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Comment by pzqmpzqm | Hacker News Reader

The first time I read Zero to One by Peter Thiel, I was a bit miffed. Stupid shit stated poorly. The second time, inartful puffery stated overly plainly. The third time, individual brilliance stated clearly.

Many replies here would do well to read, re-read, and re-re-read with an introspective mindset. This is perhaps the best quality material I have seen from pg for quite some time. Its clarity is brilliant and the thing I liked most was the second, and to me unexpected section, full of the reasons haters gonna hate.

I speak only for myself, and this is a throwaway, so nothing personal is at stake. This is a very lucid and precise examination of the fine controls at stake in writing. Their natural tension, the details of qualification. In my opinion, which may be trash, who knows, this will be cited for years to come because it is, in fact, true.

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The ideas in Zero to One are not new and can be summarized in a few paragraphs. As with basically every other book/essay/speech written by a financially-successful person, it is over-valued simply because its author is good at making money.

That said, it is certainly better than your typical business book - but that isn't saying much.

We will agree to disagree, I suppose. For you things are simple, and for me they are not. For me, some thinking in Thiel’s book was absolute heresy hiding in plain sight. I suppose we could argue over your concept of over-valued, but I have no interest in doing so.

All self improvement books (and by self improvement i mean books that claim to tell you some secret of value, i.e. i'm including business advice or drivel like the black swan) have at most 2-3 good ideas, mostly common sense, that they repeat in different forms until the book is thick enough to get sold as a book.

That's the market. You wouldn't pay for a short essay that tells you the same ideas in 2000 words but never repeats itself would you?

And that's before considering whether those 2-3 ideas are even worth the trouble.

Sure, I agree, but Thiel hardly needs the money from a self-help book. He seems to have chosen the book format in order to access the market that you described, though I feel like he’s smart enough to have put out a more significant product. IIRC he went on an interview tour promoting the book, so I think it was mostly to get his ideas out there.

In any case, it’s actually just an edited collection of lecture notes from his class on startups. Thus the length and repetitiveness. That’s fine and I wouldn’t expect an undergraduate course to deliver some radical new brilliant theory, but some people have certainly received it that way...

Thiel may just be educating his next batch of products (he produces startups, right?) and charging for the book because he's after all a business man and why not do it at zero cost or a small positive.

Zero to One was very contrarian at the time it was published. The majority of the start-up world was obsessed with lean and thought ideas were so cheap that you should try giving them away.

It is brilliant because it is brilliant and if you read 3 times and can’t see the brilliance, then....

Just stating that something is good doesn’t make it good, even though people might believe it.

We have a book, which was written quite a long time ago, filled with just utter nonsense. According to PG it is useful writing. It hits on all his points. It is much easier to be persuasive/useful when only you have the light, but when sun is out, you just one of em.

You would do well to follow pg’s advice. Your post doesn’t make sense to me and isn’t very coherent.

Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar.

Sometimes a banal reply is just a banal reply.

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