Zero to One: Lessons On Love pt.2

Infinite Player: You are the entrepreneur of your life. Here’s how to monopolize it with love.

Sep 08, 2026

Deaf n of 1,

Are you ready to play? Field guide attached here.

How to escape competition, in love.

How many people live lives they only tolerate? How many people walk paths their parents planned out for them decades ago, compete with their peers over acceptances and internships and rankings, settle unhappily into jobs they endure purely for survival, stay tethered to partners they tolerate for company to pass time, and run the same routines on autopilot indefinitely? They play things safe inside linear games, and they get exactly the safe, linear decay that comes with making that choice.

Choose something new.

When I first read Peter Thiel’s Zero to One, it shook tenth-grade me out of the kind of sleepwalking that kills 5 year old dreams. It confirmed a suspicion I’d been carrying for years: that my whole life had been built on inherited scripts. Nothing felt right or true to me. The rat race toward “success” and finding the “right path”, the pressure to be a good student with drama and conflict I kept finding myself entangled in, the sense of exile that came with not quite fitting in with the cliches, all the objects I wanted that I’d copied from people or things I saw online or in the hallway—chasing my friends’ approval, my teachers’ approval, my parents’ approval.

At first, I couldn’t translate his startup principles into anything tangible for a career at 16. So out of necessity, I applied his parameters of innovation to life through love. What I’ve learned with my guide is that people and relationships are the platform that matters most. I saw clearly for the first time how much of life was built on imitation rather than free choice. I made the choices, I was the only enemy to blame in reality, but I was also the only one who could fix it! When we examine how we live in practice, in dating, friendship, and self-worth— the ego facets of human life are hollowed out by competitive thinking.

We subconsciously import dogma of competitive logic into our relationships with ourselves and each other, and we fall back into loops of comparison because nobody ever taught us a more effective way to keep score. To escape that trap, we don’t have to abolish playing games as a whole, but we do have to go back to our first principles. Liberation. Free markets need actual free players to function. I realized I needed to invent my own creations instead of building on top of someone else’s broken foundation.

Lesson #1: Audit the Desires You Inherit

Love is steered by desire, but where do your wants actually come from?

Most of what we call our wants, our preferences, our “type,” aren’t ours at all. René Girard’s mimetic desire reveals this: we copy what other people want, mistake that imitation for authentic desire, and end up trapped in envious rivalry (social conflict) over identical, socially validated prizes. In dating, that might look like hundreds of people chasing the exact same “type” of person, the same rigid 6ft height requirement, or same career milestones as their friend groups, all because groupthink quietly told them to want it.

We watch our friends to see what they’ll approve of. We watch our culture to see what’s safe for us to be. We scroll through machine-made feeds to borrow desires wholesale at scale, then convince ourselves those things we want to buy were always our own. This kind of learning breeds toxic rivalry over scarce, identical prizes. Mimicry always tips into conflict eventually, and conflict always looks for someone to blame in order to restore a fragile peace. The harder you fight for approval, the more of your uniqueness you sand down and erase in the process of conforming.

Ask yourself honestly: do I want this only through someone I saw, or is it alive in my own heart?

Love will come to you, really being you.

Lesson 2: Look for Secrets

When my roommate first pulled up James’s Instagram and laughed at the idea of a Black raft guide in Alaska, that was my outlier moment. I didn’t think he looked “different”, but I was curious. Truth tends to hide in plain sight, usually just past the edge of whatever stereotype or norm that was supposed to rule you out. If you feel like you haven’t found your calling, or like you can’t locate genuine connection, have you actually tried looking for secrets?

Some people move through the world as though every truth has already been discovered, every problem already solved, all the magic already spent. Another roommates said something close to that and I bit my tongue, there’s so much work to do. Secrets exist, hidden in plain sight, waiting for someone patient enough to pay attention and look. There are secrets of nature, and there are secrets about people: quiet thoughts and feelings individuals hide because they’re afraid of being shamed, attacked, or misunderstood the moment ideas surface.

Artists aren’t afraid, they’re honest, and it’s why so many artists are labeled “overly sensitive.” The best place to go looking for love is exactly where the crowd refuses to glance. The anti-memes, the things we all secretly relate to but never say out loud, that tend to become popular eventually, once someone is brave enough to say them first. What is no one loving right now? What is being quietly ignored? What might you be missing entirely because you followed a dogma instead of reason?

Think critically in action.

Lesson 3: Monopolize Your Existence

Your life matters. You don’t have to compete for the right to exist; you were born, which means you cleared the only lottery that counted. Escaping competition means becoming a monopoly.

Monopoly, here, isn’t about closing yourself off from others. It’s about being so rooted in your own authentic value that comparison stops being a useful lens for anyone trying to understand you. Pay close attention to yourself and to your world. Happy people escape competition in the exact same way enduring companies do, by becoming so specifically, irreplaceably themselves that no one else can offer an adequate substitute.

