Impact is for Ccnnection

There is a caricature of the Bay Area—a culture filled with people who want to change the world, disrupt old technologies, and be the Uber for X, or create some unicorn company that will change the world in a visible way. The next Facebook, Airbnb—whatever it is, it's something big that will change the way people interact with each other or an industry.

Having lived in the Bay for a decade, the caricature has its place—there really is an overemphasis on being a changemaker in the world, or at the very least a successful founder with a fat exit. The mantras inculcating entrepreneurs to be disrupters and changemakers presume the direction is an end in itself; the implicit message is that achieving this degree of success and shifting an industry to such an extent is an inherently good objective. I rarely hear it questioned.

But why is it inherently good? Frankly, is it inherently good? What does this achievement give the achievers, outside of outsized wealth?

It gives someone a sense of importance.

If you achieve something big, if you are the head of a large company, you are important. People rely on you, they make decisions based on your vision—often your whims—and follow you. You have an impact on their lives. They may rely on your company—and by extension, you—for their livelihood. Beyond that, there is attention from media and social circles—"so and so built this and that, they are doing very well," etc., etc. There is a collective acknowledgment of someone's importance.

Now, I am not here to say it's bad to pursue feeling important. Feeling important is a human need. We need to feel like we matter. It is something that gives us meaning.

However, the caricature of the Bay Area represents a malignant hyperbolization of that human need. If we need to change the world in order to feel important, we may want to reconsider our motives. Go and pursue changing the world, sure, but there are healthier reasons than wanting to feel important.

This desire to feel important or relevant, which fuels many founders' pursuit of unicorn status, is often unconscious. Alice Miller points this out in her book Drama of the Gifted Child—to sum it up, she notes that many who go on to be over-achievers, from some childhood mistreatment, neglect, or unmet need, have mistaken praise for love and seek to replace the love they missed out on through achievement. It's a vicious cycle where an achievement yields great praise, accolades, etc., and has only a short lifespan before another achievement must come through to fill the painful void. Feeling important in this sense is feeling loved, an artifact of the need to feel loved by our parents.

When we seek to impact a community, our drive for importance is often a cry for connection. We want to connect either with that community directly, with a social group that will approve of our actions, or with the artifacts of our past.

When we pursue impact for the sake of our own importance, it may help to introspect on this motive, to understand where it comes from in our life and why we need to be so important. Questioning this does not necessitate abandoning our mission, our entrepreneurship, or our pursuit of big things in life. But it may allow us to discard psychological artifacts that will leave us feeling empty or that will hinder us from best serving our communities.