Peter Thiel: Think of the future on three horizons

“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.

Very short term is: Are you going to be happy and will you be learning a lot?

Very long term is: 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 would recalibrate it to:

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

Full video: Emergent Order “From Zero to One - Peter Thiel at the Innovation Center at Cockrell School of Engineering” (Nov 2014)

P.S. We’ve put together a YouTube playlist with every Peter Thiel insight we’ve ever shared. You can watch it here: “Best startup advice from Peter Thiel”