Tag: founderpsychology

Decade by Decade — What Biotech Teaches About the Psychology of the Long Game

July 9th, 2026

In the summer of 2012, a small biotechnology company called BioNTech was working on a technology that its founders believed would eventually transform the treatment of cancer. The technology was mRNA — messenger RNA, the molecular instruction set that tells cells which proteins to make. The founders, Uğur Şahin and Özlem Türeci, had been developing it for more than a decade. They had not yet produced a single approved product. They had spent hundreds of millions of dollars. They had told their investors, repeatedly, that the results they were working toward were ten or fifteen years away.

Eight years later, their mRNA platform produced the first COVID-19 vaccine to receive emergency use authorization, in partnership with Pfizer. The technology they had been developing for cancer — patiently, expensively, without visible results, across a decade in which every quarter produced no product revenue — turned out to be precisely the platform needed for the fastest vaccine development in human history.

This is not a story about luck, though luck was present. It is a story about a specific kind of intelligence that the biotechnology industry selects for and that almost no other industry requires in the same form — the intelligence of the person who can work, for a decade or more, toward an outcome they cannot see, in conditions of radical uncertainty, without losing the thread of why they started or the conviction that the thread leads somewhere worth going.

Silicon Valley calls this the long game. Biotechnology operators live it.

And the psychology it requires is different, in specific and instructive ways, from the psychology that the technology industry — with its eighteen-month product cycles, its fail-fast culture, and its quarterly pressure toward visible traction — has optimized for.

The Clock Problem

Every industry runs on a clock. The clock determines what counts as progress, what counts as failure, and what kind of thinking the industry selects for over time.

Silicon Valley’s clock runs fast. A consumer technology product that takes three years to reach market is considered slow. An enterprise software company that has not achieved meaningful revenue in two years is considered troubled. The culture that has developed around this clock — the lean startup methodology, the minimum viable product, the pivot, the series A to B to C funding timeline — is optimized for the extraction of learning from rapid experimentation. Fail fast, learn fast, iterate fast. The clock rewards the person who can move quickly, adapt quickly, and update their beliefs quickly in response to new information.

This is a genuine and valuable cognitive skill. It is not the only one.

Biotechnology’s clock runs on a different order of magnitude entirely.

A drug candidate that enters Phase I clinical trials today will not receive FDA approval for, at minimum, seven to ten years — and that is if everything goes well, which it almost never does. The failure rate in drug development is staggering: approximately ninety percent of drug candidates that enter clinical trials never reach approval. The companies that succeed are not the ones that avoided failure. They are the ones that survived enough failures, across enough years, with enough resources and conviction intact, to reach the successful outcome that the failures were preparing them for.

The clock that biotechnology runs on selects for patience not as a personality trait but as a professional competency. The biotech operator who cannot psychologically sustain a decade of work without visible product success is not suited to the industry — regardless of their intelligence, their scientific knowledge, or their entrepreneurial capability. The clock is the filter. And the filter produces a specific kind of person.

What a Decade of Invisible Progress Requires

The hardest thing about the biotechnology long game is not the scientific difficulty, though the scientific difficulty is immense. It is the psychological challenge of maintaining conviction, direction, and organizational coherence across a timeline in which the feedback loops that normally sustain human motivation are absent or inverted.

In most domains of human endeavor, progress is visible. The writer sees the pages accumulate. The software engineer ships features that users interact with. The athlete’s performance metrics improve or decline in ways that are measurable and immediate. The feedback is continuous, and the continuous feedback sustains the motivation to continue.

In biotechnology, the feedback is delayed, indirect, and frequently negative. A Phase II trial that fails after three years of enrollment does not mean the underlying science is wrong. It may mean the patient population was too heterogeneous, the dosing was miscalibrated, the endpoint was chosen incorrectly, the competitive landscape changed, or any number of other factors that are specific to the trial design rather than the therapeutic hypothesis. But the failure is real, the cost is real, and the timeline has been extended — again — by years.

