Thiel is a venture capitalist and the game that VCs play is to invest in 10 different ideas with the hope that one of them hits it big, while the other nine are likely to fail, morph into something different, or simply fade away.
Bill Gates (Microsoft) and Mark Zuckerberg (Facebook). Yes, both dropped out of Harvard to start a company and eventually became billionaires, but before they went to college both of them got an outstanding education that was certainly a springboard to their later achievements.
A college education trains and teaches students how to best plug themselves into the current civilization. Education helps you plug into the things society already needs, to plug into society as it is today. It’s not about tomorrow
Da Vinci basically out-observed everyone in his generation? That was critical. He spent a lot of time observing and figuring out where there were important problems and pain points that could be improved by either iterating or innovating. It’s a simple but powerful formula. Lots of organizations could do a better job of carefully observing the best opportunities to target, and then attacking the opportunity with their best ideas.
Innovation is about what’s next. To pull off a big innovation, you almost always have to take a big risk. You have to try something different.
Thiel is a venture capitalist and the game that VCs play is to invest in 10 different ideas with the hope that one of them hits it big, while the other nine are likely to fail, morph into something different, or simply fade away.
In reference to Gates and others who have shined, according to Gladwell's "Outliers" they have also most likely put in the time (10,000 plus hours) practicing, envisioning, and imagining what they want to create. Innovation takes time input, imagination, desire, and risk...