Creator vs. Competitor

David Brooks suggests a lesson from multi-millionaire Peter Thiel -  Don't be a competitor be an innovator.

His lecture points to a provocative possibility: that the competitive spirit capitalism engenders can sometimes inhibit the creativity it requires.

Think about the traits that creative people possess. Creative people don’t follow the crowds; they seek out the blank spots on the map. Creative people wander through faraway and forgotten traditions and then integrate marginal perspectives back to the mainstream. Instead of being fastest around the tracks everybody knows, creative people move adaptively through wildernesses nobody knows.

Tough to teach creativity. Especially tough for non-creative people in one of the most stultifying and retrograde systems in the free world: the U.S. public school system.