The biotech operator who survives this environment has developed something that is rarer than scientific expertise or entrepreneurial drive. They have developed what might be called decade-scale conviction — the capacity to maintain a well-founded belief in the direction of travel across a timeline in which the normal signals of correctness — product success, revenue, market feedback — are not available.

This conviction is not blind faith. It is a specific cognitive structure — the capacity to distinguish between the evidence that the underlying hypothesis is wrong and the evidence that the current approach to testing the hypothesis is wrong. The first kind of evidence should change the direction. The second kind should change the method. The biotech operator who confuses the two fails in one of two ways: they abandon a correct hypothesis because a trial failed, or they persist in a wrong hypothesis because they cannot distinguish trial failure from hypothesis failure.

Learning to make this distinction, across years of ambiguous data, is the central intellectual skill of the biotech long game.

Odysseus in the Laboratory

The operators who build significant biotechnology companies share a psychological profile that is recognizable across the industry and that maps, with remarkable precision, onto the qualities Homer attributed to Odysseus.

They never forget the destination. The specific therapeutic outcome — the patient population that will be helped, the disease mechanism that will be addressed, the biological hypothesis that drives everything — is not abstract for them. It is concrete, specific, and maintained with a clarity that the years of difficulty do not erode. This is not motivational rhetoric. It is a functional necessity. The biotech operator who loses the specificity of the destination — who allows the destination to become vague enough that any result could be interpreted as progress toward it — has lost the navigational instrument that makes the long journey possible.

They can use deception strategically. Not ethical deception — biotech is a regulated industry with specific legal requirements around disclosure — but the strategic management of narrative. The biotech operator who communicates to investors, to employees, and to the public with the same unfiltered uncertainty they carry internally will not sustain the organizational coherence required to reach the long game’s conclusion. Odysseus did not tell his men everything he knew about the dangers ahead. He managed the information to maintain the crew’s capacity to function. The biotech operator manages the narrative to maintain the organization’s capacity to continue.

They convert enemies into resources. The failed trial is not only a setback. It is data. The regulatory rejection is not only a delay. It is a specification. The competitor who reaches the market first is not only a threat. It is validation of the therapeutic hypothesis and a source of clinical data about the patient population. The biotech operator with the Odyssean intelligence finds the resource in every obstacle — the thing that the obstacle reveals that could not have been seen without it.

And they refuse Calypso’s island. The acquisition offer that comes before the program is complete. The pivot to an easier indication that would produce faster results. The partnership that would provide near-term revenue at the cost of long-term optionality. Biotech operators face these offers regularly — offers of ease, comfort, and certainty that come with the specific cost of abandoning the destination they have been navigating toward for years.

The ones who build significant companies say no. Not because they are irrational, but because they understand, at a level that only years of the long game can produce, that ease in the wrong direction is not ease at all.

The IT Difference

The comparison with information technology is not a criticism of IT culture. The fast clock, the rapid iteration, the embrace of failure as a learning mechanism — these are genuine innovations in the management of entrepreneurial uncertainty, and they have produced extraordinary results in domains where the feedback loops are fast enough to support them.

The difference is structural, not evaluative.

Information technology operates in an environment where the product can be shipped, user behavior can be observed, and the learning can be incorporated into the next version on a timeline of weeks or months. The uncertainty is real, but it is the kind of uncertainty that rapid experimentation can reduce. The fail-fast philosophy works because failure is fast, cheap, and informative — because the experiment can be run at low cost and the result can be read quickly.

Biotechnology operates in an environment where the experiment takes years, costs hundreds of millions of dollars, and produces results that are ambiguous even when positive. The uncertainty cannot be reduced through rapid iteration because the iteration is not rapid. The minimum viable product is a Phase III trial. The beta test is a ten-year clinical program. The user feedback is a p-value.

