this about a real product must be lying: either he’s delusional (lying to himself) or he’s selling something (and thereby contradicting himself).