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Keith Rabois shares the focusing framework he learned from Peter Thiel

In the clip below, Keith Rabois shares the focusing framework he learned from Peter Thiel.

At PayPal, Peter gave everyone at the company exactly one thing to prioritize at a time.

Naturally, everyone rebelled—bright people want to do multiple things and it is almost insulting to be asked to do just one thing.

But Peter enforced this pretty strictly.

He 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.”

As 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.”