Short excerpt from a YouTube video (uploaded Dec 11, 2023) in which Mark Zuckerberg recounts the best piece of advice Peter Thiel gave him: "in a world that's changing so quickly, the biggest risk you can take is not taking any risk." Zuckerberg reflects that while individual decisions have upside and downside, long-term stagnation guarantees failure without taking risks.
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Speaking of Peter, and it's sort of a closing question, what's the best piece of advice he ever gave you? I think Peter was the person who told me this really pithy quote, that in a world that's changing so quickly, the biggest risk you can take is not taking any risk. And I really think that that's true. Right. I mean, a lot of people, I think, think that, you know, whenever it comes to, whenever you get yourself into a position where you have to make some big shift in direction or do something, you know, there are always people are going to point to the downside risks of that decision. And locally they may be right. Right? I mean, for any given decision that you're going to make, there's upside and downside, but in aggregate, if you are stagnant and you don't make those changes, then I think you're guaranteed to fail and not catch up. So to some degree, I think it's really right that over time, the biggest risk that you can take is to not take any risk.