text: There are some kinds of work that you can't do well without thinking
  differently from your peers. To be a successful scientist, for
  example, it's not enough just to be correct. Your ideas have to be
  both correct and novel. You can't publish papers saying things other
  people already know. You need to say things no one else has realized
  The same is true for investors. It's not enough for a public market
  investor to predict correctly how a company will do. If a lot of
  other people make the same prediction, the stock price will already
  reflect it, and there's no room to make money. The only valuable
  insights are the ones most other investors don't share.
  You see this pattern with startup founders too. You don't want to
  start a startup to do something that everyone agrees is a good idea,
  or there will already be other companies doing it. You have to do
  something that sounds to most other people like a bad idea, but
  that you know isn't like writing software for a tiny computer
  used by a few thousand hobbyists, or starting a site to let people
  rent airbeds on strangers' floors.
  Ditto for essayists. An essay that told people things they already
  knew would be boring. You have to tell them something new.
  But this pattern isn't universal. In fact, it doesn't hold for most
  kinds of work. In most kinds of work to be an administrator, for
  example all you need is the first half. All you need is to be
  right. It's not essential that everyone else be wrong.
  There's room for a little novelty in most kinds of work, but in
  practice there's a fairly sharp distinction between the kinds of
  work where it's essential to be independent-minded, and the kinds
  where it's not.
  I wish someone had told me about this distinction when I was a kid,
  because it's one of the most important things to think about when
  you're deciding what kind of work you want to do. Do you want to
  do the kind of work where you can only win by thinking differently
  from everyone else? I suspect most people's unconscious mind will
  answer that question before their conscious mind has a chance to.
  I know mine does.
  Independent-mindedness seems to be more a matter of nature than
  nurture. Which means if you pick the wrong type of work, you're
  going to be unhappy. If you're naturally independent-minded, you're
  going to find it frustrating to be a middle manager. And if you're
  naturally conventional-minded, you're going to be sailing into a
  headwind if you try to do original research.
  One difficulty here, though, is that people are often mistaken about
  where they fall on the spectrum from conventional- to independent-minded.
  Conventional-minded people don't like to think of themselves as
  conventional-minded. And in any case, it genuinely feels to them
  as if they make up their own minds about everything. It's just a
  coincidence that their beliefs are identical to their peers'. And
  the independent-minded, meanwhile, are often unaware how different
  their ideas are from conventional ones, at least till they state
  By the time they reach adulthood, most people know roughly how smart
  they are (in the narrow sense of ability to solve pre-set problems),
  because they're constantly being tested and ranked according to it.
  But schools generally ignore independent-mindedness, except to the
  extent they try to suppress it. So we don't get anything like the
  same kind of feedback about how independent-minded we are.
  There may even be a phenomenon like Dunning-Kruger at work, where
  the most conventional-minded people are confident that they're
  independent-minded, while the genuinely independent-minded worry
  they might not be independent-minded enough.
  Can you make yourself more independent-minded? I think so. This
  quality may be largely inborn, but there seem to be ways to magnify
  it, or at least not to suppress it.
  One of the most effective techniques is one practiced unintentionally
  by most nerds: simply to be less aware what conventional beliefs
  are. It's hard to be a conformist if you don't know what you're
  supposed to conform to. Though again, it may be that such people
  already are independent-minded. A conventional-minded person would
  probably feel anxious not knowing what other people thought, and
  make more effort to find out.
  It matters a lot who you surround yourself with. If you're surrounded
  by conventional-minded people, it will constrain which ideas you
  can express, and that in turn will constrain which ideas you have.
  But if you surround yourself with independent-minded people, you'll
  have the opposite experience: hearing other people say surprising
  things will encourage you to, and to think of more.
  Because the independent-minded find it uncomfortable to be surrounded
  by conventional-minded people, they tend to self-segregate once
  they have a chance to. The problem with high school is that they
  haven't yet had a chance to. Plus high school tends to be an
  inward-looking little world whose inhabitants lack confidence, both
  of which magnify the forces of conformism. So high school is
  often a bad time for the
  independent-minded. But there is some advantage even here: it
  teaches you what to avoid. If you later find yourself in a situation
  that makes you think "this is like high school," you know you should
  Another place where the independent- and conventional-minded are
  thrown together is in successful startups. The founders and early
  employees are almost always independent-minded; otherwise the startup
  wouldn't be successful. But conventional-minded people greatly
  outnumber independent-minded ones, so as the company grows, the
  original spirit of independent-mindedness is inevitably diluted.