This structural difference produces different people. The IT operator who has spent a career in environments of rapid feedback develops a specific agility — a comfort with pivoting, a willingness to abandon what is not working, a preference for the reversible decision over the irreversible one. These are genuine cognitive assets in the fast-clock environment.

The biotech operator who has spent a career in environments of delayed feedback develops a different set of assets — a comfort with sustained uncertainty, a capacity for decade-scale conviction, a preference for the correct hypothesis over the currently-supported one, and an immunity to the social pressure to pivot that fast-clock environments generate. These assets are not better than the IT operator’s assets. They are different, and they are suited to different problems.

The most interesting question — the one that this archive’s ongoing investigation of the long game is gradually building toward — is what happens when these two kinds of intelligence are combined. The biotech operator who also has the IT operator’s agility in experimental design. The IT operator who has developed the biotech operator’s capacity for decade-scale conviction. The organization that can run fast experiments in the early stages and maintain decade-scale conviction in the later ones.

This combination is rare. It is also the precise combination that the most important problems of the next century will require.

The Specific Longevity Connection

The biotechnology of longevity — the therapeutic programs aimed at extending healthspan, reversing cellular aging, and treating the diseases of aging at their biological root — sits at the intersection of the two longest games in human experience.

It is biotechnology, with its decade-scale development timelines, its ninety percent failure rates, and its requirement for sustained conviction in the face of continuous setback. And it is the science of human longevity itself — the investigation of biological processes that operate across decades and that are only now becoming visible enough to intervene in.

The people building this field are playing a long game within a long game. They are developing therapies for a condition — aging — that has never been successfully treated, using biological mechanisms that are only partially understood, on timelines that extend to the edge of their own careers. They are making bets that they may not live to see resolved, in service of outcomes that would change what it means to be human.

The psychological profile this requires is the extreme version of the Odyssean intelligence this essay has described. Decade-scale conviction is not sufficient. What is required is something more like career-scale conviction — the capacity to commit a professional life, or a substantial portion of it, to a direction of travel that may not be validated within the span of that life.

This is not recklessness. It is the long game in its most demanding form. And the people who are choosing to play it — in the longevity biotechnology companies that are currently running programs in senolytics, epigenetic reprogramming, and aging biology — are making exactly the kind of bet that the freedom of nothing makes available and that the Calypso problem threatens.

They are choosing the difficult path home over the comfortable island. And the quality of that choice — and the character of the people making it — is visible in how they talk about their work, how they manage their organizations, and how they respond when the trials fail and the timeline extends and the question of whether the destination is real becomes, again, genuinely open.

The ones who are still working are the ones who know it is.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is the fundamental difference between biotech and IT entrepreneurship?
The fundamental difference is the clock. Information technology operates on fast feedback loops — weeks or months from experiment to result — that reward rapid iteration, quick pivoting, and the embrace of fast failure as a learning mechanism. Biotechnology operates on decade-scale timelines where the minimum viable product is a Phase III trial, the beta test is a ten-year clinical program, and the failure rate exceeds ninety percent. These different clocks select for different cognitive profiles and different psychological assets.

What is decade-scale conviction and why does it matter in biotech?
Decade-scale conviction is the capacity to maintain a well-founded belief in a therapeutic direction across a timeline in which the normal signals of correctness — revenue, product success, market feedback — are absent. It requires the ability to distinguish between evidence that the underlying hypothesis is wrong and evidence that the current approach to testing it is wrong. This distinction, maintained across years of ambiguous data, is the central intellectual skill of the biotech long game.

How does the Odysseus framework apply to biotech operators?
Biotech operators who build significant companies share the Odyssean profile: they never lose the specificity of the therapeutic destination; they manage organizational narrative strategically to maintain coherence under uncertainty; they convert failed trials and regulatory rejections into data and specifications; and they refuse the Calypso offer — the acquisition, the easier indication, the near-term revenue partnership — that would provide comfort at the cost of abandoning the destination.

