“All Rhodes scholars had a great future in their past” — Peter Thiel

Mediocrity is an arena exclusively for the competitive. If Bill Gates had remained in college to compete for top business positions, he would have become a very good businessman. And the rest of the world would still be attempting to put a computer on every desk. Were The Wright Brothers to have remained successfully competitive bicycle mechanics, the world would still be yearning for the heavens. Those men and their ilk decided not to compete. They decided to win.

This is not the choice the rest of us make. As a poet once said about the masses, “Theirs not to reason why / Theirs but to do and die.” Women struggle to be seen as equals to men. Men struggle to be seen as successful to women. Career climbers yearn for acceptance by the top boss; society climbers by the gossip columnist.

Some individuals do not enter the arena of mediocrity. This refusal is achieved by some through Opportunity and to others through Failure:

“A Death blow is a life blow to some Who till they died, did not alive become”

In 1994, Peter Thiel walked out of two interviews with Supreme Court Justices Kennedy and Scalia, respectively, feeling certain of his future. He was vying for a supreme court clerkship. As he had done throughout his life, he had risen to the top ranks among his peers.

When he was in eighth grade, a classmate prophesied that in four years Thiel would enter Stanford as a sophomore. He was correct. As a Stanford undergrad, Thiel flourished by achieving top honors in every field he entered. After graduating, he enrolled at Stanford Law. Here, as he had done all his life, he rose to the top of his class.

The highest mark of success in a law school environment is unambiguous: a Supreme Court clerkship. Thiel had clerked for a year at several federal appeals courts. After his interviews with Kennedy and Scalia, he was prepared for the next stage of his life.

But when he had received the news that he had failed to attain a clerkship with the Supreme Court, he was devastated. His future in law seemed bleak and barren. It would require long months to regain a sense of direction. But failure often blooms the best fruits.

His failure, for better or worse, had occurred in the late 90’s. The dot-com boom was full on. By now, he had learned to question the actions of those around him. While the whole world was afire and investors saw clicks as proof positive of a flourishing company, Thiel decided to build a company focused on a grand mission: To replace the U.S. currency with a digital one. This would become PayPal.

For Thiel, working in Silicon Valley was like a laboratory to study human motivation. He saw the majority of business owners around him entering the arena of mediocrity. To him it appeared like nothing other than a bizarre race to the middle.

One day, walking to his favorite restaurant in Palo Alto, he passed a British Pub, which had recently opened and then promptly shut down. Thiel remembered that on opening, the owner had said he would have little competition, because there were no other British Pubs in the area. “True,” Thiel conceded. “If you define your market as those seeking British Pubs. But if you define your market as people seeking food your competition is immense.” In comparison, PayPal was the only email based currency in the world. They had no competition.

working in Silicon Valley was like a laboratory to study human motivation.

Two years after Thiel had sold PayPal to Ebay for $1.5 billion, he ran into the man who had helped him fill out his clerkship application. The man had a sly grin on his face. His first words to Thiel were not “how are you doing?” or “Can you believe it’s been so long?” He said, instead, “Aren’t you glad you didn’t win that clerkship?”

Thiel understood. Had he won that ultimate competition his life would have been worse. He would have spent his days filing papers for other people’s businesses and accomplishments.

The arena of competition, it turned out, leads to Zero. When everyone is clamoring for that one “top spot”, they undervalue not the prize, but themselves.

“Elite students,” Thiel wrote in his book, Zero to One, “climb confidently, until they reach a level of competition sufficiently intense to beat their dreams out of them. Higher education is the place where people who had big plans in high school get stuck in fierce rivalries with equally smart peers over conventional careers like management consulting and investment banking. For the privilege of being turned into conformists, students (or their families) pay hundreds of thousands of dollars in skyrocketing tuition that continues to outpace inflation. Why are we doing this to ourselves?”