The two most common pieces of business advice you should ignore

If there’s one person worth listening to when it comes to business advice (especially when it’s controversial) it’s one of Silicon Valley’s best-known billionaire investors. Peter Thiel, cofounder of PayPal, said on Sunday at a commencement speech at Hamilton College that if he had followed what he described as a “familiar track” in his career as a lawyer, he would never have reached the type of success he has today. Easier said that done, we appreciate, but Thiel instead quit his job, moved to San Francisco, cofounded a platform that now has 184 million active accounts on it, and made his billions.

And to become as big a success as this by default means that you’re going to have to listen to your own fair share of helpful – or not so – advice time and again. If you’ve ever tried to venture into the world of business, you’ll appreciate that you hear the same types of advice from almost anyone who will offer it to you; the “go big or go home” type of advice that really, when you think about it, is far more cliché than it is helpful. So what are the two most commonly used pieces of advice that Thiel, as a man who certainly knows business, chose to pick on as being pointless?

A Shakespeare quote this may be, but the use of it when it comes to business doesn’t actually make a whole lot of sense and on this, Thiel said:

“Shakespeare is telling us two things. First, do not be true to yourself. How do you know you even have such a thing as a self? Your self might be motivated by competition with others, like I was. You need to discipline your self, to cultivate it and care for it. Not to follow it blindly. Second, Shakespeare’s saying that you should be skeptical of advice, even from your elders. Polonius is a father speaking to his daughter, but his advice is terrible. Here Shakespeare’s a faithful example of our western tradition, which does not honor what is merely inherited.”

This has to be one of the most clichéd quotes there is and one that might make sense to a certain person who’s stuck at a crossroad in their own life, but in a business sense it just doesn’t work. If you lived each day as your last when you were trying to run a business, you would surely make all kinds of irrational and over-the-top decisions that won’t affect you later in life – because you won’t have a later life. Thiel said,

“The best way to take this as advice is to do exactly the opposite. Live each day as if you will live forever. That means, first and foremost, that you should treat the people around you as if they too will be around for a very long time to come. The choices that you make today matter, because their consequences will grow greater and greater.”

The whole focus of Thiel’s speech and of sounding out these two most commonly misused pieces of advice is to put focus on entrepreneurs trying out something new rather than blindly following pieces of advice that are as old as the hills and that actually bare no real meaning, anymore, in a business sense.