What is the Calypso problem in biotechnology?
The Calypso problem in biotech is the offer of ease in the wrong direction — the acquisition that comes before the program is complete, the pivot to a faster indication, the partnership that provides near-term revenue at the cost of long-term optionality. These offers are structurally equivalent to Calypso’s offer of immortality to Odysseus: they provide genuine comfort and genuine security, at the cost of permanently deferring or abandoning the destination. The biotech operators who build significant companies are distinguished, in part, by their capacity to recognize and refuse these offers.

Why is the longevity biotech sector particularly demanding?
Longevity biotech sits at the intersection of two long games: the decade-scale timelines of drug development and the biology of aging itself, which operates across decades and is only now becoming sufficiently understood to intervene in. The people building this field are making bets that may not be validated within their own careers, in service of outcomes that would fundamentally change human experience. This requires career-scale conviction — the commitment of a professional life to a direction of travel whose validation is uncertain on any timescale the individual can confidently anticipate.

What would the combination of IT agility and biotech conviction produce?
The combination of IT’s experimental agility — the capacity to design fast, cheap, informative experiments in early-stage research — with biotech’s decade-scale conviction in the later stages of development would be unusually powerful. It describes the cognitive profile most suited to the most important problems of the next century: problems that require rapid learning in early stages and sustained conviction in later ones, that cannot be solved by either fast-clock thinking or slow-clock thinking alone, but only by the person or organization that can operate in both modes at the appropriate phase of the problem.

SIGNAL tracks the recurring patterns of human experience across history, philosophy, and science — for people living long enough to encounter them more than once.

For those who intend to last.
The Showman’s Arc — What P.T. Barnum Teaches About the Psychology of Every Entrepreneur Who Has Ever Succeeded

July 8th, 2026

A note on sources: P.T. Barnum (1810–1891) was a real American showman, entrepreneur, and politician — the founder of Barnum’s American Museum, the architect of Jenny Lind’s American tour, and the co-creator of what became Barnum & Bailey Circus. The 2017 musical film The Greatest Showman, starring Hugh Jackman, is a romanticized account of his life. The film compresses, simplifies, and sentimentalizes. The psychological arc it depicts, however, is historically accurate in its essential structure. This essay uses the arc — both as Barnum actually lived it and as the film dramatizes it — as a lens for examining the psychology of entrepreneurship more broadly.

In 1836, a man with no money, no connections, and no obvious qualifications decided to put a 161-year-old woman on display in a New York museum.

The woman, Joice Heth, was not 161 years old. She was probably in her eighties. The claim was fabricated. The audience knew it was probably fabricated. They came anyway — not because they believed the claim but because the possibility that it might be true was more interesting than the certainty that it was not.

Phineas Taylor Barnum had discovered something that would define his career and, two centuries later, still define the most successful practitioners of entrepreneurship, entertainment, and media: people do not pay for reality. They pay for the possibility of wonder.

This discovery was the first move in an arc that Barnum would spend the rest of his life completing — an arc that is not, on close examination, specific to Barnum. It is the arc of every entrepreneur who has ever built something significant from nothing, experienced the specific vertigo of success, and encountered the particular temptations that success, and only success, can generate.

The arc has five movements. They are as consistent across the historical record as any pattern this archive has examined.

Movement One: The Freedom of Nothing

The first movement of the entrepreneurial arc is the most counterintuitive.

The person who starts with nothing has an advantage that the person who starts with something does not. They have nothing to lose.

This is not a consolation prize. It is a genuine cognitive and psychological advantage. The person with assets to protect, a reputation to maintain, and a position to preserve calculates risk differently from the person who has none of these things. The calculation is not irrational — it accurately reflects their different situations. But it produces different decisions. The person with nothing to protect can make bets that the person with something to protect rationally should not.

Barnum in 1836 was twenty-six years old, nearly penniless, and had failed at grocery, lottery, and newspaper ventures in rapid succession. He had a wife, a child, and essentially no money. By any reasonable assessment, he was not in a position to take large risks.

