Immanuel Kant, Entrepreneur?
On virtue and dignity, and the values of an entrepreneur, the philosopher Immanuel Kant had quite the founder mentality.
It’s common human behavior to reach for the highest of something, and to desire that we fulfill the highest expectations of our highest moral desires.
Kant believed that there was a “thing-in-itself” that was the sort of holy grail of a moral virtue or a goal. It was a reality object so accurately real that nothing else could replace it. He argued that even the empirical evidence we gathered to prove something are just appearances.
There is always a reality under the surface.
Human attempts to reach it are forever thwarted, because it’s simply an objective beacon. It’s a guide.
Where we fail is in acting like we are actually achieving that beacon’s intensity or that we can use our mind to shine with the same illumination.
I was thinking of this on the way to work today, because I was thinking about many of the founders I had met over the past two months, and some of the reading I have been doing, and I was reflecting on where do I place my work on my self and in my work on this spectrum of moral virtue. Honest, I am not sure why I was thinking about moral virtue. I was just thinking, I think, about the intentions and the catalysts that drive work.
I was thinking, where in my life do I approach things as if I am faking it?
In assessing the question, what makes a founder a founder who can develop a great company, I think from my personal experience, and some self examination (of where I fail in this), it does come down to some degree to assessing your own character. I am not saying there is a good founder or a bad founder.
I am saying that there is a spectrum of attention that any founder has to experience on their journey to building and then deciding if what they are building is what they need to be building.
In my opinion, you cannot build a great company if you do not have some degree of generosity of spirit and a desire to be good. By good, I mean the ability to see things with optimism, and to see things without cynicism. I think this can happen in stages. I don’t think there is a “I’m born this way” kind of mentality.
In my own self examination, I found that being cynical is a habit of mind that I developed as a way of being efficient. I wanted to do the same things over and over again, make them a pattern, whether it was conversations, or doing business, or finding a way to develop product and service, and even marketing.
But being cynical is really an indignity to your own nature. It’s lying to yourself. It’s like saying that no matter what, you will refuse to examine the current person or situation and just believe that your first, impulsive assumption about the experience is right.
A pop culture reference to this that seems innocuous is: “Fake it till you make it.”
But there is no faking it.
Often, when you are building a company, or even marketing for a company, you have to fight this battle. You have to fight this impulse to crib or cheat on the intense reflection that is required to say or do the right thing.
Some people talk about the desire to look at data before they form an answer. For me it’s the desire to check my intuition.
Intuition is not the answer to the problem. It’s only a signal that leads you to the problem. It is a form of cynicism to believe that your impulse is always right.
And for me, my virtue, I think, was that I believed my intuition was generally right.
You cannot be cynical when examining that intuitive impulse. You can’t look at the surface level simply and decide you know what it means. You can not use intuition as a cheat code. There is always something that is “the thing-in-itself” beneath the surface that can not be altered.
I think in terms of the risk profile of a founder, you can see where risk is not always about the big or the crazy idea. I think it’s also a little bit about being vulnerable. It’s about taking the risk to look at “the thing-in-itself.”
“I could be really wrong.”
“I need to find out if I am wrong, or right.”
“I cannot accept things at face value.”
Accepting things at first glance is not trust. It’s cynicism. It’s a false belief that you’ve seen everything before and you can make any decision you want and, on a percentage basis, you are going to be right.
But the 25x or the 100x reward — in relationships, in investment return, in faith in humanity — is when you refuse to buy into your own cynicism, and then take the risk to dive into the situation, take your time and find out what is truly beneath the surface.
That doesn’t take just a gut instinct. That takes guts.