In business, perfect competition destroys profits, because everyone ends up selling identical products at marginal cost. Competing to be the best version of an already-established “type” burns you out. Romance run through broken, transactional mediums operates on the same bleak economics: present yourself as an interchangeable part with generic marketing, and your true depth and values go undiscovered and uncommunicated, which turn love into a coin flip instead of a value-aligned relationship.

Authenticity is the most durable asset you already own. Figure out all you actually are, filter by asking why, whenever something no longer belongs; that why, becomes your foundation. The moment you stop optimizing yourself to fit whatever the crowd finds legible any given Sunday. You step outside the competition entirely and start playing a different.

Play infinite.

Lesson 4: You Are Not a Lottery Ticket

Cash in your free will. Reject the unjust tyranny of chance over your own story. Your life is not a scratch-off ticket, and it isn’t a gamble you keep placing bets on while hedging your exits. Half-assing you dreams while keeping one foot out the door isn’t caution, it’s indecision dressed in fear. The moment you leave love up to luck, you’ve already psychologically prepared yourself to lose before the game even starts. Statistics collapse when the sample size is one. You have agency over your own choices. Vote with your time and your attention the way you vote with your dollars.

Live with conviction in yourself, just go for it!

Lesson #5: Power Law > Portfolio

Friendship is the due diligence.

70% of long-lasting relationships begin as friendships, this is because friendship quietly builds proprietary shared context, intimacy, and trust before the real stakes ever enter the picture and start influencing your gut-based decisions. Still, picks your friends like you pick your fruit. These friends will be your models, so make sure atl. 5 are good. These good models encourage you to be different, they inspire you to create.

Kanye West once tweeted (adding my sense)”:
“How to NOT kill your<dreams> pt 1 / Avoid being around people who make you want to kill your<dreams>.”’

Choose life in your choices! Let’s stop pretending, like we’re so professional…, hiding behind…, manufactured comments, personal PR, and pre-planned launch posts... Let’s get real personal, because honestly, everything we love talking about becomes personal under the surface. Is professionalism just a lie we’ve all agreed to tell ourselves to create boundaries when we get hurt?

Like Thiel, I carried this advice in my mind but undervalued in my life what mattered most—people our relationships. It was the people around me who formed my beliefs, who taught me good and evil, who I shared my life and time with. The friendships. The love. The fear. The people are the magic, and I kept forgetting that lesson. Thiel makes a version of this point for business: if you can’t count the durable relationships among the fruits of your work life, you haven’t invested your time well, even on purely financial standards.

He built up PayPal to be tight-knit instead of transactional, and that choice shaped the speed and quality with which their team collaborated with one another. He focused first on strengthening relationships, he hired people who enjoyed working together, and looked for people genuinely excited about working with them. There’s something worth getting right in the pattern between happiness and success. We aren’t just animals who run on genetic nature of selfish survival. Our egos generate entire architectures of thoughts, expectations, and obsessions we can spend years fixated on, but we can also be transformed and choose differently at any time.

Modern culture tells you to build a diversified portfolio to dabble with dozens of things and people, “spray and pray”, to never put all your eggs in one basket. Try this or that, but life isn’t an index fund. Make choices, but experiment with intention. Make bets that compound. The spray-and-pray dabbling with trends leads to treating free individuals like products to be molded, sampled, by placing weak bets on surface-level charm while dodging the heavy questions and complexity that costs something in vulnerability from the start. That approach reliably produces a portfolio of flops rather than a single hit that actually lasts for decades.

The truth is that human resonance follows a power law, we don’t live in a normal world. One outlier generates exponentially more than every average joe in your love pool combined. Spending 80% of your energy managing friction and misunderstandings from a handful of low-conviction options ends up being a fun waste of your time, only to be left drained in the end.

Find what’s meant for you. Don’t index your heart across a dozen mediocre bets. Back your outliers, fully, and let the averages go.

Lesson 6: New Creation

Existence is the parameter of success. Don’t compete for the right to exist. Create something entirely new instead.

Thiel warns that a company’s founding happens exactly once, and if the foundation is flawed, the damage often can’t be undone later. But unlike a corporation, a human being has neuroplasticity on their side. Your cognitive foundation is not a life sentence. It’s an active posture you can work to readjust, in small ways, every single day. You can refound yourself: change your mind, expand your capacity to love, let yourself be touched by knowledge and light again, and create something new in the present moment, regardless of what the earlier foundation looked like.

Your life only goes stale when creation stops. Continuing to create is how you keep evolving, and evolving is how you cheat slow death. Infinite players don’t play games to end them. They play to keep the playing itself continuing. As long as you keep creating, you’re always standing at new beginnings, no matter how far into the story you actually are.

To turn all of this into daily practice, invert the conventional wisdom and run your life on four contrarian operating principles, small bets you can place directly into your investment in love.

If you can’t trust your own mind, others will end up guiding your heart for you. Without self-reliance, you quietly surrender your own agency and default to running on someone else’s. Stop letting others act as your authority. Know your own reason. Love is a choice, and it should never be made from fear. Step out of the competitive market entirely, embrace the bare, unglamorous reality of all that you actually are, and build a life that doesn’t have to look like anyone else’s to exist as a success.

Monopolize your existence.