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Keith Rabois shares a powerful lesson from Peter Thiel on how to drive focus and tackle the hardest problems inside a startup.
“You need to spend a lot of time focusing people. This is something I learned from Peter Thiel. He used to insist at PayPal that every single person could only do exactly one thing. And we all rebelled. You feel like it’s insulting to be asked to do just one thing, but Peter would enforce this pretty strictly.”
Thiel would say:
“I will not talk to you about anything else except for this one thing that I’ve assigned to you. I don’t want to hear about how great your doing in this other area. Just focus until you conquer this one problem.”
Keith explains:
“The insight behind this is that most people will solve problems that they understand how to solve. Roughly speaking, they will solve B+ problems instead of A+ problems. A+ problems are high-impact problems for your company but they’re difficult—you don’t wake up in the morning with a solution to them, so you tend to procrastinate… If you have a company that’s always solving B+ problems, you’ll grow and add value, but you’ll never create the breakthrough idea because no one is spending 100% of their time banging their head against the wall every day until they solve it.”
Focusing relentlessly on solving A+ problems, no matter how difficult, is the key to breakthroughs. Without this level of focus, you’ll end up improving incrementally rather than making the transformative impact that drives true success.
