Working Through Consulting to Creative People
A blog by psychoanalyst Michael Jolkovski who looks at music ensembles, businesses & creative teams.
On October 15th 1 Comment
I just want to point to this fine memoir of someone whose startup failed to thrive in the non-cult known as Y combinator.
It’s valuable for the emphasis on the functioning of the team as make-or-break — a factor that can make all the other factors irrelevant.
I’m tempted to write a long meditation on Orian Marx’s essay — but it’s well through out and written and I’d rather let him tell it.
On October 6th
This post by Matt Milosavljevic titled What I Learnt at Startup Camp supports my thesis that human factors are a huge make-or-break factor in startups, bands, and other creative entities. He puts it rather nicely:
People, in my opinion, are the key differentiators between the success and failure of pretty much any startup. It’s true that lady luck can make several cameos during the course of an act, but really it’s the cast that will makes or breaks the show.
Well said. I like his Venn diagram about the degree of “overlap” between people. I’m inclined to agree.
On October 4th 1 Comment
This is the heart of why I’m doing this blog and all the other things you’ll see if you look around my site. (This post is inspired by Merlin Mann’s great talk on how to blog. )
I was a musician before I was a psychologist — low on the food chain and too much of a generalist (ahem, dilettante) to compete at a satisfying level in either the hard-core classical world or the jazz/ studio world.
I got to play in garage bands, jazz ensembles large and small, orchestras, chamber groups, new-music ensembles, early-music ensembles, theatre orchestras and a bunch of ad-hoc groups and gigs. They all had one thing in common. When they were going well, it felt unbelievably great. But every group could devolve at any time into sheer misery, a big soul-destroying bowl of suck. Read more »
On August 27th
This study from Baylor has been making the rounds. I recommend watching the short videos in the sidebars. It’s a good study, even if I think the researchers miss the best implications.
They focus on one aspect of Borderline Personality Disorder: people with this condition have a very hard time judging what is fair in a give-and-take situation. They will often feel persecuted and deeply unsafe. They will genuinely feel they are getting the short end of the stick, even when others have made huge concessions. Others perceive them as hugely selfish.
My point is not to diagnose your bandmates or fellow hackers/entrepreneurs with a personality disorder, satisfying as that may be. If you don’t know what this disorder is, don’t worry. My point is to shed light on the group-house syndrome. Read more »
On August 8th 1 Comment
Y Combinator is a Venture Capital group led by Paul Graham. It’s named after a mathematical function that I can’t come close to understanding. Something to do with recursion, I gather, probably an inside joke for LISP programmers. They provide seed money for tech startups — small amounts that allows them to do the initial work that will attract larger funding.
More importantly, they ask their sponsored groups move to Cambridge or the Bay Area for an intense 3-month sprint (they don’t like calling it a boot camp) where they receive lots of mentoring and work like their very lives depend on it. Read more »
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