[Is There Such a Thing As Founder Syndrome?: Testing a New Idea for Entrepreneurship]
As a lover of language, I often will obsess and delight in a phrase or a word that I think offers unique insight into humanity or experience.
Language can sometimes open up doors into understanding, not simply because a definition is precise, or taken literally. Used in an inventive way, you can see the world differently and perhaps understand something for its unique traits.
I find this to be the case with understanding and learning about founders. Founders tend to break the mold, as we say, but we tend to see them -- I say "we" meaning the general VC and startups ecosystem -- through a really traditional business lens, contrary to how unique they are.
In fact, I am not so sure you can see a founder's traits through a business lens, because what founders do is much different than simply running a business. I think you have to creatively see them in a new way.
This idea struck me deeply while I was in Japan, where I was relaxing with a memoir about the late neurologist Dr. Oliver Sacks, while my colleagues skied and snowboarded on a cloud-covered mountain in the snow. Sacks died in 2015, but spent a career curing neurological diseases by taking a unique approach.
I came across the word "syndrome."
It has a nice ring to it, but first, the context.
First of all, Sacks is famous for a medical experiment that "unlocked" patients who were frozen in a kind of living coma situation. You may have seen this in a movie called "Awakenings."
These patients would be frozen in a state of hibernation, awake, but not able to move. Sacks came up with the idea of dosing them with a chemical called L-DOPA, and the results were extraordinary. Almost overnight, these "vegetables," as he empathetically described him in his memoir, awakened. In one case, Sacks took a red ball he kept in his pocket and threw it at a seemingly unmovable patient, who immediately snapped to and caught the ball, threw it back, and then resumed his catatonic state.
Sacks was also something of an eccentric, who was notorious for doing things that probably a normal sane person would never do.
For example, as a medical intern in California, he once drank a vial of blood, washing it down with a glass of milk, simply because he felt compelled to understand what it tasted like. A lover of motorcycles, he quite recklessly "stepped off," as he put it, his bike traveling at 80mph, just to see what would happen. What happened? A few bruises and a torn leather jacket and pants. But nothing horrible.
In certain circles, he is still considered to be notorious and misunderstood. But his view of diagnoses centered on finding the "syndrome," and treating the syndrome as a kind of identity.
And here is our word of the day!
I am not suggesting that founders are sick people. I am saying that they are different, because they present a type of syndrome that other humans do not possess.
Syndrome, in the Greek etymology, means "a running together."
Often we look at disease as this kind of failure of the system. Something has invaded. Something has harmed the corpus of the human. But Sacks looked at syndrome issues quite literally as a grouping of things that made the patient unique.
Instead of instantly diagnosing and medicating neurological patients, he would sit and talk to them for hours, trying to understand the unique syndrome of their identity.
In one instance, he talked for four hours to a raving manic dementia patient, later concluding that there was something "inherently human about that identity in there."
Can the same be done with founders? Do they present a syndrome of entrepreneurship?
What are the characteristics of this founder syndrome?
I won't spend this whole post describing my idea, but I think a central and core attribute of a Founder Syndrome is that the discomfort that founders experience with reality is also the impetus and the catalyst that moves them to "solve" reality with their own attributes.
This syndrome manifests itself in an overarching belief that they can change the world. They are somewhat delusional and even maniacal in their approach to reality solutions. The world doesn't work for them, and rather than mire themselves in depression and disappointment in it, their syndrome rather creatively enables them to, in an expansive way, impact the lives of other people, and create things that shift reality.
Steve Jobs once said that you can only understand your journey by looking backwards, and connecting the dots after you have completed them. This is quite symptomatic of a founder syndrome.
There are no dots to connect, until you make them. A consciousness that sees the world for what it can be can seem to some like crazy talk. Just look at Elon Musk. For how long has he heard that his ideas are stupid, crazy, not worth the paper they are printed on?
Or Nikola Tesla, who died in poverty, not being believed?
Or Marie Curie, who obsessively hunted down invisible radioactivity, which killed her, but without whom we would not be able to treat cancer, or plausibly have nuclear energy?
All of these people have something of the Founder Syndrome, an ability to see what is not seen by others, and to manifest it into reality, creating incredulity until the new reality is undeniable.
Are you suffering from a syndrome, friend? If you would like to be part of our accelerator and invent what has not existed before, and if you would like to be around other unique people like you, track our application process at https://appworks.tw/accelerator
Our next cohort will start in the summer.
We would be glad to take your application when they launch later in the year. We will be accepting founders working in AI and Blockchain.
Doug Crets
Communications Master, AppWorks
Photo by Franck V. on Unsplash
「coma definition」的推薦目錄:
coma definition 在 Icu醫生陳志金 Facebook 的精選貼文
New Sepsis Definition 口訣:
THRoW away SIRS, get CRP, and calculate SOFA.
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敗血症(Sepsis)的新定義是:
「宿主對感染的反應失調,導致威脅性命的器官功能失常。」
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我是這樣理解(搭配SOFA的重要器官):
「感染之後的宿主反應失調,導致重要維生器官功能失常。」
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此次的共識,摒棄了自1991年使用至今的SIRS criteria(其命運就如其項目縮寫一樣被THRoW「丟」了!^_^)
「重要維生器官」就是SOFA score裡的六項,從頭到腳點名的話就是:腦、心、肺、肝、腎、血。
每個器官最多4分(總分24分),若在感染時,總分比baseline上升2分,就算有Sepsis。
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腦是 Coma scale
心是 MAP與升壓劑
肺是 PF ratio
肝是 Bilirubin
腎是 Creatinine與Urine output
血是 Platelet
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Septic Shock: 經足夠輸液後,仍須使用升壓劑維持MAP>=65及Lactate>2.
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另外,對於非ICU病人,有個簡易版的SOFA叫qSOFA(Quick SOFA),只有三個項目:
我把它縮寫成「CRP」口訣(因為感染時,我們一般會測CRP嘛~ 不是說一定要測CRP喔~只是方便記憶)
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Conscious alteration (只要GCS不是滿分就算)
RR >= 22/min
Pressure (systolic) <= 100
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感染症病人,若有兩項,就要懷疑有Sepsis(這是不必抽血就可以計算,算是快速方便的篩檢。)不是說有兩項就是Sepsis,而是要提高警覺,病人可能有sepsis,要抽血測SOFA score。
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這是我的第二版,做了一點小補充。
喜歡的話,請自由分享取用~
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JAMA 全文:http://jama.jamanetwork.com/article.aspx?articleid=2492881
#icucktan
#icunote01
#sepsisdefinition