Brilliant thinking is rare, but courage is in even shorter supply than genius. And it’s psychologically difficult because anyone trying to answer must say something she knows to be unpopular.

It’s intellectually difficult because the knowledge that everyone is taught in school is by definition agreed upon. This is a question that sounds easy because it’s straightforward. Whenever I interview someone for a job, I like to ask this question: “What important truth do very few people agree with you on?” Indeed, the single most powerful pattern I have noticed is that successful people find value in unexpected places, and they do this by thinking about business from first principles instead of formulas. The paradox of teaching entrepreneurship is that such a formula (for innovation) cannot exist because every innovation is new and unique, no authority can prescribe in concrete terms how to be more innovative. The act of creation is singular, as is the moment of creation, and the result is something fresh and strange.

But every time we create something new, we go from 0 to 1. Doing what we already know how to do takes the world from 1 to n, adding more of something familiar. Of course, it’s easier to copy a model than to make something new. If you are copying these guys, you aren’t learning from them. And the next Mark Zuckerberg won’t create a social network. The next Larry Page or Sergey Brin won’t make a search engine. The next Bill Gates will not build an operating system. Like Heraclitus, who said that you can only step into the same river once, Thiel believes that each moment in business happens only once. Here are eight lessons I took away from the book. And thinking about thinking is what we’re all about. Zero To One is an exercise in thinking - about questioning and rethinking received wisdom to create the future. And now he’s written a book, Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future, with the goal of helping us “see beyond the tracks laid down” to the “broader future that there is to create.” He also made the first outside investment in Facebook and was an early investor in companies like SpaceX and LinkedIn.

Peter Thiel is an entrepreneur and investor.

Book zero to one