Keith Rabois shares the focusing framework he learned from Peter Thiel

Where do you aim these barrels? So 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. Every single person in the company rebelled to this idea. Because it's so unnatural. It's so different than every other company where people want to do multiple things. Especially as you get more senior, you want to definitely want to do multiple things. And you're like, you feel it's like insulting to be asked to do just one thing. And Peter would enforce this pretty strictly. He 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. Just shut up. And Peter would run away and then focus until you conquer this one problem. 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 and over an entire company of hundreds of people that just cascades. So you have a company that's always solving B plus things, which does mean you grow and does mean you add value. 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 solve it. So I highly recommend some version of that. You can be less stringent. You can be like, you can get three things to work on. But I would still track at least the concept of what would happen if you only gave everybody one to prioritize.