For the past few years I’ve been trying to trying to put into words the idea of the difference between two different types of people. The closest I came to expressing this difference was enterpreneurs versus non-enterpreneurs, but the difference is more subtle.

  • People who actively decide to do something they want to do. I know several such people, and they are mostly enterpreneurs. For example, a friend of my wife left her job at Goldman Sachs in New York about 10 years ago to go to Mumbai, India and start a media company.

  • People who work in more conventional jobs, earning a salary, and reskilling and moving to a differnet job when their existing field becomes overcrowded or automated. These people are more reactionary, more passive, and they attempt to position themselves to adapt to what is coming, rather than going forward and creating something new. Being reactionary isn’t the key difference though - enterpreneurs can also be reactionary, as changing market conditions create a new opportunity.

In his book Zero To One, Peter Thiel introduces vocabulary that helped connect some dots for me. The difference between the two types of people is only manifest as enterpreneur versus employee, but at a fundamental level, it is described by Thiel’s characterization of ‘Definite’ versus ‘Indefinite’. The Indefinite person (or company , society, etc.) believe that the future is random and not very much in their control, and therefore they hedge their bets by doing multiple different things, acquiring many skills and degrees. The Definite person has a concrete idea about the future and does that one thing that makes him/her very good at it, and continues to chip away at creating that future. Now, I think the vast majority of people today, and in history have been of the former type. So, part of me wonders whether this is a real trait in certain people, or whether is a sales pitch by Theil the venture capitalist to being out the enterpreneurs in people.

In Thiel’s calculation, the US was a Definite society in the 1950s and 60s, but since the 1980s it has been an Indefinite society, characterized by the prestigious but indefinite professions of lawyers, consultants and finance professionals - none of which are definite in nature. Becoming a Definite person requires greater clarity about the way the world works because it requires predicting what is important and will not be redundant. It also requires courage, because working towards a Definite future requires working much harder - one does not have a hedge.