Paige Finn DohertyFounding Partner, Behind Genius · Founding Partner at Behind Genius Ventures

the belief to start a company/fund

16 Feb 2024 · 1 min

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In this interview excerpt, Speaker B recommends Alice Miller's book Drama of the Gifted Child as a valuable framework for clients. They explain that the common belief that one must have confidence to start a company or fund often stems from a deeper need to prove oneself to others—parents, the world, or oneself. The speaker connects this drive to childhood experiences that condition individuals to equate personal worth with external validation, using the metaphor of having "chips on shoulders" (or in pockets) to illustrate how past wounds can motivate entrepreneurial ambition.

What other frameworks do you like using in your practice?
There's a book that I recommend to a lot of clients called Drama of the Gifted Child by Alice Miller, who's an Austrian psychoanalyst. Um, I recommend it because it was really powerful to me, but I also see it in a lot of my clients. The belief in yourself that you have to have to start a company or a fund More often than not comes from a place of needing to prove something either to yourself or to the world or to your parents. I think the colloquial saying is chips on shoulders put chips in pockets, and that saying comes from somewhere. And so the book is about how the experiences that we've had over the course of our lifetime have often led us to believe that we only have worth as human beings when we get validation from someone else.
Mm-hmm.