The Psychological Needs of the Extremely Ambitious

Most of my field (along with most of our social and ethical systems and institutions) is focused on “raising the floor” of human functioning: lifting more people out of depression, anxiety, and trauma, and up to the mean level of wellbeing, resilience, self-efficacy, or whatever outcomes we’re trying to optimize. The methods and metrics used by the... See more

Take, for example, the ambition to “make your venture-backed startup profitable”: to develop, market, and distribute a product or service that’s never existed before, in a form that’s valuable and accessible enough for large numbers of people to want to pay you for it, in sufficient quantity that your revenue consistently exceeds your costs.

If you... See more

Founders are striving to do something more innovative, uncertain, and psychologically demanding than most of us ever try to do—many with potentially large impacts on the world—and yet their distinct psychological needs have gone largely unstudied and unaddressed. And despite the many headlines signaling a “mental health crisis in startups,” with se... See more

A difference in emphasis: raising the floor versus raising the ceiling

Matt Clifford has written about how building a world-changing technology company has never been easier than it is today. But for all of the technical, commercial, and industry-specific knowledge that founders can readily access, psychological knowledge still lags behind. (In fac... See more