Keith Rabois on the “one person, one problem" framework he learned from Peter Thiel

I'm going to argue that you really need to spend a lot of time focusing people. This is something I learned from Peter Thiel, actually. He used to insist at PayPal that every single person could only do exactly one thing. And we all rebelled. You feel it's like insulting to be asked to do just one thing. And Peter would enforce this pretty strictly. He'd basically say, I will not talk to you about anything else except this one thing I've assigned to you. I don't want to hear about how great you're doing over here. Focus until you conquer this one problem. And the insight behind this is that most people will solve problems that they understand how to solve. Roughly speaking, they will solve B problems instead of A problems. A plus problems are high impact problems for your company, but they're difficult. You don't wake up in the morning with a solution, so you tend to procrastinate them. So imagine you wake up in the morning and you create a list of things to do today. There's usually the A1 on the top of the list, but you never get around to it. And so you solve the second and third over an entire company of hundreds of people that just cascades. So you have a company that's always solving B things, but you never really create that breakthrough idea because no one is spending 100% of their time banging their head against the wall every day until they sol it.