⚒️ Why Peter Thiel left law
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🧠 Resources and Opportunities
XPrize Musk Foundation - Have an idea to fight climate change? This is your opportunity to get funded by Elon Musk’s foundation. Register for the Student Awards before Oct 1, 2021!
Reflect Paid Student Apprenticeship - Calling all Canadians! Reflect is hiring grade 11/12 students to learn and do full-stack development and design. Apply by July 25th, 2021!
Wharton Pre-Baccalaureate Program - For high school juniors and seniors who want to take coursework at Wharton. Applications due July 30, 2021!
TechCrunch Extreme Tech Challenge - A virtual showcase of global startups, investors, and corporations working to address the most pressing issues facing humanity. 2 days left to join!
💎 Why Peter Thiel left law for tech
Before starting PayPal and Palantir, Peter Thiel was a lawyer. What prompted him to make the switch that led to success? Rene Girard’s Mimetic Theory.
According to Mimetic Theory, people copy each other’s desires. We want what others want. As a result, we compete.
Thiel saw his fellow lawyers competing mercilessly for the same goal and measuring personal progress through social comparison rather than individual fulfilment. Feeling dissatisfied, he:
Quit law and built PayPal (worth $346.11 billion today) by creating a company culture advised by Mimetic Theory.
Turned a $500,000 Facebook investment into $1 billion by identifying Facebook’s early success (Mimetic Theory fuels Facebook as it’s a social network for humans who have mimetic desire).
Read more on Mimetic Theory and Thiel here.
📝 Writing tips they don’t teach you in school
The world’s most valuable skill: writing effectively.
English class teaches you to write long, decorative sentences.
Decorative sentences are beautiful, but they don’t sell.
At Amazon, Jeff Bezos trains his employees to write with clarity. This is a photo of an Amazon whiteboard listing 5 principles that the Amazonians follow 👇
🚀 Elon Musk’s advice on how to build the future
Elon Musk dropped out of Stanford on his second day.
He went on to build Tesla, SpaceX, and OpenAI, and is now the third richest person in the world.
Here were our takeaways from his interview with Sam Altman:
Ask, what can you do to be useful? This was the question that started it all for Musk.
Cultivate a sense of fatalism. Musk transforms his fear into action. His companies focus on the actions that can change what he's afraid of.
Compare product utility to impact. A product that makes a big difference to a small population is just as great as something that makes a small difference to many.
📚 What else we’re reading
I’m feeling curious: The startup scene is undeniably still male-dominated. Check out this talk by Jessica Livingston, a female founding partner of Y Combinator, on the birth of a startup.
I’m feeling hungry: From the founder of your favorite nutrition bar, Daniel Lubetzky, the mastermind behind Kind Snacks, writes about his ‘3 C’s of Entrepreneurship.’
That's it for this week!
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Mei, Kyler, & Jodi from the Spark Teen team