Lessons from Peter Thiel 彼得·蒂爾的教訓
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These lessons summarize what Joe Lonsdale learned from working over many years with Peter Thiel, a chairman and founder of Palantir. These are very much worth reading — they will change the way you think.
這些課程總結了喬·朗斯代爾在多年與彼得·蒂爾(Palantir 的主席和創始人)合作中所學到的經驗。這些內容非常值得一讀——它們將改變你的思維方式。
The nine lessons: 九個教訓:
1. Divide reasoning into separate parts and clearly identify the most important factor.
1. 將推理分成不同部分,並清楚識別出最重要的因素。
If there’s no single reason that can cause you to do something, you should think carefully about whether it’s important or not. Oftentimes we’ll want to do something, and we’ll give multiple reasons for it without thinking hard about them. If you can’t give a single reason that justifies doing something on its own, you should be very wary that you aren’t exercising sufficient intellectual discipline.
如果沒有單一的理由能讓你去做某件事,你應該仔細思考這件事是否重要。很多時候,我們會想要做某件事,並且會給出多個理由,而不會深入思考這些理由。如果你無法給出一個單獨的理由來證明做某件事的必要性,你應該非常警惕自己是否缺乏足夠的智力紀律。
2. Don’t divide your attention: focusing on one thing yields increasing returns for each unit of effort.
2. 不要分散注意力:專注於一件事能為每單位的努力帶來越來越高的回報。
At a micro level, an extra hour of focus on the current project has a much higher return than an hour on something new, or worse, 5 minutes each on 12 new things. Before you ever do something new, you should understand the opportunity cost vs. existing things. Don’t rationalize that something you want to do is complementary when it’s not!
在微觀層面上,對當前項目多花一小時的專注,其回報遠高於在新事物上花一小時,或者更糟的是,在 12 個新事物上各花 5 分鐘。在你開始做任何新事物之前,應該了解與現有事物相比的機會成本。不要為你想做的事情不相容而找藉口!
At a macro level, understanding that applied effort has a convex output curve is a very useful discipline when considering new market areas. This convexity means that the opportunity cost of transferring resources from existing projects to new ones is high. Unless the new area is incredibly valuable, anything we can do to extend an existing convex curve is worth so much more.
在宏觀層面上,理解應用努力具有凸性產出曲線是一個非常有用的學科,尤其在考慮新市場領域時。這種凸性意味著將資源從現有項目轉移到新項目的機會成本很高。除非新領域極具價值,否則我們能夠延伸現有凸性曲線的任何行動都更具價值。
3. In hiring, value intelligence highly. Like focus, intelligence yields increasing returns.
在招聘中,高度重視智力。就像專注一樣,智力會帶來不斷增長的回報。
Like focus, intelligence has a convex output curve — the smartest people can be an order of magnitude more productive than others who are only somewhat less smart. The key in hiring is to value potential skill rather than currently existing skill — and potential skill is based on intelligence rather than training.
像專注力一樣,智力也有一個凸形的產出曲線——最聰明的人在生產力上可以比那些稍微不那麼聰明的人高出一個數量級。招聘的關鍵在於重視潛在技能而非當前存在的技能,而潛在技能是基於智力而非訓練。
4. Obsess over perfection.
4. 對完美執著。
If you are designing something that a customer is going to use or that will represent us in public, it’s not good enough unless it’s flawless and extraordinary.
如果你正在設計一個客戶將使用的東西或將在公共場合代表我們的東西,那麼它必須是完美無瑕且卓越的,否則就不夠好。
Especially in software, many situations have winner-take-all dynamics due to network effects and switching costs. Being the winner means being in the 99.99-percentile. A winner at the top takes nearly everything, and only a pittance goes to the others — so being 99.99-percentile is worth an order of magnitude or two more than being just 98-percentile. If it’s 1am and you’ve already got something that is very good, this is why it’s worth spending the next couple of hours to make it amazing.
尤其在軟體領域,許多情況因為網絡效應和轉換成本而呈現出贏者通吃的動態。成為贏家意味著位於 99.99 百分位。位於頂端的贏家幾乎獲得一切,而其他人僅僅得到微薄的份額——因此,99.99 百分位的價值比 98 百分位高出一到兩個數量級。如果現在是凌晨 1 點,而你已經擁有一個非常好的產品,這就是為什麼值得花接下來幾個小時來讓它變得更出色的原因。
5. Use small details as indicators to point to the larger truth — and be alert when they point to conclusions you don’t like.
5. 利用小細節作為指標,指向更大的真相 — 當它們指向你不喜歡的結論時,要保持警覺。
Despite the danger in this approach — indicators are not always right — more often than not you can derive a lot of wisdom from subtle indicators. How competent a single person is or how hard one person is working, or what a couple smart people think, might tell you a lot about a group before deciding whether to work with them. It’s an important discipline to be open to any indicators that you find whether they confirm your biases or not. In fact, you should be open to them especially when they do not confirm your biases. Indicators can be about all sorts of things, such as about the importance of a contract, the effectiveness of our software in different scenarios, the opinions and biases of key decision makers, etc. Few people pay as close or as honest attention to them as they should.
