The 1 to 0 Problem
Why success isn’t the most important thing.
Everyone defines success differently.
You might think how rich you are is a measure of success while another person might consider raising a family and owning a home successful.
How you define success for yourself is up to you. But that doesn’t change the fact that success is deeply ingrained in our culture. Everyone is striving to be successful at something.
The quest to find success might be a central driving force in your life that becomes a core part of your identity. Your understanding of your own existence is directly correlated with your goals and whether or not you achieve them.
While working hard to achieve success isn’t a bad thing, there’s a dark side of success that no one really talks about.
What happens after you achieve success?
In his book Zero to One, Peter Thiel offers a framework for differentiating average success from normal success. Thiel has a cult-like following among Silicon Valley types. You’d be hard pressed to find a founder who hasn’t read Zero to One.
The book makes the case for being an outlier. It suggests that being in a league of your own – above the competition – is desirable. But what happens when you get there? If there’s nowhere for you to go and no one to support you once you get to the top, is it really worth it after all?
That’s what this essay will dive into. It’ll look at what comes after success. By becoming aware of the potential pitfalls you may face once you achieve success you can recalibrate the speed at which you reach your goals. Or, more importantly, whether or not your goals are worth pursuing in the first place.
Zero to One is a book by investor Peter Thiel. His framework for going from 0 to 1 is a guiding framework for founders and ambitious individuals on the quest to achieve success.
If you’ve been around Silicon Valley types, you’ve probably heard the name Peter Thiel. A member of the PayPal Mafia, Peter Thiel is legendary founder and one of Silicon Valley’s largest investors.
In Zero to One, Thiel argues that real innovation comes from creation. Instead of copying something that already works, progress comes from creating something that no one has thought of much less tried before.
Thiel argues progress occurs either horizontally or vertically. Horizontal progress makes more of something that already works – like scaling a business. You take an idea or model – Uber, for example – and distribute it throughout the economy. This might entail applying an existing business model to a new industry or taking a business that works and expanding into new markets, but at the end of the day you’re just replicating something that already works.
Vertical progress, on the other hand, is a leap into the unknown. Neuralink and OpenAI are two examples of 0 to 1 companies. These companies are creating something entirely new that hasn’t existed before, disrupting the entire economy, and creating new opportunities that have yet to be imagined.
Thiels’ interpretation of progress has become something of a holy grail for founders. As a result, it has also seeped its way into culture to become a new definition of success. Rather than making incremental progress – as Atomic Habit’s James Clear might advocate – Thiel suggests real achievement is made through massive, vertical leaps.
When companies do this, they are able to establish creative monopolies. In other words, their innovation is so unique and adds so much value to society, no one else even comes close. Companies who achieve this rise above the competition, creating a league of their own.
Individual founders are encouraged to emulate this. Rather than trying to be better than everyone else, they should be the best. That’s why so many founders are willing to go to extreme lengths to turn their big idea into something successful.
But while Peter Thiel’s advice is inspirational for entrepreneurs, it elevates success for the sake of success. Rather than building a business to solve a problem or make the world a better place, Thiel advocates for building a business for the sake of being the best at doing so.
At the individual level this turns achievement into an end in and of itself. Taken to its logical end, this creates a fundamental problem: if you pursue success for the sake of pursuing success, what happens when there’s no more success left to achieve?
While many people spend their whole lives trying to get to 1, there’s a diminishing return on success after you reach it. Rather than improving the quality of your life, it could degrade it.
While Peter Thiel’s book has become the guide all founders follow on their quest for success, it leaves more questions than answers. What happens after you get to 1? If you don’t like what’s on the other side, is it even worth getting to 1 in the first place?
These are some things you’ll want to consider when setting 0 to 1 goals.
You’ll find yourself unfulfilled
Think back to the last time you accomplished a goal. How did you feel three months later? Six months later? A year later?
I’m going to wager you felt a whole lot of nothing.
This is what happened to me when I almost accomplished my biggest goal – qualifying for the Boston Marathon.
In 2024, I ran the Austin Marathon finishing in 3:24:12. As soon as I crossed the finish line, I was inconsolable. I had spent years working towards this goal and finally it happened.
