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The Transcausal Entrepreneur
New mental frames for living in a chaotic world
What makes entrepreneurs successful? What is the actual cause? Is it their great ideas? Their passion? Their determination? Their genes? The genetics of their parents? The fact that their parents met? The fact that their mother was saved from being killed in the holocaust? The fact that their grandfather moved to America? How far back should we trace the causes? And does a single “cause” actually exist?
As neuroendocrinologist Robert Sapolsky points out, the reasons why things happen are often elusive. Skepticism about being able to determine the actual “causes” of things dates back to the philosophical writings of Hume and Kant, and the psychological writings of Jung, who took the postion that the synchronicity of things was more observable than their actual causes.
Given how elusive causes are, perhaps business strategies would be enhanced by things beyond cause. I call this approach “transcausal”, and there are useful mental frames that can inform how entrepreneurs monitor their progress in a chaotic world where opinions and experts abide, yet few actually succeed.
Below are five transcausal mental frames that can help entrepreneurs make sense of their business progress. They are defined by the 5 S’s for the sake of simplifying them.
