Raised by wolves

Having worked in the startup world for the best part of a decade, I've met a lot of people that believe they were born to be entrepreneurs, but in reality most are simply bred for it, told a thousand times before they're 10 that they're destined to be great. They respond quickly, and correctly, when prompted with "fetch": their dogged determination kicks in. They're diligent, admirably so, because they've been assured of their success.

For others, for those raised a little more wild, it can take time for them to come around to realising their potential. So I wouldn't be afraid if the mantras of self-belief haven't yet been installed in your head. As soon as the wilder sort of person does arrive, they discredit the bred entrepreneurs, in the same way that a wolf discredits a dog, even a pedigree dog, by their mere existence.

…Or at least that's what I hope for, for the shaggy underdog to turn out to be a wolf. Some years back, at a job fair, I overheard a student ask a founder (who shall remain nameless) "how can I become like you?" They responded with "you've either got it or you don't", being typically cagey about what "it" is. Supporting parents? A trust fund? Grandiose delusions?

The trick is a good one. I suppose it made that student feel that instead of asking for advice, he was asking for permission, and that his permission was denied (on what grounds, because of his humility maybe?) The lesson to learn here is not to avoid talking to successful people, clearly there is much to gain from this. Just don't fall for that trick. You were never asking for permission, you were trying to learn, to further your own goal.

Successful, powerful people play tricks in the name of acquiring and maintaining power, the more often they've been told how great they are, the more likely they are to be narcissistic.

Competition and the desire to win no matter what

At a time in my career when I felt overexposed to political manoeuvring I decided that I needed to educate myself on people's behaviours. I found myself re-reading the tired old Myers-Briggs theories. I acquired the book Surrounded by Idiots. The Culture Map found its way to my desk. Each offered easy, memorable categories to label people with. The more I read, the more enraged and indignant I became.

In the midst of all this, I was reading another book, The 48 Laws of Power. Hundreds of stories of the most scheming, power-hungry people in history, and an in-depth analysis of the many techniques they trialed in pursuit of their goals. Many people refuse to open its pages, deciding instead that they'd rather leave their faith in humanity intact. I thought I'd be better off well informed, and rolled the dice. Weirdly, it didn't trigger a sense of injustice in me, at least not on the scale of the other books.

I think what helped most was the framing. The other books, especially Surrounded by Idiots, presented maladjusted characters as entirely mundane. The author of that one even penned a sequel called Surrounded by Narcissists, thinking he needed to drive the point home. The 48 Laws of Power on the other hand benefits from distance. The stories it tells typically happened long ago and in places where the average person has simply never been: war councils, king's courts, aristocratic tea-parties.

He decides to kill the lot of them. So far, so what.

From the list of laws, number 25 is Re-Create Yourself: be the master of your own identity, don't let others define you. From the founder's point of view, when asking for advice on how to be an entrepreneur, that student was stepping into the arena. The game had begun, and confronting this student with the assertion "you are not founder material" was a quick check to see if he knew the rules.

The Green Goblin

Norman Osborn starts his story as a good candidate for the archetypal cutthroat CEO. In the first Spider-Man movie we're presented with a man who is trying everything in his power to win. Research on a new performance-enhancing drug is moving too slowly so he resorts to self-experimentation. He learns that the board is planning to sell his company to a rival weapons dealer so he decides to kill the lot of them. So far, so what. As before the distance helps: we as a viewer are not going to end up unintentionally as a war profiteer, so their deaths are not especially concerning.

What really sets the story in motion is the danger Norman causes to innocent lives in the process, and he afterwards finds himself locked in a battle of principles. For Norman, this is a newly minted set of principles, one that accommodates collateral damage as unavoidable and unimportant, because the weak are worthless. If he can get us to accept that, he can protect his reputation as a successful man, as a winner. It's not cheating if everyone does it.

The problem is that he doesn't keep the fighting in the ring. That pulls in more variables than he knows how to deal with: the public, the powerful everyman, and his own son. It becomes a problem of identity: wolf or dog? The success he seeks is tied to this, no matter how hard he tries to rewrite the rules. People love wolves, as long as they're in the wild, and dogs, as long as they don't bite their owner.

Norman was hasty, and assured of his success, when he decided that he could crush his enemies totally. But the enemies are too many to dispatch of them all. This is apparent to anyone actually raised in the wild.

The Wolf

When the snows fall and the white winds blow, the lone wolf dies but the pack survives.

George R.R. Martin, A Game of Thrones

A lot has been written about wolves in literature. They may well be our favourite metaphor. "All stories are about wolves. All worth repeating, that is." But what are the true virtues of a wolf? They're an apex predator, which of course comes with its fair share of horror and admiration. They can be "socialised", but never tamed. They're ferocious and they're free.

What about the wolf speaks to me then? For one, it's that authority need not be derived purely from ferocity. Wolf hierarchies turned out to be little more than a family structure. It's nurture, not dominance, reinforcing the lesson that power is not taken, it's given. Western peoples have struggled with this ever since "woe to the vanquished" was first proclaimed.

The story wolves tell of scarcity, of how it hones the senses, is also a place to draw inspiration from. When presented with the impossible jar, it's been shown that the wolf persists when the dog gives up and turns to their master to help (so much for dogged determination). When later shown how to solve the impossible problem, the wolf watches and remembers, while the dog doesn't learn the lesson. The reader can draw their own parallel around people surrendering their cognition to LLMs.

Finally, the symbol of the wolf helps in drawing that jagged, hotly contested, vital line between cooperation and obedience. Wolves teach us that cooperation is formed in the wild, where the spoils are shared rather than hoarded, where favours are courted, not commanded. People often fall short. Mona Chollet was working towards that same point in Résister à la culpabilisation: those trained to be obedient are just as quick to demand obedience once the tables have turned.

The Entrepreneur

So why would any of this matter for the entrepreneur? Because there is more to it than the boardroom, more to it than knowing how to play the corporate game. Oliver Eidel of OpenRegulatory puts his finger on it with his advice on hiring: experienced people from big companies often sink a startup, rather than help it grow. Simply put, an acquaintance with the wild is needed. It's needed the day when nothing is working, and no one has the solution. It's needed the day you find yourself in a room full of people that think differently than you (in a way that the Culture Map, Myers-Briggs, or the colour system of Surrounded by Idiots has failed to inform you about). And it's needed the day that the infinitely spiteful customer decides that today is gonna be your last.

So how do I see that gatekeeping founder? Maybe he had it figured out at some point, and simply lost the skill over time. "The Power Paradox" suggests this may be true: people gain power by empathy, cooperation, and attention to others, skills which then erode to be replaced with entitlement. As the ego inflates and the outside world seems to shrink in comparison, playing the little game, the game of war councils and tea parties, seems like the only thing that matters. But the real play, the one that gives you power, is the one that keeps everyone engaged in the game. Rather than defend against a competitor, all his actions truly did was lose him an ally, and lose him the ability to influence what move was going to be made next. ◆