Luke Nosek: Another way I would put it is, it’s just part of keeping a healthy brain. For example, you need to have strong muscles and a strong cardiovascular system to stay healthy. Even if you’re not necessarily an athlete, the whole human body is a system; if your cardiovascular system is not working, you’re going to die once everything starts functioning less and less. So we know, okay, you’re going to want to start doing some cardio a few times a week. It used to be just for athletes, but now we know it’s for everybody.

 

Likewise, we’re learning that meditation strengthens brain function. For instance, certain types of meditation can increase your concentration ability; that’s useful for everything. People have been confused because there are a lot of different types of meditation, different teachers, some of them are bad, perhaps some of them are not appropriate for you at certain times. But, there’s a lot of different types of exercise. These are basic things that are good for everybody to do. 

 

OP: How would you define success?

 

LN: I would define success as something you know from the inside. It’s your success; get to know yourself really, really well, and what you want. That is something which could be very different from what the overall culture is saying—“These are the things that are valuable,” like a fast car or a big house, or having many emails in your inbox. In Silicon Valley people will be like, “Oh, I have so many emails,” like this is a good thing. Success is finding out what your own deepest desires are, and shaping your own life to satisfy those. If you do that, you are successful.

 

OP: What inspires your work in the world?

 

LN: I feel like I have the opportunity to make a better world; that’s something I’ve dreamt about ever since I was young. I imagined making a better world through my inventions, and I’ve seen many different ways to make things better. It’s exciting. I get to be good at a few of them. I’m good at helping entrepreneurs build companies. For me, that one is particularly special because these are the very few people that are out there making a big, leveraged difference. They’re creating something that magnifies their impact with their company, so I’m really privileged to be able to help them in that.

 

OP: Speaking of entrepreneurs, what does that word mean to you?

 

LN: An entrepreneur is someone who is willing to do something that no one has done before. Something that hasn’t been thought of before or is maybe thought of as bad or stupid or weird. They’re willing to go through that difficulty of doing something that appears to a lot of the prevalent culture as just, “Why are you doing this? It’s not going to work, you’re not going to get anything out of this.”

 

When Elon Musk started SpaceX, his friends were telling him it was crazy, begging him not to do it. He was going through all this money and his wife said, “You know what, in the end it’s fine. You can throw all your money away into this thing but we have to have a house and a car after this is done.”

 

That’s the kind of person who’s an entrepreneur. Someone that believes something needs to be done, for the world, for themselves, for their own conception of themselves or their own conception of the world; they’re willing even though people have been telling them for quite a while that it’s not a good idea. I want to contrast that. It’s important to know that the entrepreneurs famous today, that everyone says are great—everyone is saying now that Mark Zuckerberg is great or that Elon Musk is great; they weren’t saying that when they were starting out, when you didn’t know about them. Generally, people were telling them, “This is really bad. This is really dumb.”

 

So that’s the special thing for me, that they’re willing to persevere through that and build something that they know is important, that they know is going to work, that they know is going to benefit people. 

 

OP: Wow. If you could say one thing to everyone on the planet, what would it be?

 

LN: “Build your own life. Don’t build a life for other people.”
I don’t mean don’t help people, if you enjoy doing that—but don’t do things because it’s the acceptable or standard thing. Find out what life you really want and go make that life. Go live it. 

 

OP: Can you name an obstacle that you’ve faced and overcome? What did you learn from that experience? 

 

LN: There are a lot of different things. I mentioned the physical practice of getting up every morning and exercising and doing yoga. It wasn’t always like that; it was a few years ago that I was quite unhealthy and it was because of that, of getting so unhealthy that my body could not . . . I was just sick, really, really sick for that year. And I had to go, “Well, I got to figure this out. I can’t be sick. I can’t even do my work.” 

 

By focusing on my body, I started to discover all these other things again that I had forgotten about, like my meditation practice, about what is meaningful in my life. What did I really want to do with my life? It was an important doorway. But the challenge itself in the beginning was, “Hey, I just want to get well, I want to eat well and I want to exercise well.” So it was a challenge that brought for me these other things that I would not have expected.

 

OP: What wisdom can you offer for those looking to follow in your footsteps?

 

LN: Don’t follow in my footsteps. Trace your own. If you want to take inspiration from any great entrepreneurs, that is good, but remember that you are different than they are, so becoming them is going to be impossible. Become yourself.

 

OP: Is there any way that our readers can become involved in what you’re doing?

 

LN: We met during the Thiel Fellow Summit. So for one thing, if your readers think that they qualify to be one of the Thiel Fellows—if you have a project that you think is going to make the world better, that you’re passionate about, and you want to do it outside the traditional education system, apply for the Thiel Fellowship. We need you. We want the best.

 

That is really the first one, although, if you don’t do that, as you become more successful I would just ask you to keep doing the things that you think are important for building your own life, and maybe one day our paths will cross, either in entrepreneurship or in something else.