Seeing Through the Darkness
Navigating Success and Failure in Silicon Valley
Just before Christmas of 2018, there was a big splash around Silicon Valley when a mysterious company named TouchBase released a series of trading cards depicting Venture Capitalists. While I see the utility of having cards to remember stats about different VCs, it made me hungry for a different type of card. What if we had trading cards for every Silicon Valley darling that fell from grace?
Like Startup Graveyard shows, startups close up shop every day in Silicon Valley. For every Adam Neumann or Travis Kalanick, there are hundreds who, as they navigate the waters of success by their strengths, are sunk under the weight of their dysfunctions.
The problem is that our strengths are often a double-edged sword. Because our strengths usually form in response to some psychological need — in light of some trauma or perceived lacking — they are almost always inextricably bound to our dysfunctions. So the more we steer into these strengths, the faster we speed toward inevitable destruction. The shores of Silicon Valley are littered with the wreckage of those that thought they could pilot by their strengths alone.
To avoid this fate, the best pathway through the darkness is self-awareness and the adoption of a growth mindset. Fundamental to a growth mindset is the belief that talents can be developed, as opposed to a fixed mindset or the belief that talents are innate gifts, as popularized by the book Mindset, written by Stanford psychology professor Carol Dweck in 2007.
In a 2016 article for the Harvard Business Review, she shared,
When entire companies embrace a growth mindset, their employees report feeling far more empowered and committed; they also receive far greater organizational support for collaboration and innovation.
While it’s popular in Silicon Valley to reject your shortcomings, desperately obscuring them while inflating your strengths, critical to success in Silicon Valley or anywhere is the acceptance, embrace, and eventual integration of your dysfunctions into your overall concept of self.
When talking recently about the whole WeWork debacle, Barry Brown said something that stuck with me. Paraphrasing, he said,
It’s a curse on a founder to get too big too fast. Eventually, the market will come back and accuse you for not having done your inner work.
So many of us run from our flaws as if acknowledging their existence would make them real and failure inevitable. In truth, this is only a rejection of ourselves, which makes failure that much more likely. When we conflate our flaws with who we are and lock them away in a safe of shame, we lose sight of them. We lose awareness of the pitfalls we are most likely to navigate into.
The good news is this is a sentence imposed upon ourselves, and so all we have to do issue our own pardon. By raising awareness of our selves — both the light and the shadow — and accepting them wholly, we are empowered to see through our darkness, learn how best to put these strengths to work for our benefit and mitigate potential negative impacts as much as possible. Through self-awareness and acceptance, we unlock a life a freedom and opportunity, illuminating the path to our greatest self.
This article was developed in collaboration with Barry Brown, adapted from a workshop we gave on personal growth and leadership development for a division of the Canadian Government. To learn more about our workshops, message me for more information.
Barry Brown is a former community leader, nonprofit organizer and personal coach that works in identity and leadership development for startups and enterprise businesses around the world. He’s a cofounder of human(Ethos), on faculty at Singularity University, and runs be/do labs, a part of Runway Innovation Hub in San Francisco.
Damien Foord is an Air Force veteran and creative entrepreneur that has advised hundreds of brands in Silicon Valley, including LinkedIn, Tesla, Adobe, and many more. He is a cofounder of Prismonde, applying cognitive science to business strategy and brand development and speaks on organizational identity and human-centered innovation.
