Here is a brief excerpt from an article written by Walter Chen and featured in an issue of BusinessInsider. To read the complete article, please click here.

Photo: Suzie Katz via Flickr

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“What are your top five priorities for this week?” “What are the top three objectives and key results you’re using to measure how you’re doing for the quarter?”

These are questions that get thrown around by managers at work to help their teams prioritize and focus on achieving the most important accomplishments.

In Peter Thiel’s view, this doesn’t go far enough. As the founder of PayPal, Thiel developed an unorthodox, extreme philosophy on focus and prioritization. Instead of focusing on five things, or three things, the magic number is one. You only focus on one singular thing .

As PayPal executive Keith Rabois recalls, Thiel “would refuse to discuss virtually anything else with you except what was currently assigned as your #1 initiative.” Every employee, for instance, had to identify their “single most valuable contribution to the company” on PayPal’s 2001 annual review forms.

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To read the complete article, please click here.

Peter Andreas Thiel is an American entrepreneur, hedge fund manager, libertarian and venture capitalist. With Elon Musk and Max Levchin, Thiel co-founded PayPal and was its CEO. He currently serves as president of Clarium Capital, a global macro hedge fund with more than $2 billion under management, and a managing partner in The Founders Fund, a $275 million venture capital fund he launched with Ken Howery and Luke Nosek in 2005. He was an early investor in Facebook, the popular social-networking site, and sits on the company’s board of directors. Thiel was ranked #377 on the Forbes 400 in 2008, with a net worth of US$1.3 billion. However this number now underestimates his wealth as his Facebook share alone, at a 2010 valuation, is worth US$1.7 billion. Peter Thiel lives in San Francisco, California.