儘管這種方法存在風險——指標並不總是正確——但通常你可以從微妙的指標中獲得很多智慧。一個人的能力或工作努力程度,或者幾位聰明人的看法,可能在你決定是否與某個團隊合作之前,告訴你很多關於該團隊的資訊。保持對任何你發現的指標開放是很重要的,無論它們是否確認了你的偏見。事實上,當指標不符合你的偏見時,你更應該對它們保持開放。指標可以涉及各種事物,例如合同的重要性、我們的軟體在不同情境下的有效性、關鍵決策者的意見和偏見等等。很少有人能像應該的那樣,對這些指標保持如此密切和誠實的關注。
6. Don’t waste time talking about what you plan to think about; instead, work through it immediately.
6. 不要浪費時間談論你計劃思考的事情;相反,立即著手處理。
Intellectual laziness can easily sneak up on you. If you are sitting there talking about problems you plan to solve later, there’s a good chance you are being inefficient. Similarly, in GTD, you don’t put off tasks that only take a couple minutes. In many cases, you can outline and solve or at least clarify any decision or problem you’re confronted with in just a few minutes.
智力懶惰很容易悄然來襲。如果你坐在那裡談論你計劃稍後解決的問題,那麼你很可能效率不高。同樣,在 GTD(完成任務法)中,你不會拖延那些只需幾分鐘的任務。在許多情況下,你可以在幾分鐘內概述並解決,或至少澄清你面對的任何決策或問題。
7. Take the time to listen to smart people with whom you disagree.
7. 花時間聆聽那些與你意見相左的聰明人。
This is not easy to do. Over time, any firm will find that certain methods and biases tend to work very well, and the more successful it is, the more it will develop its own unique mindset. We couldn’t succeed without the methods and principles that we learn over time, nor can we constantly re-articulate why they are the correct approach to everyone who comes along.
這並不容易。隨著時間的推移,任何公司都會發現某些方法和偏見往往非常有效,而公司越成功,它就越會發展出自己獨特的思維方式。我們無法在沒有隨著時間學習到的方法和原則的情況下取得成功,也無法不斷向每一位來者重新闡述為什麼這些方法是正確的。
A sort of pride rightly develops around the successful structure, but this mindset cannot be allowed to ossify into an orthodoxy. So we have to use our judgment to seek out intelligent people who disagree with us — or even intelligent people who have simply taken a different approach — and be open about what we might learn from them. Despite his very strongly developed and out-of-the-mainstream views, Peter does this constantly, and it makes him extremely effective.
一種正當的自豪感圍繞著成功的結構發展,但這種心態不能被固化為一種正統。因此,我們必須運用判斷力,尋找那些與我們意見相左的聰明人——甚至是那些採取不同方法的聰明人——並對我們可能從他們身上學到的東西保持開放。儘管彼得的觀點非常強烈且不屬於主流,但他不斷這樣做,這使他變得極其有效。
8. Be skeptical of any sort of external allies, and don’t trust the execution of anyone outside Palantir.
8. 對任何外部盟友保持懷疑,不要信任 Palantir 以外的任何人的執行。
In the abstract, this is because the incentives of the other company will not line up with ours, and even if they do for the moment, they no longer will once the situation changes. In specific, other companies don’t have the same culture of execution that Palantir does, and we don’t have the power to instill that culture in them. Very early on, Peter saved Palantir from a partnership that would likely have destroyed the company.
在抽象層面上,這是因為其他公司的激勵措施不會與我們一致,即使在某個時刻它們一致,但一旦情況改變,它們就不會再一致。具體來說,其他公司並沒有像 Palantir 那樣的執行文化,而我們也無法將這種文化灌輸給他們。早期,彼得拯救了 Palantir,避免了一個可能會摧毀公司的合作夥伴關係。
In practice, that skepticism has led us to force others to pay upfront as one of the ways of proving value, which has worked well. Ultimately, only our own execution can make us win.
在實踐中,這種懷疑使我們迫使他人提前付款,作為證明價值的一種方式,這種做法效果良好。最終,只有我們自己的執行才能讓我們獲勝。
9. Return to first principles and act quickly on your new conclusions.
9. 回到基本原則,並迅速根據你的新結論採取行動。
It’s very easy to take the world as it is, as opposed to envisioning it as you want it to be. For example, when re-designing a feature, one approach is to take what you have, and imagine small changes that will solve the problems with the feature. Instead, it’s often instructive to imagine that you were working from a clean slate and design the feature from scratch. In either case, the right approach is almost always to re-use the existing codebase in your implementation — but starting from first principles frees your mind from your assumptions about implementation complexity and forces you to re-consider the assumptions that stand in the way of the best solution.
很容易接受現實世界的樣子,而不是想像它應該是什麼樣子。例如,在重新設計一個功能時,一種方法是利用現有的東西,想像一些小改變來解決功能上的問題。然而,通常更有啟發性的是想像自己從零開始,從頭設計這個功能。在這兩種情況下,正確的方法幾乎總是要在實現中重用現有的代碼庫——但從基本原則出發可以讓你擺脫對實現複雜性的假設,並迫使你重新考慮那些妨礙最佳解決方案的假設。
Just like questioning our own assumptions, returning to first principles and building the argument up from scratch is a very powerful intellectual device that helps us to recreate our models as you receive new information, and to uncover options and opportunities you’d otherwise miss. It is not surprising to see that the largest hedge fund in the world, now one of our customers, also emphasized this as their key methodology.
就像質疑我們自己的假設一樣,回到基本原則並從零開始建立論點是一種非常強大的智力工具,幫助我們在獲取新資訊時重建模型,並發現那些否則會錯過的選擇和機會。世界上最大的對沖基金,現在也是我們的客戶,強調這一點作為他們的關鍵方法論,這並不令人驚訝。