Dissecting the Entrepreneurial Mind:
As a young startup founder I’ve learned the importance of learning from others. In order to accelerate your personal growth, business growth, and achieve your Life’s Task, you have to learn and execute the strategies of success that others have achieved before you. One avenue of life that I’m particularly interested in is health and wellness to harmonize my mental, emotional, and physical lives.
Currently I’m reading “Wire This Way” by Jessica Carson, Georgetown University’s first Expert in Residence and Director of Innovation at American Psychological Association. With a background in psychology, neuroscience, startups, venture capital, and mindfulness, she has both a scientific and embodied understanding of the unique wiring of entrepreneurial spirits, and empowers them to develop their capacity for self-study. “Wired This Way”, serves as a user’s guide to understanding, accepting, and caring for all facets — both light and dark — within the entrepreneurial spirit.
It’s not a simple soul who has the ability to create something from nothing. The job of a creator by definition is to create something that’s never existed before. In order to achieve this, creators must possess contradictions and must experience tension — the foundation of their potential energy — their source of inspiration, motivation, and productivity.
Creators need to acknowledge both their strengths and weaknesses, the tension created can manifested into a creative force or self-destruction. Internally this often looks like physical, mental, emotional, and spiritual distress. Without honoring their complexity, the entrepreneur and creator risk allowing their energetic potential to harm themselves.
Observing this contradictory paradigm throughout her research, interviews, and personal experience in the entrepreneurial ecosystem, Carson indicates the volatility of the self-stark contrast between the light and dark within the entrepreneurial spirit — is the source of the “wellness crisis” — that the entrepreneurial ecosystem faces today. Entrepreneurs are prone to polarities — they’re high and low, optimistic and pessimistic, masculine and feminine, logical and creative, energized and exhausted, open-minded and critically-minded, and other extremes of the human experience.
To overcome these challenges, William James, the “father of American Psychology”, asserts the goal is not to eliminate, ignore, or shame the many selves within, as this inner tension makes complex individuals most capable of achieving renewal and rebirth. Instead, the goal is to undergo a process of balancing, integration, and unification — to understand that one must leverage every crevice of one’s being as a source of creative potential.
Through the practice of self-study, creators can activate their inherent capacity for self-regulation, and intuitively guide themselves toward a state of wholeness. Wholeness is a natural consequence of gracefully regulating and harmonizing the contradictory oscillations of human behavior. Remember, self-study isn’t a one-time cure, but a life’s work involving daily, intentional, and fiercely curious participation. It’s interesting to see this consistency of self-improvement across fields and industries. This emphasis of a life-long journey of self-study parallels the importance of obtaining self-mastery as asserted in “Mastery” by international best-selling author, Robert Greene.
Self-study is a journey of identifying your greatest potentialities and sharing them through the act of creation. It’s not about becoming more, but coming back to your most essential self.
Reality is woven in opposing truths — a principle that is valid in physics and psychology — and creative consciousness arises from the ability to hold and harness it all.
In “Wired This Way”, the journey of self-study is structured as:
- Self-Understanding: First, embark on a journey of self-understanding, to identify both the light and dark within your entrepreneurial spirit.
- Self-Acceptance: Next, with the tools of self-understanding, you will explore self-acceptance. You will identify patterns as they arise, preventing the projection of unresolved inner conflicts onto your creations of those around you.
- Self-Care: Finally, once you achieve greater self-understanding and self-acceptance, you can engage in sustainable self-care. Self-care should be practiced mindfully and with utmost self-compassion.
I’m excited to learn, partake, and receive the benefits of the entrepreneurial path while undergoing a personal transformation through self-study. While creators and entrepreneurs should expect to find themselves in states of distress in their careers — we haven’t taken a job, we’ve chosen a hero’s journey and will inevitably face challenges. Our expectations for perfect balance and bliss should be disregarded, instead filled with a desire to achieve wholeness as a natural consequence of gracefully regulating the oscillations of highs and lows of the human experience. Remember, nothing great has ever been created from steadiness and stability alone. Embrace your multitudes and tap into your full creative and productive potential.
