“Success is never accidental.” ― Jack Dorsey

When Jack Dorsey, co-founder of Twitter and Square, grew up in St. Louis, Missouri, he always had a fascination with cities. He began collecting maps, and became fascinated with cities such as New York, where so many things were happening simultaneously. His parents gifted him an old police scanner, which announced the locations of emergency vehicles and fire trucks as they were passing through the city. He taught himself to program in order to build a digital map that would visualize those vehicles as dots. When he was older, he worked for a dispatch solutions company, which was doing what he did as a kid. He became even more fascinated by the pulse of a city and what was happening. This was the seed that gave birth to Twitter, the social networking company.

When a few years later, Dorsey was looking for new ideas to start a company, he had a conversation with his old friend Jim, a glass artisan who sold glass artwork. Jim told him that he had just lost a $2,000 sale because his customers didn’t carry cash and he was unable to accept credit cards. The traditional way of applying for a merchant account took a long time. Together they decided to build a startup that would help anyone with a startup to accept credit card payments. This became the foundation for Square, the mobile payments company.

No matter how much luck do you ascribe to Dorsey’s fortune to build two multi billion dollar businesses, there was more than luck at play. An idea that has occupied his mind for years finally brought fruit when the rights came together, which he carefully and planned.

This is what Peter Thiel calls a definite optimist, someone that has a definite idea about how the future will form and then plans for it in advance. The indefinite optimist, on the other hand, believes that the future will be better, but is not sure how and therefore creates no specific plans. A definite optimist focuses on the executing his vision for the future, while an indefinite optimist, fooled that the world is governed by randomness, focuses on the process. This explains why in finance people diversify their portfolio when they are running out of ideas, or politicians prefer polls over visionary thinking.

What makes a definite optimist unique is that he favors firm convictions. Instead of having many options, he closes his options and works on the future that is most compelling to him. If you believe that the future will be better than the present, and you have a firm conviction on how you can shape it, you will work on creating that future. This may be single-minded like Lafayette, or having three areas like Elon Musk. The point is they both focused on areas that they strongly believed in.

As millennials, we are afraid to close options. We build our resumes in a way that prepares us for many things, but nothing in particular. We overestimate the value of choice, and forget that the risk that comes with being too diversified. It is the curse of having too many options, then we become paralyzed. We are optimists about the future, but in no particular way.

If you want to escape the status quo, you need to believe that things are governed by cause and effect and not randomness. What distinguishes a definite optimist from an indefinite optimist is that a definite optimist has conviction about a particular future. If you want to build a different future, you need to pursue one or two things at the exclusion of everything else. And as Thiel argues you need to prioritize design over chance. You need to believe that you can have agency and that you can change not only yourself, but also the world around you. That while luck is involved, it is not the determining factor.