Peter Thiel has a contrarian view of Shakespeare, too (VIDEO)

Peter Thiel Interview - Peter Thiel"s Top 10 Rules For Success

"When I was sitting where you are, back in 1989, I wouldve told you that I wanted to be a lawyer. I didnt really know what lawyers do all day, but I knew they first had to go to law school, and school was familiar to me," he said.

So he went to law school and got a very good job at a law firm, and soon after that almost landed a position as a Supreme Court clerk.

"This is sort of the top prize you can get as a lawyer. It was the absolute last stage of the competition. But I lost. At the time I was totally devastated. It seemed just like the end of the world," he said.

Instead, it led him to move to California and eventually help to found and lead PayPal.

"Looking back at my ambition to become a lawyer, it looks less like a plan for the future and more like an alibi for the present," Thiel said. "It was a way to explain to anyone who would ask to my parents, to my peers and most of all to myself that there was no need to worry. I was perfectly on track. But it turned out in retrospect that my biggest problem was taking the track without thinking really hard about where it was going."

While Thiel thought he was being true to what he wanted to do, he said he was actually doing what others had taught him he should want to do.

"At this moment in your life you know fewer limits, fewer taboos and fewer fears than you will ever in the future. So do not squander your ignorance," Thiel advised Hamilton"s grads. "Go out and do what your teachers and parents thought could not be done and what they never thought of doing."

Of course, Thiel also started his speech with the warning, "Like most graduation speakers my main qualification would seem to be that I am one of the few people who are even more clueless about what is going on in your lives than your parents and your professors."

A video of the complete Thiel speech is attached to this story.

Cromwell Schubarth is TechFlash Editor at the Silicon Valley Business Journal.

Source: http://www.bizjournals.com/sanjose/blog/techflash/2016/05/peter-thiel-has-a-contrarian-view-of-shakespeare.html