  This causes all kinds of problems besides the obvious one that the
  company starts to suck. One of the strangest is that the founders
  find themselves able to speak more freely with founders of other
  companies than with their own employees.
  Fortunately you don't have to spend all your time with independent-minded
  people. It's enough to have one or two you can talk to regularly.
  And once you find them, they're usually as eager to talk as you
  are; they need you too. Although universities no longer have the
  kind of monopoly they used to have on education, good universities
  are still an excellent way to meet independent-minded people. Most
  students will still be conventional-minded, but you'll at least
  find clumps of independent-minded ones, rather than the near zero
  you may have found in high school.
  It also works to go in the other direction: as well as cultivating
  a small collection of independent-minded friends, to try to meet
  as many different types of people as you can. It will decrease the
  influence of your immediate peers if you have several other groups
  of peers. Plus if you're part of several different worlds, you can
  often import ideas from one to another.
  But by different types of people, I don't mean demographically
  different. For this technique to work, they have to think differently.
  So while it's an excellent idea to go and visit other countries,
  you can probably find people who think differently right around the
  corner. When I meet someone who knows a lot about something unusual
  (which includes practically everyone, if you dig deep enough), I
  try to learn what they know that other people don't. There are
  almost always surprises here. It's a good way to make conversation
  when you meet strangers, but I don't do it to make conversation.
  I really want to know.
  You can expand the source of influences in time as well as space,
  by reading history. When I read history I do it not just to learn
  what happened, but to try to get inside the heads of people who
  lived in the past. How did things look to them? This is hard to do,
  but worth the effort for the same reason it's worth travelling far
  to triangulate a point.
  You can also take more explicit measures to prevent yourself from
  automatically adopting conventional opinions. The most general is
  to cultivate an attitude of skepticism. When you hear someone say
  something, stop and ask yourself "Is that true?" Don't say it out
  loud. I'm not suggesting that you impose on everyone who talks to
  you the burden of proving what they say, but rather that you take
  upon yourself the burden of evaluating what they say.
  Treat it as a puzzle. You know that some accepted ideas will later
  turn out to be wrong. See if you can guess which. The end goal is
  not to find flaws in the things you're told, but to find the new
  ideas that had been concealed by the broken ones. So this game
  should be an exciting quest for novelty, not a boring protocol for
  intellectual hygiene. And you'll be surprised, when you start asking
  "Is this true?", how often the answer is not an immediate yes. If
  you have any imagination, you're more likely to have too many leads
  to follow than too few.
  More generally your goal should be not to let anything into your
  head unexamined, and things don't always enter your head in the
  form of statements. Some of the most powerful influences are implicit.
  How do you even notice these? By standing back and watching how
  other people get their ideas.
  When you stand back at a sufficient distance, you can see ideas
  spreading through groups of people like waves. The most obvious are
  in fashion: you notice a few people wearing a certain kind of shirt,
  and then more and more, until half the people around you are wearing
  the same shirt. You may not care much what you wear, but there are
  intellectual fashions too, and you definitely don't want to participate
  in those. Not just because you want sovereignty over your own
  thoughts, but because unfashionable
  ideas are disproportionately likely to lead somewhere interesting.
  The best place to find undiscovered ideas is where no one else is
  To go beyond this general advice, we need to look at the internal
  structure of independent-mindedness at the individual muscles
  we need to exercise, as it were. It seems to me that it has three
  components: fastidiousness about truth, resistance to being told
  what to think, and curiosity.
  Fastidiousness about truth means more than just not believing things
  that are false. It means being careful about degree of belief. For
  most people, degree of belief rushes unexamined toward the extremes:
  the unlikely becomes impossible, and the probable becomes certain.
  To the independent-minded, this seems unpardonably sloppy.
