If you can identify a delusional popular belief, you can find what lies hidden behind it: the contrarian truth.

Had the people who started Facebook decided to stay at Harvard, they would not have been able to build the company, and by the time they graduated in 2006, that window probably would have come and gone.

I'm in favor of free trade, but I think if you had to make a choice between having technological progress versus free trade, you had one or the other, you should always pick technological progress. I think it's an incredibly important variable for creating more prosperity.

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.

There's a wide range of sales ability: there are many gradations between novices, experts, and masters. There are even sales grandmasters. If you don't know any grandmasters, it's not because you haven't encountered them, but rather because their art is hidden in plain sight.

Consider the trivial but revealing hallmarks of urban hipsterdom: faux vintage photography, the handlebar mustache, and vinyl record players all hark back to an earlier time when people were still optimistic about the future. If everything worth doing has already been done, you may as well feign an allergy to achievement and become a barista.

What nerds miss is that it takes hard work to make sales look easy.