Zero to One_ Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future ( PDFDrive )

You can also expect the future to be either better or worse than the present.
Optimists welcome the future; pessimists fear it. Combining these possibilities
yields four views:
Indefinite Pessimism
Every culture has a myth of decline from some golden age, and almost all
peoples throughout history have been pessimists. Even today pessimism still
dominates huge parts of the world. An indefinite pessimist looks out onto a bleak
future, but he has no idea what to do about it. This describes Europe since the
early 1970s, when the continent succumbed to undirected bureaucratic drift.
Today the whole Eurozone is in slow-motion crisis, and nobody is in charge. The
European Central Bank doesn’t stand for anything but improvisation: the U.S.
Treasury prints “In God We Trust” on the dollar; the ECB might as well print
“Kick the Can Down the Road” on the euro. Europeans just react to events as
they happen and hope things don’t get worse. The indefinite pessimist can’t
know whether the inevitable decline will be fast or slow, catastrophic or gradual.
All he can do is wait for it to happen, so he might as well eat, drink, and be