And yet the absence of an established position — the fact that he had no professional identity to protect, no accumulated reputation to risk, no assets that could be lost — meant that the cost of failure was, in a specific sense, zero. He was already at or near zero. Failing could not take him further below zero than he already was.

This is the freedom of nothing. And it is available only to people who have not yet succeeded.

Every entrepreneur who has built something significant from nothing has, at the beginning, inhabited this freedom. The history of business is full of founders who describe their early ventures as characterized by a recklessness that they could not replicate later — a willingness to make bets that, in retrospect, they describe as insane, and that produced outcomes that, in retrospect, they describe as inevitable.

The insanity and the inevitability are both real. The bets were genuinely reckless. They also had to be made, because the alternatives — caution, prudence, the protection of a position that did not yet exist — would have produced nothing.

The freedom of nothing is the precondition of everything. It is also, once spent, gone.

Movement Two: Reading the Crowd

The second movement is the development of the skill that distinguishes the entrepreneur from the dreamer.

Every person with nothing to lose can make reckless bets. Not every person with nothing to lose can make reckless bets that pay off. The difference is the ability to read what people want — not what they say they want, not what they think they want, but what they will actually pay for when given the opportunity.

Barnum’s genius was not showmanship in the theatrical sense. It was perceptual. He understood, with remarkable precision, the gap between what people consciously desired and what they actually responded to.

People said they wanted education. They paid for spectacle. People said they wanted truth. They paid for the possibility of wonder — for the experience of encountering something that might be impossible, might be real, and was interesting precisely because the question could not be immediately resolved.

The Cardiff Giant — a stone figure discovered in 1869 that Barnum suspected, correctly, was a hoax — he purchased rights to exhibit not because he believed in its authenticity but because he understood that the controversy around it was more commercially valuable than its resolution would be. When the original was exposed as a fake, Barnum commissioned his own copy and exhibited it as “a fake of the fake.” People came to see both.

This is not cynicism about the audience. It is a precise reading of what the audience actually wants, as distinct from what they say they want. The audience wants to be in the presence of something remarkable. They are willing to tolerate — and in many cases prefer — a certain ambiguity about whether the remarkable thing is real, because the ambiguity sustains the wonder that the certainty of either truth or falsehood would dissolve.

Every successful entrepreneur has this perceptual skill in some form. The product that succeeds is almost never the product that was asked for. It is the product that addresses a desire that people had not yet articulated — that gives people something they did not know they wanted until they had it. The skill is not the product itself. It is the perception of the unarticulated desire. And it is not learnable from a textbook. It comes from paying close attention to what people do, as distinct from what they say.

Movement Three: The Vertigo of Success

The third movement is the one that almost no account of entrepreneurial psychology adequately describes.

Success is disorienting.

Not in the way that failure is disorienting — failure produces a clear and navigable problem. You have less than you had. You need to get more. The direction is clear even if the path is not.

Success produces a different kind of disorientation. You have what you wanted. And the having of it reveals, with uncomfortable clarity, that what you wanted was not quite the thing you thought you were pursuing.

Barnum in the 1840s had built the most popular museum in America. He was drawing 400,000 visitors a year to Barnum’s American Museum in New York. He was wealthy. He was famous. He was, by any reasonable measure, successful.

And he was not satisfied.

The specific form of his dissatisfaction is instructive. It was not that he wanted more of what he had — more visitors, more money, more shows. It was that he wanted a different kind of recognition than what his success had brought him. The crowds that came to see his exhibits were working-class New Yorkers, immigrants, the kinds of people who paid twenty-five cents for an afternoon of entertainment. They were not the socially elite. They were not the critics and intellectuals who defined cultural respectability. They were not the class of people whose approval would confer a different kind of status than the status Barnum had.