  They're willing to have anything in their heads, from highly
  speculative hypotheses to (apparent) tautologies, but on subjects
  they care about, everything has to be labelled with a carefully
  considered degree of belief.
  The independent-minded thus have a horror of ideologies, which
  require one to accept a whole collection of beliefs at once, and
  to treat them as articles of faith. To an independent-minded person
  that would seem revolting, just as it would seem to someone fastidious
  about food to take a bite of a submarine sandwich filled with a
  large variety of ingredients of indeterminate age and provenance.
  Without this fastidiousness about truth, you can't be truly
  independent-minded. It's not enough just to have resistance to being
  told what to think. Those kind of people reject conventional ideas
  only to replace them with the most random conspiracy theories. And
  since these conspiracy theories have often been manufactured to
  capture them, they end up being less independent-minded than ordinary
  people, because they're subject to a much more exacting master than
  Can you increase your fastidiousness about truth? I would think so.
  In my experience, merely thinking about something you're fastidious
  about causes that fastidiousness to grow. If so, this is one of
  those rare virtues we can have more of merely by wanting it. And
  if it's like other forms of fastidiousness, it should also be
  possible to encourage in children. I certainly got a strong dose
  of it from my father.
  The second component of independent-mindedness, resistance to being
  told what to think, is the most visible of the three. But even this
  is often misunderstood. The big mistake people make about it is to
  think of it as a merely negative quality. The language we use
  reinforces that idea. You're unconventional. You don't care
  what other people think. But it's not just a kind of immunity. In
  the most independent-minded people, the desire not to be told what
  to think is a positive force. It's not mere skepticism, but an
  active delight in ideas that subvert
  the conventional wisdom, the more counterintuitive the better.
  Some of the most novel ideas seemed at the time almost like practical
  jokes. Think how often your reaction to a novel idea is to laugh.
  I don't think it's because novel ideas are funny per se, but because
  novelty and humor share a certain kind of surprisingness. But while
  not identical, the two are close enough that there is a definite
  correlation between having a sense of humor and being independent-minded
  just as there is between being humorless and being conventional-minded.
  I don't think we can significantly increase our resistance to being
  told what to think. It seems the most innate of the three components
  of independent-mindedness; people who have this quality as adults
  usually showed all too visible signs of it as children. But if we
  can't increase our resistance to being told what to think, we can
  at least shore it up, by surrounding ourselves with other
  The third component of independent-mindedness, curiosity, may be
  the most interesting. To the extent that we can give a brief answer
  to the question of where novel ideas come from, it's curiosity. That's
  what people are usually feeling before having them.
  In my experience, independent-mindedness and curiosity predict one
  another perfectly. Everyone I know who's independent-minded is
  deeply curious, and everyone I know who's conventional-minded isn't.
  Except, curiously, children. All small children are curious. Perhaps
  the reason is that even the conventional-minded have to be curious
  in the beginning, in order to learn what the conventions are. Whereas
  the independent-minded are the gluttons of curiosity, who keep
  eating even after they're full.
  The three components of independent-mindedness work in concert:
  fastidiousness about truth and resistance to being told what to
  think leave space in your brain, and curiosity finds new ideas to
  Interestingly, the three components can substitute for one another
  in much the same way muscles can. If you're sufficiently fastidious
  about truth, you don't need to be as resistant to being told what
  to think, because fastidiousness alone will create sufficient gaps
  in your knowledge. And either one can compensate for curiosity,
  because if you create enough space in your brain, your discomfort
  at the resulting vacuum will add force to your curiosity. Or curiosity
  can compensate for them: if you're sufficiently curious, you don't
  need to clear space in your brain, because the new ideas you discover
  will push out the conventional ones you acquired by default.
  Because the components of independent-mindedness are so interchangeable,
  you can have them to varying degrees and still get the same result.
  So there is not just a single model of independent-mindedness. Some
  independent-minded people are openly subversive, and others are
  quietly curious. They all know the secret handshake though.
  Is there a way to cultivate curiosity? To start with, you want to
  avoid situations that suppress it. How much does the work you're
  currently doing engage your curiosity? If the answer is "not much,"
  maybe you should change something.
