
Peter Thiel’s Unorthodox Management Philosophy of Extreme Focus - ca98am79
http://blog.idonethis.com/post/37113345206/peter-thiels-unorthodox-management-philosophy-of
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confluence
From the article comments:

> _"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.

~~~
ryguytilidie
The last 4 founders I worked for went to: -Stanford -Harvard -Harvard -Oxford

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.

~~~
confluence
This psychological bias is called the just world fallacy and is a derivative
of the aforementioned fundamental attribution error.

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.

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calinet6
A classic sociopathic anti-reality extremist viewpoint. I've seen this type of
thinking run companies into the ground. It is myopic and will be detrimental
to any real-world situation in the long run.

Thiel is chock full of this BS, and his success should be disregarded as
anything other than the statistical anomaly that it was.

~~~
QuantumGood
Rabois says "I resisted some of this approach during the PayPal years, I am
now a proponent of it and have even devised a theory of why it is crucial"

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...](http://www.quora.com/PayPal/What-strong-beliefs-on-culture-for-
entrepreneurialism-did-Peter-Max-David-have-at-PayPal/answer/Keith-Rabois)

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paulsutter
Paul Graham goes a step further in his Startup=Growth essay, focus the entire
company on a single goal: growth rate. I didn't realize the analogy till now.
Thanks for bringing this up.

~~~
kitcar
Growth rate of what? Revenue? Gross Profit? Profit Margin? Users? Active
users? Length of user session? etc...

Focusing on growing one of those metrics can result in the minimization of
others -

~~~
phillmv
If you're at the stage of your company's lifecyle where you're in YC, then all
metrics of users. Users, users, users.

~~~
IgorPartola
"The first lesson of Silicon Valley, actually, is that you only think about
the user, the experience. You actually don't think about the money. Ever."

Ryan Howard, The Office, S07E09

I know what you mean, but every time someone says something like this, that
quote comes to mind.

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MrMan
let's see more Elon Musk worship, less Peter Thiel worship.

(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.

~~~
chollida1
> (losing huge amounts of investors' money on hubristic hedge fund bets +
> lucky VC investments).

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

~~~
MrMan
No disrespect to someone I have never met. I am frustrated that you pretend
there is a symmetric equivalence between macro hedge fund investing and the
world of private placements. Mathematically it couldnt be farther from your
silly damned if you do solipsism. It is not Thiel I mind, it is his accolytes.

~~~
chollida1
> I am frustrated that you pretend there is a symmetric equivalence between
> macro hedge fund investing and the world of private placements.

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:)

~~~
MrMan
I don't mean to be harsh in any way but as I said I get frustrated sometimes
by the hero worship. I can separate that frustration from my admiration for
anyone's accomplishments.

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a-priori
Followed strictly, how can two people work together in this kind of
environment? If I need a bit of someone else's time to allow me to complete my
objective, they can't provide it unless it also contributes to their
objective, which it likely won't.

~~~
VLM
"My single objective this year is to work together with a-priori to
proactively synergize a sustainable seamless profit focused massively parallel
best practice for demonstrating how two HN users can work together while only
having one single objective"

~~~
MrMan
My single objective is to give you $15k to pursue this single-minded goal and
to avail you of my social network to guarantee your success, and to blog about
it.

~~~
mrslx
No one wants to work for The Man!

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Cl4rity
This actually isn't extremist or crazy, it's common sense. Multitasking is a
myth and you really can only focus on one thing at a time. By adopting this
philosophy, you'll probably get a lot more done, quickly. Once your one task
or goal is accomplished with that hyper focus, you move onto the next one.
It's really the best, and arguably the only way, to work. Again, our brains
don't do more than one task at once with any efficiency.

~~~
stephengillie
Absolutely refusing to handle anything but that #1 priority is also its own
cage. What if the #4 priority suddenly catches fire? If you change your focus
to #4, isn't that just multitasking?

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.

~~~
chimeracoder
> What if the #4 priority suddenly catches fire?

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!

~~~
stephengillie
So how is this different than just doing things?

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lsc
well, what is "one thing"?

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.

~~~
danek
I think people are reading this too literally. The 'one thing' isn't your
task, it's your goal. You engage in whatever tasks are necessary to achieve
your goal in a way that is good for the business. This ensures that each
business function is the best it can be.

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.

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sixQuarks
wow, such hate in the comments. I think some people are taking the "focus"
theme too far. Focusing on one thing doesn't mean you absolutely ignore
everything else. If you're going to ignore co-workers, then you might as well
skip taking a shower in the morning, eating breakfast, and all the other
things you need to do, and just FOCUS, FOCUS, FOCUS!

~~~
ScottBurson
I think there are legitimate questions about how this actually works in
practice. The blog post provides only a little information.

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throwmeaway33
In my rather limited experience this doesn't work.

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.

~~~
chris_mahan
When I get in the flow, writing software, I get a day of work done per hour.
When I do 5 hours of focused work, I do about 2 weeks worth of work. The
slightest distraction throws me off, though, because the context-switching
becomes enormous. My favorite (yikes) distraction: having a tool I know and
use not be available because of outdated company policy. This throws off
everything and loads Anger and Frustration 3.7 in the brain processing center.

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klochner
What happens when you need someone else to take an action before you can move
forward? It's like blocking IO.

~~~
chris_mahan
You do it, and if someone complains, you say you had to get this done in order
to continue work. If it's something "out of your area" you treat it as a bug
and you make a workaround. Remember: businesses only reward achievement.

~~~
stephengillie
_Remember: businesses only reward achievement._

Which is why _failing upward_ is such an unsuccessful career strategy. I'm
with Dogbert on this one.

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ckluis
If you recommend this then your customers wouldn't need a todo list :)

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wedmondson
I wonder how this works when you need input from a coworker whose number one
focus is different than your own. If this coworker, in turn, is reliant on
input from you for something that is not your number one focus then you are
deadlocked...each waiting for the other to finish but unable to finish until
the other has time.

~~~
VLM
Easy, escalate to a boss who's only focus is making sure you both get your
work done. I'm also sure trades and bribes and a informal form of corporate
currency changes hands

"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.

~~~
rhizome
Congratulations, you've just invented politics. :)

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marze
It would appear Apple is managed in a way that allows employees to have
"extreme focus", or a single focus.

Also, Apple as a company seems to do a good job of staying focused on what
they think is key.

Thoughts?

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pvdm
This makes sense since we are terrible at multitasking.

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michaelochurch
The big problem with "one thing" is the extremely political matter of who gets
to set a person's "one thing". Is it the employee? (Open allocation.) Or is it
the manager? (Then it's dictatorial, and you'll have to offer 30-50% annual
raises to keep people.)

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.

~~~
dkarl
_The big problem with "one thing" is the extremely political matter of who
gets to set a person's "one thing". Is it the employee? (Open allocation.) Or
is it the manager? (Then it's dictatorial, and you'll have to offer 30-50%
annual raises to keep people.)_

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."

~~~
SatvikBeri
Guy #2 is probably worth 10-40% more to a business, especially as it grows
larger.

