Akylles Talks Rami Alame [Akylles]

This episode discusses 3 main layers of complication when launching your startup. It all comes down to "Perceived stability" but the 3 layers are: 1. Explaining the new lifestyle to yourself2. Explain things to your parents and surrounding3. Explaining things to your partners, team, and investors. Follow on IG: @ramialame

Take a second to be nice to yourselfInstagram: @ramialameTwitter: @rami_alameh

It’s a cliché to say that founders flounder, but unfortunately, that’s usually the case. Wild exceptions like Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, and Michael Dell aside, executives who start a business or project fizzle more often than not once they’ve gotten their venture on its feet.Entrepreneurs actually show their inability to switch to executive mode much earlier in the business development process than most people realize, as my stories will reveal. But the reasons executives fail to “scale”—that is, adapt their leadership capabilities to their growing businesses’ needs—remain fuzzy. It’s simply assumed that there’s an entrepreneurial personality and an executive personality—and never the twain shall meet. I don’t think that’s true. I believe most executives can learn to scale if they’re willing to take a step back and admit to themselves that their old ways no longer work.Over the past four years, I’ve worked closely with more than 100 entrepreneurs and seen them struggle to adapt as their companies grow beyond a handful of employees and launch a new product or service. In the process, I’ve observed that the habits and skills that make entrepreneurs successful can undermine their ability to lead larger organizations. The problem, in other words, is not so much one of leadership personality as of approach.I’ve identified three tendencies that work for leaders of business units or small companies but become Achilles’ heels for those same individuals when they try to manage larger organizations with diverse needs, departments, priorities, and constituencies.The first tendency is loyalty to comrades—the small band of colleagues there at the start of the enterprise. In entrepreneurial mode, you need to lead like you’re in charge of a combat unit on the wrong side of enemy lines, where it’s all for one and one for all. But blind loyalty can become a liability in managing a large, complex organization. The second tendency, task orientation—or focusing on the job at hand—is critical in driving toward, say, a big product launch, but excessive attention to detail can cause a large organization to lose its way. The third tendency, single-mindedness, is an important attribute in a visionary who wants to unleash a revolutionary product or service on the world. Yet this quality can harden into tunnel vision if the leader can’t become more expansive as the company grows. And the fourth tendency, working in isolation, is fine for the brilliant scientist focused on an ingenious idea. But it’s disastrous for a leader whose burgeoning organization must rely on the kindness of customers, investors, analysts, reporters, and other strangers.Startup Kudos is available on Amazon andwww.startupkudos.comIG: @ramialameBe Organized, Be Passionate, Be Structured

Be True to yourself. Be real. Basic Instincts involve 2 main things as well1. Being true to yourself and being very transparent and honest with yourself2. Being true to others and making sure to be complementary with others. Ego can last for a short while and then dissipate into an oblivious scenario that has no ending or rather a bad ending. Be Organized, Be Passionate, Be StructuredIG: @ramialamewww.startupkudos.com

The sexual instinct aims to fuse chemically with another, this fusion transforming both parties. In a sense, this need for fusion on both parties can be objectifying. It is not a caring social fusion, but rather a chemical essential to infect and be infected, to have the other person grow inside you and alter you, thus each person transforming into something else. Achieving this fusion via seduction and display manifests in two ways:

This is part of the Concept of Adversarial Excitement that gets you the fast win. The Partnership Excitement wins you the War.

Be Organized, Be Passionate, Be Structured.

www.ramialame.com
IG: @ramialame
www.startupkudos.com

It is often said that “humans are social animals” without really thinking what that implies. Many creatures are social in the sense that they live in groups. Still, there are wide differences in what ‘social’ means – from the simple semi-chaos of herding for cattle or deer to the elaborate, regimented, division-of-labor society of the termite or the honey bee.

Human social scientists (sociologists and anthropologists especially) have traditionally spent most of their time searching for differences between human societies and often assuming that the wide variety that exists is somehow infinite and has no, or few, underlying patterns, laws, or theories explain its myriad diversity. One is tempted to think that a non-human social scientist might take a rather different view, seeing clear patterns at both the macro and micro levels of human social organization, just as we find it easy to recognize patterns in other social species.

Social Instincts

It is not true to say that social scientists have had no idea of the nature of human sociality: – there have, in fact, been two competing visions of individuals' inherited social instincts. Neither view would probably admit that they were, by implication, theories of inherited human characteristics, i.e., theories of human nature.

The first and most obvious is the neo-classical economics notion of the “rational utility-maximizing” human individual. Rather obviously, the idea that everyone, regardless of context or culture, is a "rational utility maximizer’ can only be due to human nature. Most neo-classical economists would be very uncomfortable with discussing their micro-economic ‘simplifying axioms’ actually relating to real-world human nature, but it seems difficult to avoid.

The second is called the “standard social science model” of the infinitely malleable “blank slate” individual. Social scientists who hold this view would even more vehemently reject the idea this was a view of human nature, but of course, it is. For everyone, everywhere, to be ‘blank slates’ means we all must be born that way, which is, of course, a view of human nature. Having no ‘hard-wired’ social instincts is just as much an assumption about human nature as ‘rational utility maximization.

These two basic approaches have been associated largely with the two principle wings in the democratic political thought of the past century and a half – free-market capitalism and liberalism (rational utility maximization) and socialism or social democracy (‘blank slate’ adaptability).

I want to argue that both these models are partly right and also wrong because they are incomplete. There is an alternative, which is still a relatively simple picture of human social instincts but accounts for contradictory human behavior.

Let me first set out some definitions.

What do I mean by “instincts”? I use the term in the same way it is used in Steven Pinker’s “The Language Instinct” – that is to say, an ‘instinct’ combines an innate desire to acquire something (language) with an innate ability to assimilate it. Pinker argues that humans are normally born with an innate desire to acquire language and an innate ability to do so. This is not at all culture or experience-dependent but is ‘hard-wired.’

Which language people acquire is determined by the socio-cultural context in which they grow up. Take a child of American English-speaking parents at birth and have it adopted by Mandarin-Chinese speaking parents, and it will grow up speaking Mandarin like a native, and vice-versa.

Thus, human facility with language includes elements of inherited, fixed, motives and abilities and an acquired cultural component.

By social, in the context of social instincts, I refer to how humans seek to interact with other humans in ‘their’ and other groups (not just their immediate family). Most evidence suggests humans evolved in groups of about 150 (the famous “Dunb