That's a good comparison for people whose mental model set is at Kegan level* 5. Kegan 5, the fluid mode, is almost certainly a job requirement for startup founders, where you have to invent new roles and abstract systems of relationships rather than fit naturally into preexisting ones - that's Kegan 4 - or fit into them badly with behav…
That's a good comparison for people whose mental model set is at Kegan level* 5. Kegan 5, the fluid mode, is almost certainly a job requirement for startup founders, where you have to invent new roles and abstract systems of relationships rather than fit naturally into preexisting ones - that's Kegan 4 - or fit into them badly with behavioral hacks because you do not yet distinguish between your self and your relationships to other people, like many teenagers - that's Kegan 3. People at Kegan 4 are apt to be upset by your comparison, and people at Kegan 3 might be unable to process the comparison at all.
* I'm still in the middle of Kegan's book In Over Our Heads, but David Chapman of the Meaningness blog (IIRC he commented here once or twice) has multiple extended summaries and explanations of it, e.g. https://vividness.live/developing-ethical-social-and-cognitive-competence. Kegan theory is a hell of a job to summarize, as Chapman says many times, and at least at this point I can't do better than him.
ETA: I should add that what Paul Graham calls "playing [startup] house" does _not_ require Kegan 5, because people playing house are just LARPing with roles they have learned about in school or incubator. It is possible (but not a given) that people playing startup house will level up while doing it, because their lower-level model sets will be challenged from outside by the environment their startup puts them into.
That's a good comparison for people whose mental model set is at Kegan level* 5. Kegan 5, the fluid mode, is almost certainly a job requirement for startup founders, where you have to invent new roles and abstract systems of relationships rather than fit naturally into preexisting ones - that's Kegan 4 - or fit into them badly with behavioral hacks because you do not yet distinguish between your self and your relationships to other people, like many teenagers - that's Kegan 3. People at Kegan 4 are apt to be upset by your comparison, and people at Kegan 3 might be unable to process the comparison at all.
* I'm still in the middle of Kegan's book In Over Our Heads, but David Chapman of the Meaningness blog (IIRC he commented here once or twice) has multiple extended summaries and explanations of it, e.g. https://vividness.live/developing-ethical-social-and-cognitive-competence. Kegan theory is a hell of a job to summarize, as Chapman says many times, and at least at this point I can't do better than him.
ETA: I should add that what Paul Graham calls "playing [startup] house" does _not_ require Kegan 5, because people playing house are just LARPing with roles they have learned about in school or incubator. It is possible (but not a given) that people playing startup house will level up while doing it, because their lower-level model sets will be challenged from outside by the environment their startup puts them into.