Peter Thiel’s Unorthodox Management Philosophy of Extreme Focus
blog.idonethis.com
blog.idonethis.com
> "Successful people become successful despite their methods, not because of them."
I think most of these articles mix correlation with causation.
A better article would state this: to be successful be an upper middle class white male whose parents can afford to send you to Stanford before one of the greatest bull runs in economic history happens in California. Now attribute success to personal habits which have fuck all to do with anything.
These types of articles are complete fucking jokes. Fundamental attribution at work people.
Beware breathless entrepreneurship bullshit - there is oh so much of it.
Next you'll be telling me that getting a mustache makes me Stalin.
You forgot to mention "born in the USA" which excludes at least as many people as any other thing you've listed.
Being alive today is another important factor. 125 billion people have ever lived - it's just sheer luck that one is born today at all.
Hell there were 250 million sperm at conception and by sheer accident each and everyone of us was born - I'm amazed any one of us is even around.
There are a thousand Thiels born everyday. Most are fucked by being born into poverty - of those that aren't - their success is separated by mere path dependent chance.
Humans are similar. Situations aren't.
Just kidding, I love him, too.
I'm always amazed how people talk about the SV startup community as if it is some sort of equal opportunity venture. These people become founders and meet VCs because of the connections their family has and the connections their school has given them. Whenever I see a specific former boss asked their key to success and they say some super high level touchey feely crap and not "well, my dad knows a bunch of VCs and basically talked them into funding us". Its basically the same as Republican's telling you how hard they worked to get where they are when really they were born on third base and think they hit a triple.
It is this phenomena under which the conservatives, republican party, libertarians, and the concept of meritocracy can exist and be honestly entertained and adopted by seemingly well adjusted people. To anyone aware of this bias the preceding philosophies verge on the psychopathic.
On following advice: if it's not listed as a series of facts, it's probably bullshit.
Thiel is chock full of this BS, and his success should be disregarded as anything other than the statistical anomaly that it was.
Being anti-Thiel is not a shortcut to actually evaluating something on its own merits.
http://www.quora.com/PayPal/What-strong-beliefs-on-culture-f...
The main problem with a single-priority system is the question of who sets the priority. If the employee is autonomous and trusted (e.g. open allocation) it can work. In a traditional managed environment, you already start out with 2 priority sets: the manager's goals, and the employee's career interests.
In what ways in Thiel full of BS?
In what ways is this type of thinking myopic and detrimental?
In what situations would you advise someone not to spend their time working on the most important thing they could be doing?
Focusing on growing one of those metrics can result in the minimization of others -
Ryan Howard, The Office, S07E09
I know what you mean, but every time someone says something like this, that quote comes to mind.
Alternately, since you're obviously a ninja rockstar, you could show us all what a great entrepreneur you can be by disregarding his advice.
(SpaceX + Tesla) > (losing huge amounts of investors' money on hubristic hedge fund bets + lucky VC investments).
As far as I can tell Thiel's successes are mostly based on tapping his social network. White guys already know how to do that, in theory.
Wow, dammed if he does and damned if he doesn't in your eyes.
If he picks a winner it's luck, if he picks a loser, then no luck involved, that was all him.
As someone who sits on the side of trying to pick the winners i can assure you it's extremely hard and alot of work goes into it.
You may not like Peter, but let's try to give some credit where credit is due. He's clearly done many things right in his life.
His idea's might not be worth dismissing out of hand.
> As far as I can tell Thiel's successes are mostly based on tapping his social network. White guys already know how to do that, in theory
Classy
I never did any such thing:).
I happen to think that both men are worthy of praise.
I do feel the same as you that Elon's accomplishments are more impressive.
Back to your original plea
> let's see more Elon Musk worship, less Peter Thiel worship.
We can have both. Both men have done some pretty impressive things:)
Multitasking is a myth on one level, but so is this hyperfocus. There must be room for task switching, for thoughts, for interrupts, and for breathing.
Then it may (or may not) become your #1 priority!
> If you change your focus to #4, isn't that just multitasking?
No, because you have to question which should be the new #1 priority: the old #4 or the old #1? You can still only do one thing at a time; we only have one body and one brain[1].
[1] As of 2012, that is!
