In Zero to One, Peter Thiel says he asks each potential employee this question: “What important truth do very few people agree with you on?”
The question is deceptively simple. It’s quite hard to come up with a good answer.
‘Bad answers, he says, are common ones like these:
‘Our educational system is broken and urgently needs to be fixed.‘
‘‘America is exceptional.’
They’re bad because most people already agree with these.
A good response would look something like this: “Most people believe in x, but the truth is the opposite of x.”
Peter says future progress will take either a horizontal or a vertical form. Horizontal progress involves copying what’s been done before (“going from 1 to n”). Vertical progress involves creating something new (“going from 0 to 1”). “If you take one typewriter and build 100, you have made horizontal progress. If you have a typewriter and build a word processor, you have made vertical progress.”
Here is his answer to his own interview question: “Most people think the future of the world will be defined by globalization, but the truth is that technology matters more.”
His explanation helped me to better understand his Zero to One theory:
“Without technological change, if China doubles its energy production over the next two decades, it will also double its air pollution. If every one of India’s hundreds of millions of households were to live the way Americans already do—using only today’s tools—the result would be environmentally catastrophic. Spreading old ways to create wealth around the world will result in devastation, not riches. In a world of scarce resources, globalization without new technology is unsustainable.”
This reminded me of another problem-solving technique I recently read about:
The Outside Advantage
In his wonderful book, Range: Why Generalist Triumph in a Specialized World, David Epstein illustrates the surprising advantage of generalized thinking. “Almost twenty years after the 1989 Exxon Valdez oil spill, thirty-two thousand gallons of oil remained stubbornly stuck along Alaska’s coast.” When oil mixes with water, it creates a sticky, peanut butter-like substance. Scott Pegau, research program manager at the Alaska-based Oil Spill Recovery Institute, turned to InnoCentive and offered $20,000 to the person with the best solution for removing this goo from the recovery barges.
Davis, a chemist, read about and pondered the oil spill cleanup challenge. His first thought was to use a chemistry-based solution to address the problem—but thought better of it, deciding it would be unwise to add more chemicals to a chemical problem.
He then thought of a distant analogy—drinking a slushy. You have to move the straw around to get the slushy out.
This reminded him of a construction job he once worked pouring concrete down a chute. The slow process allowed huge portions of the concrete to bake in the sun and harden before he could pour it. He recalled how his friend solved the problem by using a concrete vibrator to shake loose the concrete and keep it from sticking together. This was his eureka moment. He drew a diagram of a concrete vibrator attached to a barge and showed how it could easily unstick the oil, just like it had done with the concrete.
Davis presented this solution, and won the money.
“Sometimes you just slap your head and go, ‘Well why didn’t I think of that?’” says Pegau afterward. “If it was easily solved by people within the industry, it would have been solved by people within the industry. I think it happens more often than we’d love to admit, because we tend to view things with all the information we’ve gathered in our industry, and sometimes that puts us down a path that goes into a wall. It’s hard to back up and find another path.”
Scientist Alph Bingham created Innocentive as a way for specialists to post industry-specific problems and offer rewards for solutions. The company soon discovered that the likelihood of a problem being solved increased in proportion to the diversity of the people trying to solve it. “The more likely a challenge was to appeal not just to scientists but also attorneys and dentists and mechanics, the more likely it was to be solved.”