This is the vertigo of success: the discovery that the success achieved is not the success that was ultimately desired. And the particular trap it sets is this: the new desire — for a different kind of recognition, a higher kind of status, the approval of a different kind of audience — requires different things than the original success required. The skills that built the first success are not the skills that will earn the new recognition. And the pursuit of the new recognition puts the original success at risk.

Movement Four: The Temptation

The fourth movement follows directly from the third.

The temptation that success generates is not, primarily, the temptation of vice — though vice is part of it. It is the temptation of a different identity. The temptation to become someone other than the person who built the thing — to use the success as a platform for a self-reinvention that moves toward the kind of recognition that the original success could not provide.

For Barnum, the temptation took the form of Jenny Lind.

Lind was the most celebrated opera singer in Europe — the Swedish Nightingale, as she was known, whose concerts drew audiences of royalty and aristocracy and whose artistic reputation was the opposite of everything Barnum’s name stood for. In 1850, Barnum negotiated a tour of America for Lind that was, by any measure, one of the most successful entertainment enterprises of the nineteenth century.

But the motivation was not simply commercial. Barnum wanted what Lind represented — the cultural legitimacy, the association with high art, the proof that he was not merely a showman but a cultural impresario of the highest order.

The tour was a success. The legitimacy it conferred was real, but temporary and partial. The critics who had dismissed Barnum as a humbug did not revise their opinions because he had imported a Swedish opera singer. The social world whose approval he sought did not open its doors.

And in the pursuit of their approval, Barnum had begun to neglect what had made him successful. He had taken his eye off the crowd that had built him — the working-class audiences whose twenty-five cent admissions had funded everything — in pursuit of the approval of an audience that would never fully accept him on his own terms.

This is the structure of the temptation that every successful person eventually faces. It is not the temptation of more of what you have. It is the temptation of a different kind of having — a validation that the current success cannot provide, pursued in ways that put the current success at risk.

The entrepreneur who built a product beloved by its users and begins to pursue the approval of the press, the venture capital community, or the social world of the successful is making the same move Barnum made. The artist who built an audience on the strength of their authentic voice and begins to pursue critical respectability that their audience does not require is making the same move. The executive who built a business on a specific understanding of their customers and begins to pursue strategic validation from consultants and business school case studies is making the same move.

The move is always the same. And it always carries the same risk.

Movement Five: The Return

The fifth movement is the one that determines whether the arc ends in tragedy or in something more durable.

In the story that The Greatest Showman tells, the circus burns. The physical manifestation of everything Barnum had built is destroyed. And in the aftermath of the destruction, Barnum sees, for perhaps the first time with clarity, what he had actually made.

He had made a place where people who did not belong anywhere else belonged. The bearded woman. The tattooed man. The dwarf. The acrobat. The people whom the world that Barnum had been pursuing for its approval had rejected and excluded — these were the people whose loyalty had built everything he had.

The return is always to this: the recognition of what was actually built, as distinct from what was sought. The entrepreneurial arc that ends well ends not with the achievement of the recognition that was pursued in the fourth movement but with the recognition of what the third movement’s vertigo had obscured — the specific, irreplaceable value of the thing that was actually made.

This is not sentimentality. It is structural. The entrepreneur who pursues external validation at the expense of the thing they built will lose the thing they built. The entrepreneur who returns to the thing they built — who recovers the specific understanding of what they were actually making and who they were actually making it for — recovers the ground from which the temptation had displaced them.

The circus that Barnum rebuilds after the fire is smaller than the one that burned. It is also more himself. The pursuit of Jenny Lind’s legitimacy is over. The working-class audiences whose twenty-five cents had built everything are still there. And the thing that had been lost in the vertigo of success and the temptation of a different identity — the genuine connection between the showman and his crowd — is recovered.

The Pattern

The five movements are not specific to Barnum. They are the structure of the entrepreneurial arc across the historical record.

