Wealth Competition is for losers

[Anonymous]

I want to share with you a masterpiece by a billionaire Peter Thiel, founder of PayPal, first investor in Facebook and hundreds of other companies.

Below is a link to class notes from a course he taught at Stanford:

https://gist.github.com/harperreed/3201887

Main ideas

- If you want to create a valuable business, build a monopoly. (Chase has a great article related to this)

- 4 characteristics of a monopoly are: Proprietary technology; Economies of Scale, Network effects, Brand.

- People imitate each other constantly, which leads to irrational competition for small stakes (e.g. college, academia, small business in a populated area, low-barrier-to-entry professions like blogging/photography and many other things).

- Do something different. You should make yourself and your business unique and hard to replace.

- We live in a power law world (few people had/have/will_have most of the wealth/power/fame).
For example:
(1) an average person might be recognized and remembered by few hundred/thousand people. But, top scientists(Einstein), politicians(Hitler/Napoleon), philosophers(Aristotle) etc are recognized and remembered by billions of people
(2) 300 wealthiest people own as much wealth as the bottom 3 000 000 000

- Don't rely on luck (you are not a lottery ticket). Plan in advance and rely on your skills/substance(Chase wrote something related to that)

 

[Ross]

Moral,

Yeah, no/little competition is the best scenario for any one business/entity. This is why many small time local businesses such as restaurants are almost always deemed failures out of the gate as well as bad opportunities for investment - they're already competing with hundreds of other places.

However, I would say that it is still possible to interrupt an already stable monopoly if there is a flaw in their design or something to exploit. There almost always is something to battle which would disrupt the power, if you were so inclined to steal ideas and fight in a battle of power rather than come up with a unique idea. Sometimes this is favoured because you're always going to have challenges for power, and even if you do come up with a unique idea that establishes a monopoly, you're going to have to fight like hell against imitators.

It's also why starting a blog like GirlsChase is so difficult and is likely one of the reasons that Chase thought that this website was a bad business idea at first. Luckily he did stumble into a niche that many didn't have a good grip on, which is guys who reject typical canned-PUA advice in favour of broad advice which is neatly organized, but even then, it's hard to form a business model around selling ideas.

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Even such, I find myself at constant battle with monopolies and the rich. I attempt as much as possible to keep things local with my personal spending, but unfortunately, as you've stated, few people have the power in this system. For a capitalist system to work there needs to be more competition, but very few people even recognize that there is a power struggle and thus they continue to feed their money right back into the top 300, rather than attempting to come up with something extremely valuable that would make the rest transfer their wealth to them.

There's a reason the "elite" is so rare. Because most people are content to simply sit around with the same life day-to-day, while a very select few have the innate pull towards power and competition, and they are the ones who clean up in life.

I am one of those who is drawn towards power and competition, and let me tell you, it's one hell of a way to enjoy life when you're in that flow.