Welcome to the home of Noah Brier. I'm the co-founder of Variance and general internet tinkerer. Most of my writing these days is happening over at Why is this interesting?, a daily email full of interesting stuff. This site has been around since 2004. Feel free to get in touch. Good places to get started are my Framework of the Day posts or my favorite books and podcasts. Get in touch.

You can subscribe to this site via RSS (the humanity!) or .

Secrets

If you’ve read the class notes from Peter Thiel’s Stanford class on entrepreneurialism or his new book Zero to One, you’ll know his take on “secrets.” Basically his idea is that every great business is built on a secret, something you believe that no one else does: The bigger the secret, the bigger the opportunity.

From the essay on his secrets class:

Some secrets are small and incremental. Others are very big. Some secrets—gossip, for instance—are just silly. And of course there are esoteric secrets—the stuff of tarot cards and numerology. Silly and esoteric secrets don’t matter much. And small secrets are of small importance. The focus should be on the secrets that matter: the big secrets that are true.

I mention this because I ran into a new McLuhan book I had never heard of called The Book of Probes, which is basically a collection of quotes designed to make you think. When I opened the book I turned straight to this page:

Maybe Thiel is a McLuhan fan?

November 24, 2014