The freedom of nothing — the recklessness available only to those who have not yet succeeded — is documented in the founding stories of almost every significant business, creative enterprise, and social movement. The reading of the crowd — the perception of unarticulated desire — is the common thread in every product, performance, and idea that has found a genuine audience. The vertigo of success is described, in one form or another, in the autobiographies of almost everyone who has built something significant. The temptation — the pursuit of a different kind of recognition at the expense of what was built — appears with remarkable consistency in the histories of enterprises that lost their way. And the return — or the failure to return — determines whether what was built survives.

The pattern does not predict outcomes. It describes the terrain. The entrepreneur who understands the structure of the arc they are walking is better positioned to navigate it — to recognize the vertigo when it arrives, to see the temptation for what it is before it has done its damage, and to recover the thing that was built before the pursuit of something else has destroyed it.

P.T. Barnum did not know he was walking this arc. He walked it anyway, because the arc does not require understanding to exert its pull. But the person who knows the shape of the terrain before they enter it has an advantage that Barnum did not.

They have seen where it goes. And they can choose, at each movement, more deliberately.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is the entrepreneurial arc described in this essay?
The entrepreneurial arc is a five-movement pattern observable across the history of significant business and creative enterprises: the freedom of nothing, which enables the reckless bets necessary to begin; the reading of the crowd, which distinguishes entrepreneurs from dreamers; the vertigo of success, which reveals that the success achieved is not quite the success desired; the temptation of a different identity, which puts the original success at risk; and the return, which determines whether what was built survives.

What is the freedom of nothing?
The freedom of nothing is the cognitive and psychological advantage available to people who have not yet accumulated assets, reputation, or position to protect. With nothing to lose, the cost of failure is effectively zero, enabling bets that people with something to protect rationally cannot make. This freedom is the precondition of entrepreneurial beginning. It is also, once spent — once success has provided assets and reputation to protect — gone.

What does P.T. Barnum teach about reading the crowd?
Barnum’s perceptual genius was the ability to distinguish what people said they wanted from what they actually paid for. People said they wanted truth and education. They paid for wonder — for the possibility of encountering something remarkable, with sufficient ambiguity about its reality to sustain the experience of wonder that certainty would dissolve. Every successful entrepreneur has some version of this skill: the ability to perceive unarticulated desire, to provide something people did not know they wanted until they had it.

What is the vertigo of success?
The vertigo of success is the disorientation that follows the achievement of a significant goal — the discovery that the success achieved is not quite the success that was ultimately desired. Barnum’s vertigo took the form of recognizing that his commercial success had not provided the cultural legitimacy and social recognition he also wanted. The vertigo is dangerous because the new desire it reveals requires different things than the original success required, and the pursuit of the new desire puts the original success at risk.

What is the temptation that success generates?
The temptation success generates is not primarily the temptation of vice but the temptation of a different identity — the use of success as a platform for a self-reinvention that moves toward a kind of recognition the original success could not provide. For Barnum, this took the form of the Jenny Lind tour — a pursuit of cultural legitimacy that required neglecting the working-class audiences whose loyalty had built everything. The structure of the temptation is consistent: it involves pursuing the approval of an audience that did not build you, in ways that risk the loyalty of the audience that did.

What is the return, and why does it matter?
The return is the recognition, typically following some form of loss or crisis, of what was actually built — as distinct from what was sought in the temptation phase. It matters because the entrepreneur’s relationship with what they actually built — the specific, irreplaceable value they created for the specific people they created it for — is the ground from which the temptation displaces them and to which the return brings them back. The arc ends well when the return happens before the loss is total; it ends badly when it does not happen at all.

SIGNAL tracks the recurring patterns of human experience across history, philosophy, and science — for people living long enough to encounter them more than once.

For those who intend to last.

Tag: founderpsychology

Decade by Decade — What Biotech Teaches About the Psychology of the Long Game

The Showman’s Arc — What P.T. Barnum Teaches About the Psychology of Every Entrepreneur Who Has Ever Succeeded