PayPal's Singular Priority

A story about how Peter Thiel implemented an intense focus system at PayPal that drove their success.

"Peter Thiel had a very simple common sense system at PayPal. Everybody in the company should figure out one priority - you should have one priority in your brain. What's it gonna be? Forcing people to figure out one priority, not a to-do list, was an incredible forcing function.

If anybody tried to talk to him about something that was not their big thing, their one thing, he would literally just leave the room. He'd say 'Oh you're talking to me about that? I thought your thing is this. Okay, see you.' He wouldn't try to convince you, but would signal this is not a priority by literally leaving the meeting or the room.

To Thiel, if you allow yourself to have more than one focus, you've already blinked. You've determined that mediocrity is an acceptable outcome. His singular focus philosophy was that solutions may not be clear, but the path to excellence and value are - and that path is to have a singular focus.

The problem with having multiple priorities is that we often don't know the answer to priority number one. Number one lacks a clear solution - it's a gnarly problem, an important problem, but not an obvious one. So we gravitate towards the second task because it's much clearer. We gravitate towards the known rather than the important things where the solution is in the dark."