If you're working at something that's the only of its kind in the world, that's very meaningful.

It could be for profit, non-profit, all sorts of contexts.

 If we weren't doing this, this problem absolutely wouldn't be tackled. That's what's meaningful.

When you're competing you're already, by definition, number two.

When you compete you get better at beating people on the narrow things you need to beat them on.

But it often comes at this very high price of losing sight of what's truly valuable and important.

We overplay the role of luck in our future. Luck is like an atheistic word for God.

We attribute too much to luck, we could be thinking a little bit more.

So you think you make your own luck?

I like that!

When I was playing chess in junior high I learned that a bad plan is better than no plan at all.

Have a plan, you can always change it, but don't pretend you have no clue about what's gonna happen.

If you say everything about the future is random and out of your control,

The core thing is to have a great product and then you can always improve on in all sorts of ways.

If you're just trying to optimize and you don't have a great product, that rarely works.

It's always worth asking where you're gonna go with this business.

Imitation is how we learn language as kids, it's how culture gets transmitted.

But it also leads to a lot of insane behavior, such as the madness of crowds.

It leads into bubble like behavior, which we've seen many in our society in recent decades.

So the challenge to think for yourself is always very trivial to say, but always quite hard to do.

I think you become an entrepreneur because you're working on a problem nobody else is working on.

You should start a business if you're working on a problem that otherwise wouldn't get solved.

Saying I want to be an entrepreneur is like saying "I want to be rich and I want to be famous."

Those are good things, being rich and famous.

They're not good as direct goals, if you have them as such you're unlikely to succeed. 

If you're a founder or an entrepreneur, you should always aim to build a monopoly.

Where you're the only person in the world doing what you're doing.

There're only 2 kinds of businesses, those in crazy competition and one of a kind monopolies.

Every moment in the history of business happens only once.

The next Mark Zuckerberg won't be starting a social media site.

The next Bill Gates won't start an operating system, the next Elon Musk won't start another Tesla.

So I'm always pushing back on the idea that there's some kind of formula.

I don't see younger professors who're deeply critical of the university structure. It's just nuts!