The Art of Playing a Game No One Else Knows Exists

Most businesses are stuck in a loop of tiny, meaningless upgrades. A shinier button. A new shade of blue. A slightly better algorithm. They mistake busyness for progress, convinced that tweaking something by 5% is what separates winners from losers.

Peter Thiel calls this going from one to n—taking what’s already out there and multiplying it. It’s safe, predictable, and completely uninspiring. The real players, the ones who change everything, go from zero to one. They don’t optimize; they invent. They don’t improve what exists; they make it irrelevant.

This is where Youngme Moon would slam the brakes.

In Different, Moon calls out the great corporate delusion: every company wants to be “unique,” yet they all end up blending together. Fast food brands introduce the exact same plant-based burger within months of each other. Smartphone companies strip away bezels, and suddenly, all phones look identical. Everyone talks about differentiation, but what they’re really doing is standardization.

Thiel’s ‘Zero to One’ rips this mindset apart. The best companies don’t compete—they remove themselves from competition entirely. Google didn’t build a better Yahoo. Tesla didn’t make a more fuel-efficient car. They made the old way irrelevant.

And that’s where most companies fail. They want to be kind of different but not so different that they risk being alone. So, they settle for being a recognizable variation of the status quo instead of an unrecognizable anomaly. But the real breakthroughs? They come from businesses willing to be unlike anything else.

If you’re spending your time analyzing competitors, tweaking your strategy based on what they’re doing - congratulations, you’ve already lost. The winners? They aren’t playing “who did it better.” They’re playing “who did it first.” They create something so original, so category-defining, that competitors don’t just fall behind—they disappear.

Here’s the paradox: the harder you try to win at the existing game, the more trapped you become inside it. If your strategy starts with better, you’re fighting for inches. If it starts with something the world has never seen, you’re rewriting the rules.

Zero to One isn’t about squeezing into a crowded market. It’s about detonating the market and building something entirely new in its place. It’s about making the competition obsolete before they even realize what’s happening.

Or, as Youngme Moon might put it: "Being better is an improvement. Being different is an advantage. But being untouchable? That’s how you break the universe."