How to Get From ‘Zero to One’ Create and Nurture Original Business Ideas
WANT TO START A BACKYARD GARDEN? Randy’s Top Tips for Planting Season
Last March when the COVID-19 pandemic hit, the whole country had the same two thoughts:
“What important truth do very few people agree with you on?”
That’s entrepreneur and author Peter Thiel’s favorite interview question. To Thiel, a person’s answer to that question provides insight into whether they’ll be able to find success as an entrepreneur. Ideally, if you can answer with something like “Most people believe in X, but the truth is the opposite of X,” then you’re well on your way from zero to one and creating an original business idea. That’s what Thiel explores in his book “Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future.”
1. It’s time to learn how to make sourdough bread. 2. Let’s start a garden!
Randy and his family jumped on the bandwagon. Seed packets, miniature shovels, and potting soil were selling out all over the country, but they managed to get their hands on the equipment they needed to build a raised garden bed in the backyard. They had vegetables to eat by summer, but they learned a thing or two along the way. If you want to start your own backyard garden this spring, here are Randy’s top tips. Plant in a raised bed . Planting seedlings in a raised bed instead of directly in the ground has a lot of perks. Fewer weeds will grow in the bed, the drainage will be better, your plants will stay warmer, and you won’t accidentally step on your carrots. Raised beds are easy to build, too. You can find a complete guide on Lowes.com. If you don’t want to spend money on lumber, you can make a raised bed out of just about anything. Randy’s neighbor used old furniture! (There’s a great MasterClass on this by “Gangster Gardener” Ron Finley. He’ll show you how to turn a drawer into a planter.) Buy seedlings instead of germinating seeds yourself . As Randy and his family discovered, germinating plants from seed is a slow, finicky process. If you don’t mind the extra cost, he suggests buying seedlings or plant starts instead. You’ll save a lot of time and hassle. Plus, if you buy from a nursery or local farmers market, you get the added benefit of knowledgeable salespeople. Invest in wire mesh . Almost as soon as Randy’s plants popped up, bits started to go missing! Rabbits were the culprits. To keep them away, he wrapped his garden bed with a short wire fence. You can use chicken wire or mesh to keep your vegetables safe. Don’t be ashamed to use YouTube. It’s 2021, and in the age of Alexa, there’s nothing wrong with asking YouTube to solve your problems. While they were putting together their bed and figuring out how to keep vegetables alive, Randy and his family relied on YouTube videos for help. You can learn a lot from channels like Kelly’s Kitchen Garden, Garden Ninja, and The Gardening Channel with James Prigioni.
“Zero to One” is all about coming up with and nurturing unique ideas, which are the foundation of game-changing businesses. As a co-founder and investor in a number of companies that have changed the business landscape, Thiel has some authority on this subject. He co-founded Cofinity (which later became PayPal) and invested in startups like Facebook, SpaceX, Lyft, and Airbnb whose ideas were so novel at the start that they were perceived as risky by many. Throughout the book, Thiel shares his wealth of knowledge garnered from a long, successful career of recognizing and acting on original ideas. According to him, and anyone else who has ever tried creating something wholly unique, developing an original idea is no easy task. The difficulty of originality even led Mark Twain to once say “There is no such thing as a new idea. We simply take a lot of old ideas and put them into a sort of mental kaleidoscope.” But in “Zero to One,” Thiel proves that coming up with original ideas is possible, and he provides readers with helpful tips and lessons for how to get there. One such lesson: Stop trying to be the next Bill Gates or Mark Zuckerberg because “if you’re copying these guys, you aren’t learning from them.” Thiel uses his favorite interview question to try to identify original thinkers. These are the people who take their businesses from zero to one because they looked at past successes and thought, “I can do it differently, and I can do it better.” If you want to be in that group, then reading Thiel’s advice in “Zero to One” is a great place to start.
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