The best place to look for secrets is where no one else is looking. Most people think only in terms of what they’ve been taught; schooling itself aim… - Peter Thiel

The best place to look for secrets is where no one else is looking.

So you might ask: are there any fields that matter but haven’t been standardized and institutionalized?

Talented people don’t need to work for you; they have plenty of options. You should ask yourself a more pointed version of the question: Why would someone join your company as its 20th engineer when she could go work at Google for more money and more prestige?

. . . the bond bubble, the tech bubble, the stock bubble, the emerging markets bubble, the housing bubble. . . One by one they had all burst, and their bursting showed that they had been temporary solutions to long-term problems, maybe evasions of those problems, distractions. With so many bubbles-so many people chasing ephemera, all at the same time-it was clear that things were fundamentally not working.

Elite students climb confidently until they reach a level of competition sufficiently intense to beat their dreams out of them.