The Austin Marathon took place in February which meant I had to wait seven months before I could submit my time for the Boston Marathon. My running immediately tanked. While I have other running goals, this one goal had been my north star for years. Without it, I felt lost.
2024 turned out to be the most competitive year for Boston Marathon applicants. I had a qualifying time – even with the new qualifying time change – but I didn’t make the cut. I accomplished the goal of qualifying for the Boston Marathon, but I didn’t accomplish my goal of actually getting to run the race.
The entire experience left a vacuum in my life that I, frankly, still haven’t recovered from. While my long term goal is to qualify and run all the Abbott World Marathon Majors, the quest to accomplish this initial goal has left me burned out. And now that I’ve experienced the absence of fulfillment that comes on the other side of success, I’m scared to try again.
Think about the primary goal you’re working towards right now. If you accomplished that goal this year, what would replace it? Could you find the same passion you used to accomplish that goal and repurpose it for your next goal?
People say it’s the journey that matters, not the destination. This is why. Once you achieve your goal, there’s nothing to replace it. You may have other goals you want to achieve, but it will never be the same experience as your original goal. Depending on how important a newly accomplished goal was to you, the absence of the quest to achieve it can leave you feeling hollow and deeply unfulfilled.
Your social network will shrink
Your relationships will change as you achieve success. Some people will be jealous of you and leave your life while new people will enter it as you ascend to a different level of existence.
Look at weight loss as an example of this. If you’re morbidly obese today, your friend group probably consists of people who share some of the same unhealthy habits as you.
But what happens if you try to lose weight and succeed?
The people who are your friends today might not want to be your friends after you achieve your goal. You’ll probably have adapted new habits eliminating some of the unhealthy shared activities you used to bond over. And because you’ve achieved something they haven’t, they’re going to either envy you or resent you.
The ladder of success narrows the higher you go. As you climb it, you’ll have fewer friends to confide in and relate to. And if you reach 1 as Peter Thiel defines it, you’ll be in league all on your own. The only thing you’ll have is the thing that made you successful in the first place. That may fill your life with purpose for a while, but if that thing goes away or you can’t do it anymore, what are you left with?
Social isolation is a consequence of success that’s often overlooked. Someone like Taylor Swift is incredibly successful, but that comes at a cost. After you eliminate the fans, her staff, and celebrity “friends,” who is left?
Success may be desirable but are the trade-offs worth it? Are you willing to lose friends and freedom as you climb your way to the top?
There won’t be anywhere left for you to go
Once you’ve reached the top, where do you go?
You’ll need to set a new goal to replace the goal you just accomplished. But each new goal you set has to be more ambitious than the last to give you the same feeling of drive and purpose.
Look at mountain climbers as an example. First, you might aspire to climb Mt. Everest. Then you might aspire to climb all 14 eight-thousanders. After that where do you go? You begin climbing without oxygen just for the sake of setting new records. And after you succeed at doing that, then what?
Eventually there won’t be anywhere for you to go. What do you do when that happens?
Being the best at something can lead to stagnation. If you have no one to compete against and nothing new to pursue, you’re stuck in status quo. That might seem like a good idea at the moment but after a period of time you’ll get bored.
I think this is why there has been such a spate of celebrity suicides in recent years. Eventually you get to a point in your career where there’s nowhere else left for you to go. And if your career is your identity, this creates an existential crisis.
If your entire life is set on achieving a goal and you’ve done it with flying colors who do you become?
Final takeaway.
The innate desire to be successful at something is a guiding force that shapes your day-to-day life. Even if it’s just being a good mom or a good dad, whatever goal you are working towards is a quest that you are striving to achieve.
0 to 1 is a framework used in businesses to set yourself above the competition. While this might make sense for a business, the same logic doesn’t always apply to individuals.
Not all goals are worth achieving. Striving towards an impossible goal is sometimes more important than achieving the goal itself.
1 to 0 is a success trap. While getting to 1 may make you exceptional or unique it’s not a destination that you can linger at eternally. You can create new goals that take you to even higher heights but eventually you’ll come back to zero.
The process of achieving a goal – rather than the end goal – is arguably more important than the goal itself. It establishes habits and practices that foster an achievement-oriented identity that isn’t wedded to a specific outcome.
Once you achieve one goal you still have your process as a foundation. And it’s this process that helps define you – not the goal you’ve set out to achieve.
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