I picture my todo list as heirarchical. Like, "grow my business" might be a top level entry... but beneath that, I've got, say, "improve provisioning automation," "Improve marketing," "setup backups," "create new services," then, say, under "improve provisioning automation" then we start seeing, you know, actual programs I could work on.
But, my point is, "One thing" if you don't specify how far up or down that hierarchical list, really can mean a billion things. I mean, even once I have the hierarchical list up, many tasks help with more than one higher level task. I mean, backups, for my own stuff, could improve marketing, but the way I'm implementing backups, I can sell space to people that aren't my current customers, so it's also a new service.
For example, suppose the next most important thing for your business to do is to reduce marketing spend. you make that someone's goal, and that person focuses on reducing CPA for several weeks. obviously, you don't want this person to divert their time to answer support emails--you want them focused on saving your company boatloads of money.
Ex: Say you are working on just one feature for your company's software.
Most people, including myself, aren't able to sit for 8-10 hours a day in front of the computer working on just one problem. Your brain turns to goo, you start getting easily distracted and your productivity drops through the floor. I'd say at most I can sit in front of a debugger for 3 hours, and that's on particularly good day.
People need to be able to switch their brains to other work when they get overwhelmed or get stuck.
More interesting is the opposite problem of having too many things to do. At some point you never get to focus on any one of feature and you end up not getting anywhere.
Which is why failing upward is such an unsuccessful career strategy. I'm with Dogbert on this one.
"I'll purposefully and intentionally reduce my focus from 100% to 99.999% this year by helping you out IF in exchange you'll do something that improves my efficiency in my remaining 99.999% of the time by around a factor of one ten-thousandth"
Its a market driven approach. Plenty of game theory behind it, too.
Also, Apple as a company seems to do a good job of staying focused on what they think is key.
Thoughts?
I do agree that corporate multitasking often creates mediocrity-- that's painfully obvious-- but you can't actually get singular focus from people unless you give them autonomy. Otherwise, they're already serving 2 masters (their boss's assignments, and their long-term career interests which include getting out from under that boss's thumb) from the gate. So, "one thing only" really only works in an open-allocation environment, in which case you are by definition giving people the authority to decide for themselves if they prefer to take a one-thing-only laser-focus or a more multi-pronged approach. Which makes a hell of a lot of sense, actually, because everyone's different.
The problem with corporate multitasking is that it comes out of a lack of autonomy-- from requirements that come in from all sides and quickly leave the worker overwhelmed not necessarily with the amount of work (although that can be a problem, too) but with the total lack of coherence.
I've found that a number of my bosses have been quite understanding about this sort of thing. (I'm terribly lucky.) I have been able to pitch a new idea and get the nod to work on it. Granted, I've also never done the singular focus thing; I'm still required to pitch in with bug work and sometimes I'm the right person to ask for some random but important distraction.
On the other hand, they are a single point of failure. When someone succeeds from outside in pushing the dictator out, chaos ensues. Some will thrive under the ensuing autonomy as they see room to advance their own agenda, but many of the most talented will move on if they perceive that the team is in a degraded state. Worst of all, being a trusted minion of the prior dictator leaves you with a suspect role when a new dictator grabs the throne. Experiencing this is somewhat painful and complicates your weighted decision heuristic for what to do with the rest of your life. Will things get better? How long do I wait? Could I possibly reinvent myself to the degree that e.g. patio11 was able? etc.
Another problem is that it's a matter of framing, which is subjective. One guy, if asked to describe what one thing he did this year, might say, "One thing? Oh, god, I did zero things, because I was too busy doing a million things. I spent the first quarter putting out fires while we were scaling up the WhizBar, then I spent a few months looking over the call center's shoulder trying to figure out what they were doing to kill the DoodleBlat after we rolled out the Bilbo feature to production. At the same time we were debugging that thing that made flames shoot out of the Bilbo every Thursday night in the Central Time Zone during Daylight Savings Time. Then I was on that planning committee helping do traffic projections. And of course Q3 was when we did all the work to make the AcmeCorp deal actually work. Ask me about Q4 when it's over because frankly right now I don't even know what I'm doing this afternoon."
The same guy with a different manner of presenting himself might say, "I kept the servers alive all year, asshole. Now get out of my way or they're gonna die while I'm talking to you."