  The most important active step you can take to cultivate your
  curiosity is probably to seek out the topics that engage it. Few
  adults are equally curious about everything, and it doesn't seem
  as if you can choose which topics interest you. So it's up to you
  to find them. Or invent them, if
  Another way to increase your curiosity is to indulge it, by
  investigating things you're interested in. Curiosity is unlike
  most other appetites in this respect: indulging it tends to increase
  rather than to sate it. Questions lead to more questions.
  Curiosity seems to be more individual than fastidiousness about
  truth or resistance to being told what to think. To the degree
  people have the latter two, they're usually pretty general, whereas
  different people can be curious about very different things. So
  perhaps curiosity is the compass here. Perhaps, if your goal is to
  discover novel ideas, your motto should not be "do what you love"
  so much as "do what you're curious about."
  One convenient consequence of the fact that no one identifies
  as conventional-minded is that you can say what you like about
  conventional-minded people without getting in too much trouble.
  When I wrote "The Four Quadrants of
  Conformism" I expected a firestorm of rage from the
  aggressively conventional-minded, but in fact it was quite muted.
  They sensed that there was something about the essay that they
  disliked intensely, but they had a hard time finding a specific
  passage to pin it on.
  When I ask myself what in my life is like high school, the
  answer is Twitter. It's not just full of conventional-minded people,
  as anything its size will inevitably be, but subject to violent
  storms of conventional-mindedness that remind me of descriptions
  of Jupiter. But while it probably is a net loss to spend time there,
  it has at least made me think more about the distinction between
  independent- and conventional-mindedness, which I probably wouldn't
  have done otherwise.
  The decrease in independent-mindedness in growing startups is
  still an open problem, but there may be solutions.
  Founders can delay the problem by making a conscious effort only
  to hire independent-minded people. Which of course also has the
  ancillary benefit that they have better ideas.
  Another possible solution is to create policies that somehow disrupt
  the force of conformism, much as control rods slow chain reactions,
  so that the conventional-minded aren't as dangerous. The physical
  separation of Lockheed's Skunk Works may have had this as a side
  benefit. Recent examples suggest employee forums like Slack may not
  be an unmitigated good.
  The most radical solution would be to grow revenues without growing
  the company. You think hiring that junior PR person will be cheap,
  compared to a programmer, but what will be the effect on the average
  level of independent-mindedness in your company? (The growth in
  staff relative to faculty seems to have had a similar effect on
  universities.) Perhaps the rule about outsourcing work that's not
  your "core competency" should be augmented by one about outsourcing
  work done by people who'd ruin your culture as employees.
  Some investment firms already seem to be able to grow revenues
  without growing the number of employees. Automation plus the ever
  increasing articulation of the "tech stack" suggest this may one
  day be possible for product companies.
  There are intellectual fashions in every field, but their
  influence varies. One of the reasons politics, for example, tends
  to be boring is that it's so extremely subject to them. The threshold
  for having opinions about politics is much lower than the one for having
  opinions about set theory. So while there are some ideas in politics,
  in practice they tend to be swamped by waves of intellectual fashion.
  The conventional-minded are often fooled by the strength of
  their opinions into believing that they're independent-minded. But
  strong convictions are not a sign of independent-mindedness. Rather
  Fastidiousness about truth doesn't imply that an independent-minded
  person won't be dishonest, but that he won't be deluded. It's sort
  of like the definition of a gentleman as someone who is never
  You see this especially among political extremists. They think
  themselves nonconformists, but actually they're niche conformists.
  Their opinions may be different from the average person's, but they
  are often more influenced by their peers' opinions than the average
  If we broaden the concept of fastidiousness about truth so that
  it excludes pandering, bogusness, and pomposity as well as falsehood
  in the strict sense, our model of independent-mindedness can expand
  further into the arts.
  This correlation is far from perfect, though. G๖del and Dirac
  don't seem to have been very strong in the humor department. But
  someone who is both "neurotypical" and humorless is very likely to
  Exception: gossip. Almost everyone is curious about gossip.
  Thanks to Trevor Blackwell, Paul Buchheit, Patrick Collison, Jessica
  Livingston, Robert Morris, Harj Taggar, and Peter Thiel for reading
  drafts of this.