Peter Thiel on how to think about the future

January 01, 2025

“What you end up doing when you think of the future as indefinite is you pick a job that will be good on your resume because it will then lead to a different job later on.”

Instead of viewing the future as indefinite, Thiel suggests that the students in the audience think of the future on three horizons: short term, medium term, and long term. And he defines them as follows:

  1. Short term = Are you going to be happy and will you be learning a lot?

  2. Medium term = How good is it on your resume?

  3. Long term = Are you working on something important or meaningful?

“I think we are in a skewed world where we overweight the medium term, and we underweight some combination of the short term and the long term.”

Thiel recommends recalibrating it to:

“Focus on some combination of short term and long term. And forget about the medium term.”