Chapter Eight- Secrets 

In today’s day and age, it is the new norm to have no hard questions, as technology has answered all of them. Some questions can never be answered, and some can be answered easily. People think there are no secrets left to discover. But this is wrong. A world without secrets would provide a perfect understanding of justice. Four social trends have conspired to root our belief in secrets- incrementalism, risk aversion, complacency, and flatness.

Thiel says, Ted Kaczynski, a Unabomber that believed in this, claimed that in order to be happy every human needs to have goals that require and need to succeed in some of these goals. He divided human goals into 3 groups.

• Goals that can be satisfied with minimal effort
• Goals that can be satisfied with serious effort
• Goals that cannot be satisfied no matter how much effort is put in

This is the classic trigonometry of the easy, the hard and the impossible. The value of things are set by the market. If you think something hard is impossible, you’ll never even start trying to achieve it. Belief in secrets is an ineffective truth.

Be careful who you share your secrets with. It could be dangerous to reveal your knowledge. Every great company is built around a secret that’s hidden from the outside.