Escaping Alcatraz by the front door

Peter Thiel was on a fast track early. In his junior high yearbook, a friend wrote that he would get into Stanford, and four years later, at the end of high school, he went to Stanford, then on to Stanford Law School. He ended up at a big law firm in New York, where from the outside everybody wanted to get in and from the inside everybody wanted to leave.

Many people there had wrapped their identities up in winning these competitions. When he left after some months, having decided this was maybe not the best idea, one of the people down the hall told him it was really reassuring to see him go, since he had had no idea it was possible to escape from Alcatraz. All it took was going out the front door and not coming back.