When I read Peter Thiel’s Zero to One, the chapter that had the biggest impact on me was chapter 6, ‘You Are Not a Lottery Ticket.’
The basic message of the chapter is that we tend to overestimate the role luck plays in our lives and underestimate the power of our own planning, and that this leads to self-limiting inaction on our part.
He points to several successful ‘serial’ entrepreneurs as proof that if success were mostly a matter of luck, there likely wouldn’t be anyone who could have founded multiple multi-billion-dollar companies. Afterall, how can luck replicate itself like that over and over? Instead, Thiel points to a rare characteristic those entrepreneurs have in which they possess ‘definite’ views of the future, or in other words, a clear, well-defined vision of what they want their future to look like, followed by the initiative to go out and make it happen. Thiel says this is something we can all do, and that it can give us more control over our outcomes than we might think.
You can expect the future to take a definite form or you can treat it as hazily uncertain. If you treat the future as something definite, it makes sense to understand it in advance and to work to shape it. But if you expect an indefinite future ruled by randomness, you’ll give up on trying to master it.
Peter Thiel, Zero to One
Similarly, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman published a blog post in 2019 titled “How To Be Successful,” which outlines his lessons learned from prominent startup career in Silicon Valley. Most ideas aren’t super novel (focus, work hard, build a network), but there was one idea from his list that he referenced as a “secret”:
Be willful: A big secret is that you can bend the world to your will a surprising percentage of the time—most people don’t even try, and just accept that things are the way that they are. People have an enormous capacity to make things happen. A combination of self-doubt, giving up too early, and not pushing hard enough prevents most people from ever reaching anywhere near their potential.
Sam Altman, How To Be Successful
Not surprisingly, one of the “reviewers” cited in that post is Peter Thiel!
Scale AI CEO Alexandr Wang not only has a very similar mindset to this idea, but he proves for in the candidates he interviews for positions at this company:
“I generally believe there really are two kinds of people in the world. There’s – and this is a psychological term – but there’s having an internal versus an external locus of control. So if you have an internal locus of control, it means that you believe the things that happen in your life are actually more of product of what you do and the actions that you take. So you believe a lot more in like, you’re holding the reins on your own life. And if you have an external locus of control, it’s the opposite. You believe that things that happen to you are mostly the outcome of things outside of your control, sort of like the world is very deterministic and you’re sort of like a pinball in a big pinball machine. I only want to work with people who have an internal locus of control. One way to index off of that is seeing how hard they worked at the things that matter to them. If they have an internal locus of control then they’re going to work their ass to make sure the things that matter to them happen in the best possible way. If they have an external locus of control, it matters to them but they throw their hands up in the air and let the world take the wheel.
Alexandr Wang, The Logan Bartlett Show
Thiel may think of it as holding “definite” view of the future, while Altman calls it “being willful” and Wang refers to is as an “internal locus of control.” But they’re all saying the same thing. There is immense potential in deciding what we want our future to look like, and the proactively working to build it. If we do, we might find out we have more power to make it happen than we thought.