"Like a lonely mountain peak, or rather like the spire of a cathedral, rise the men of high talent and of genius above the broad mass of mediocrity… The number of the highly gifted is at all events so small that it is impossible that 'many' such exceptional individuals could have been held back in lower economic positions simply due to flaws in social institutions or lack of opportunity." — Otto Ammon
Private wealth that governments have previously seized will instead remain with those who create it. Growing amounts of wealth will flow to the most capable entrepreneurs and venture capitalists around the world. Globalization and other features of the information economy will increase income for the most talented individuals in every field. Since exceptional performance will create enormous value, earnings distribution across the global economy will mirror what we already see in performance fields like professional sports and opera—where a small number of top performers earn vastly more than everyone else.
Success in the Information Age demands high levels of literacy and mathematical skills. — The Sovereign Individual
The best maxim in the history of entrepreneurship is from the founder of Four Seasons: he said,
"Excellence is the capacity to take pain."
How many people want to achieve greatness? Everyone. But anybody that's ever done anything difficult knows the euphoria and terror it takes — it's the entrepreneurial emotional rollercoaster. It's important to talk about this precisely because it's supposed to be hard. There isn't a single book that reads. "Hey, I had this idea. I started it. Everything went great. The end." It doesn't happen. James Dyson finishes his autobiography by saying,
"Listen, it's easy for me to celebrate my doggedness now. I made $300 million last year, but I'd be lying to you if there weren't times where I went inside my house, had my wife look at me like I'm a failure and cry myself to sleep. I got up and did it again anyways because excellence is the capacity to take pain."
You do something all day, don't you? Everyone does. If you get up at seven o'clock and go to bed at eleven, you have put in sixteen good hours, and it is certain with most people, that they have been doing something all the time. They have been either walking, reading, or writing, or thinking. The only trouble is that they do it about a great many things and I do it about one. If they took the time in question and applied it in one direction, to one object, they would succeed. Success is sure to follow such application. The trouble lies in the fact that people do not have an object, one thing, to which they stick, letting all else go. Success is the product of the severest kind of mental and physical application. — Thomas Edison
"Only those who have taken a product from zero to one — from sheer nonexistence to something genuinely new — are truly qualified to lead a technology company.
Everything else is management of the known. But zero to one is creation. It’s not scaling; it’s genesis. It demands original insight, extreme clarity of vision, and the capacity to defy consensus.
A true founder doesn’t just iterate — they invent. They build what no one else sees yet, often in silence, often in defiance.
If you haven’t endured that lonely, violent birth of something new, you’re not building a tech company. You’re babysitting an MBA case study." — Peter Thiel