Start-ups and hardship

Handle, who has been on a comment roll in recent weeks, wrote

it’s easy for kids to make and keep close – sometimes lifelong – friends when they see the same other kids at school, church, sports, and around the neighborhood for palling around. . .

. . .even while one thinks one is suffocating from claustrophobia and lack of privacy and just wants to bail out to the other, atomized anonymity side where the grass is greener, when people actually leave, they discover pretty quickly they feel terrible, isolated, lonely, uprooted, and aimless, and it can take a long time to adjust, and some never quite recover. Prison and the military are two good examples of that, but start-up culture seems to be similar in some respects.

The comment refers to Sebastian Junger’s claim that people derive satisfaction and meaning out of being associated with small groups under hardship. Imagine a stereotypical start-up, in which a handful of people work very long hours in an environment that is challenging, uncertain, and ambiguous.

When I started a business, I repeatedly watched The Compleat Beatles, a documentary about the iconic band. I picked up on a couple of points.

1. Because the narrator said that they were lucky to meet the right people at the right time, I made an effort to meet a lot of people (something I have not done before or since).

2. The film describes the hardship that the Beatles endured in Hamburg, where they lived in slum conditions and played exhausting marathon sets. A fellow musician said that with the long sets and tough audiences, “Either you got good or you gave up.” Taking that to heart, I often worked late into the night, even though the traffic to my site was on the order of 100 visitors a week when I got started.

10 thoughts on “Start-ups and hardship

  1. The Beatles turn out to be a good example of something else. For example, they didn’t say ‘we need the best bassist’ or ‘we need the best percussionist’ – the didn’t have a manpower mentality, with spaces that needed to be filled, auditions, etc. Instead, they assembled a group of pretty/very good musicians, who then picked up instruments or roles as they saw the need; and wrote music to match the people.

    • I don’t know that this is an accurate description, they booted Pete Best from the Band and took on Ringo. They didn’t just go with who they had, there was an active management of who was in the group.

      Likely there is no simple explanation for massive success, only many attributes that are hard to separate from each other.

  2. The Beatles’ secret weapon was Brian Epstein. His death left them to drift and to break up. The Hamburg experience pretty obviously didn’t cause any forging of lifelong affinity – from 1964 to 1971 was only 7 years. Their breakup led to some spectacular solo efforts and lots of thing in media besides music.

    I suspect Junger is talking more about Girardian bonding. Combat is different.

  3. Arnold wrote: “…even though the traffic to my site was on the order of 100 visitors a week…”

    Huh. I’ve been under the impression you didn’t much care about traffic because you rarely interact with commenters as far as I can tell and I am under the impressions that small sites that wish to increase traffic can do well to help increase robust discussion in the comments.

    • I’m also somewhat surprised by Arnold’s paying attention to blog visits. Other than interacting with commenters, there are many other things (e.g., hiring professional to re-design sites vs. standard template, active promoting sites on podcast or youtube) those who optimize toward site visit would do but Aanold would not.

  4. I immediately thought of a GREAT book: The Soul of New Machine, by Tracy ? (Kidder).
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Soul_of_a_New_Machine

    Mini-computer war (competition) between Dec VAX and Data General (1981ish, just before the “IBM PC” explodes into all finance offices with Lotus 1-2-3).

    Silicon Valley friends tell similar stories about development of the Mac (83ish, out in 84). My chip testing at AMD, as a contractor, wasn’t as intense.

    It’s not only, as you say challenging, uncertain, and ambiguous situations.
    It’s also where your success depends on your team, and they depend on you.

    Surviving hardship together is the goal of other “team building” exercises, like white water rafting.

    My D&D playing friends (tho not me), a subset of my game-playing friends, seemed to have some of that bonding thru playing their roles together. And now that I think of “acting”, those in a play or in a band, or any performing group, develop some of this.

    The “hardship” of having a performance judged is part of what is different from between a dance group performance, and a dance club for fun. Much stronger bonding with the performance.

    Most normal folk get a LOT of bonding from their families. The US custom of moving away from your parents to go to school, with most not coming back to their “hometown” to live, certainly reduces adult bonds with parents.
    “Nothin’ but the dead and dying, back in my little town…” (S&G, after they split up for their later song together on a Paul Simon album).

    Most Libertarians don’t bond very tightly. Freedom kind of means free from bonds, it’s “just another word for, nothin’ left to lose”.

    A LOT of people seem to get some quick bonding together when they agree to HATE somebody, and treat that person badly.

  5. I met one of the guys from “Soul Of A New Machine” a year or few after the book came out and talked to him about it. The book was only approximately accurate. Events and quotes were selected and massaged to make a good story. There wasn’t anything about other parts of the development because the other manager told Kidder to go away.

  6. I think there are two important points here that are not really being joined together.

    1: You need connections with people to be happy, successful, flourish, what have you.
    2: You need to meet the right people.

    The key I think is meeting and making connections with the right people.

    What I think the super isolationists miss is that you need to meet people and make connections; arms length relationships are not sufficient for human happiness. How many close connections and ties you need will vary by the individual, but it almost certainly isn’t 0.

    What I think Robert Putnam and those like him (I can’t really think of a term for it now) miss, I believe, is that who we are surrounded by to bond with matters. People are more or less compatible with each other, and putting incompatible people together for a long period of time does not necessarily make them hate each other less.

    Even friends can be like that; I have ruined one friendship in college by becoming roommates with a friend that I subsequently dreamed of murdering every night. Then again, I roomed with an acquaintance and we became super close friends quickly. To add a third category, I have friends that I would (and have) happily spent weeks with working on projects and small businesses, and others that I quite like but am very done seeing after 3-4 hours.

    The point of this is that the value in shared interests and social mixing, bowling, gaming, school etc. is that you meet lots of different people and so have the opportunity to find people most compatible with you wherever they may be. It isn’t that the hardship or raw time spent together is what creates the bond, it is that it is easier to find and bond closely with 5 compatible people if you are interacting with 100 regularly than it is when you are interacting with 10.

    What exactly defines compatible? That I don’t know. I suspect it has a great deal to do with interests, such that you can discuss things you both are interested in, things that are difficult to find others who share. Incompatible likely has a lot to do with caring about things the other person has zero or negative feelings about. There is also temperament, intelligence, and a wide variety of other stuff I am sure.

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