My answer – your answer – to most issues should be complicated, almost elusive.
Why?
Because most of life is complex and thorny in the same way.
Circumstances change and grow while we change and grow too.
In a measured way, let’s end more sentences with question marks.
And answer more questions like Peter Thiel.
If someone asks him a question—say, about some controversial issue of the day—he does not simply react with an opinion, or pluck a conclusion from nowhere. Instead, he begins with, “One view of these things is that . . . ,” and then proceeds to explain the exact opposite of what he happens to personally believe. Only after he has finished, with complete sincerity and deference, describing how most people think about the issue, will he then give you his opinion, which almost always happens to be something radically unorthodox—all of it punctuated with liberal pauses to consider what he is saying as he is saying it. Even when he does describe his opinion, he prefaces it with “I tend to think . . .” or “It’s always this question of . . . ,” as if what he is about to tell you is simply capturing where his opinion falls the majority of the time when running a thought exercise on the topic, as if he is always in the process of deciding what he thinks. And this is simply the process for articulating what he thinks.
-Ryan Holiday, Conspiracy
