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“ZERO TO ONE EVERY MOMENT IN BUSINESS happens only once. The next Bill Gates will not build an operating system. The next Larry Page or Sergey Brin won’t make a search engine. And the next Mark Zuckerberg won’t create a social network. If you are copying these guys, you aren’t learning from them.��
Peter �� Thiel, Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future

It is always a useful experience to read the thoughts of a successful entrepreneur and mentor. According to the book notes, this work is a compilation of notes from a lecture series.
This is a must-read, filled with so many great insights and take-aways, and it is definitely becoming part of my permanent bookshelf!

"Every culture has a myth of decline from some sort of golden age, and almost all peoples throughout history have been pessimists. Even today pessimism still dominates huge parts of the world. An indefinite pessimist looks out unto a bleak future, but he has no idea what to do about it. This describes Europe since the early 1970's, when the continent succumbed to undirected bureaucratic drift. Today the whole Eurozone is in slow-motion crisis, and nobody is in charge. The European Central Bank doesn't stand for anything but improvisation: the U.S. Treasury prints "In God We Trust" on the dollar; the ECB might as well print "Kick the Can Down the Road" on the euro. Europeans just react to events as they happen and hope things don't get worse. The indefinite pessimist can't know whether the inevitable decline will be fast or slow, catastrophic or gradual. All he can do is wait for it to happen, so he might as well eat, drink, and be merry in the meantime: hence Europe's famous vacation mania."

"Sometimes you do have to fight. Where that's true, you should fight and win. There is no middle ground: either don't throw any punches, or strike and end it quickly."
Peter �� Thiel, Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future