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> What game do you want to play with your life? ... just-collect-a-paycheck-and-get-your-fulfillment-elsewhere game This sort of rhetoric shows how much of ent

> What game do you want to play with your life? ... just-collect-a-paycheck-and-get-your-fulfillment-elsewhere game This sort of rhetoric shows how much of entrepreneurship isn't really about like, making money. It's meaningless emotional warble-garble, a kind of psychological warfare that people do to themselves to stay happy in a system of really emotionally punishing rules of one-upmanship. Like one funded founder I know, I asked him straight, "Are you motivated by acting out college-age vengeances against your peers?" and he said yes! It's not really about, "I don't want that Google engineer lifestyle," because that person does, he just wasn't qualified (in some narrow sense) to do that. He just failed at it. A lot of people don't grow out of that. And it's not just limited to people who didn't pass the Google interview. There are plenty of Google engineers who said to, e.g., studying medicine in college, "I don't want that doctor lifestyle," when really they did not perform competitively in their first-year life sciences class! Medicine dropouts everywhere! The startup handbook materials seem so incomplete. They don't honestly engage with the emotions of their audience, which is overwhelmingly disaffected college-educated 20-40 year old men of means. In fact, the reason your rhetoric is so appealing is because it doesn't put these emotional things out into the open. It amplifies the weird psychological warfare, it doesn't question it. The right question isn't, what kind of game you want to play? It starts with what a therapist would ask, "Why are you here today?" to lead to "Why do you think you're unhappy?", questions that make the audience of your line of thinking deeply uncomfortable and something to be avoided.

hisnameisjimmy 7y ago
Figuring out what you want to be when you grow up, what makes you happy, etc etc is a mind-bogglingly complex problem. Often, we just have to make decisions with the best information we have with whatever emotional motivations we have. A lot of our decision making, historically, was just decided for us. Parents had children and married them based on economic benefits. Your work was just what your Dad did or through other close relationships. Now you have seemingly infinite choices. People are often making the wrong decision for the wrong reasons all the time. Sometimes it works out, sometimes it doesn't. I think anything that helps you frame your actions and understand yourself and your motivations is fine. I know plenty of people who happily would identify with the 'collect a paycheck and get fulfillment elsewhere'. I also think it's perfectly valid to want to start a company to get vengeance on those who appeared to underestimate you. The reality is there are many paths and it's very hard to judge what a valid or right path is.

hisnameisjimmy 7y ago

Figuring out what you want to be when you grow up, what makes you happy, etc etc is a mind-bogglingly complex problem. Often, we just have to make decisions with the best information we have with whatever emotional motivations we have. A lot of our decision making, historically, was just decided for us. Parents had children and married them based on economic benefits. Your work was just what your Dad did or through other close relationships. Now you have seemingly infinite choices. People are often making the wrong decision for the wrong reasons all the time. Sometimes it works out, sometimes it doesn't. I think anything that helps you frame your actions and understand yourself and your motivations is fine. I know plenty of people who happily would identify with the 'collect a paycheck and get fulfillment elsewhere'. I also think it's perfectly valid to want to start a company to get vengeance on those who appeared to underestimate you. The reality is there are many paths and it's very hard to judge what a valid or right path is.