Love this. Your thesis is spot on. Btw, divine has a second meaning as well, to discover. So your thesis does double work.
IMO, re: reason it's hard to focus on demand: the Amygdala "protects" the brain from important, painful truths. What one is doing is simply not working, etc.
This reminds me of the Richard Feynman quote: "The first principle is that you must not fool yourself and you are the easiest person to fool."
I think part of why we founders fool ourselves is that we lack measurement tools (as opposed to physicists). For instance, it's easy to FEEL like you're building an engine that makes your car go faster. The value of a speedometer is that you can SEE your speed never goes over 2mph.
In Rob's "demand problem" post, imagine if his demand audit table for Waffle were all purely red (https://howtogrow.substack.com/p/do-you-have-a-demand-problem). That's one way a founder could see the truth of not working and not struggle to internalize it.
--Rob, I'd suggest adding that demand audit table to your Miro board. I think it's super important.
I’m having trouble with footnote 2 in the divine lever vs ikigai. Whats the one layer deeper on the differences, and why would you argue ikigai misses the point?
How does one who isn’t creating something (the “founder”) solve for and act on their divine lever? This seems hard if not impossible in a standard corporate environment.
With ikigai, you are concerned about “what you enjoy” as a first-order concern, where it is actually something that is second-order - CAUSED, not CAUSAL. By optimizing for this as a first-order concern, you wind up suboptimizing the whole function (hence why so many people “pursue their passion” and everyone’s passions are travel, food and self-care… and wind up not being happy)
In corporate, totally going to depend on what is rewarded/not as to whether deeply serving demand gets you rapidly promoted or instantly fired, I assume
I recently designed a guided process to help people apply the Ikigai diagram, and similar to what Rob said, a flaw in the diagram is that some of the Ikigai dimensions are dependent on others.
I found that if I have people start with "what you love to do", things get real difficult, shifty, and ambiguous because what you love to do can change based on whether you're good at it, whether you get paid for it, and whether it matters to the world. And you can also miss a ton of great opportunities if you start with what you love as an initial constraint.
Ultimately I concluded that the best place to start is with "what the world needs", which I also would modify so that "the world" can also mean your industry, your company, your team, your community, etc. Starting here creates the grounded container from which you can derive the other dimensions.
So with the divine lever, I'd see it as a kind of finding and pursuing a pure good of what the "world" needs, then as Rob says, the rest may take care of itself.
It sounds like in your experience a divine lever is found within the context of searching for demand. Do you think it can work the other way around where a founder finds what feels like a divine lever, and this drives the right path to finding demand?
I'm asking from the context of founders who reveal something they feel like they must do or offer or tell the world, where this gives them the drive, energy, and purpose, but might not connect to a real demand.
Yeah interesting. Short answer is I don’t know. I think there is a Venn diagram between “objective, inherent good” and “lever”, and I think you only find what’s in the middle by serving demand (or getting lucky and stumbling upon it, which isn’t impossible)
I really liked this post. One thing I struggle with is that even though I believe in my bones that you need to spend a lot of your time talking to other people—to learn where they’re at and to figure out demand—as an introvert, I find it so draining to have these conversations. Even though I enjoy them, they wipe me out and I’m less able to do other things important for my company’s success (like doing the work for existing clients).
If the divine lever gives you energy, it’s important to pay attention to it to counter that drain. I mean, in some sense, I know this already, since I’ve noticed that the actual work I do for clients once I have them, and writing my own Substack building out new frameworks, both energize me. But I like how you’ve wrapped it up into a coherent idea. After reading this post, I see clear as day that my divine lever is to build and share a comprehensive, practical theory of communication for deep tech startups traversing the valley of death. (Sorry to partially steal your wording!)
I really appreciate you publishing your ideas as you flesh them out and letting us chime in to try to help you. I've listened to the podcast 2x + read this post 2x. I still don't totally know what you're getting at exactly, but I have some general feelings/inklings.
Two things come to mind -- both of these are kind of out there, so apologies if they don't add to the discussion. Keep what works and discard the rest ;)
1. The Beginning of Infinity by David Deutsch. This book changed my life and approach to startups. It frames progress as a search for good explanations. I think this is what founders do when they find their divine lever. Meaning, the founder hits upon a problem that resonates with them personally and so they become obsessed with solving by creating knowledge through good explanations. https://share.google/990hIZQRAR1bwkrUb
2. The search for our place in the world. This one is really out there. I've been listening to the Take One podcast by Liel Leibovitz and the episode for today talks about our struggle to find our place in the world. Hitting upon our divine lever is when there's a "click" and we know where we're supposed to be.
Love this. Your thesis is spot on. Btw, divine has a second meaning as well, to discover. So your thesis does double work.
IMO, re: reason it's hard to focus on demand: the Amygdala "protects" the brain from important, painful truths. What one is doing is simply not working, etc.
I have been thinking about your latter paragraph - I think there is something there that is the root of demand
This reminds me of the Richard Feynman quote: "The first principle is that you must not fool yourself and you are the easiest person to fool."
I think part of why we founders fool ourselves is that we lack measurement tools (as opposed to physicists). For instance, it's easy to FEEL like you're building an engine that makes your car go faster. The value of a speedometer is that you can SEE your speed never goes over 2mph.
In Rob's "demand problem" post, imagine if his demand audit table for Waffle were all purely red (https://howtogrow.substack.com/p/do-you-have-a-demand-problem). That's one way a founder could see the truth of not working and not struggle to internalize it.
--Rob, I'd suggest adding that demand audit table to your Miro board. I think it's super important.
I’m having trouble with footnote 2 in the divine lever vs ikigai. Whats the one layer deeper on the differences, and why would you argue ikigai misses the point?
How does one who isn’t creating something (the “founder”) solve for and act on their divine lever? This seems hard if not impossible in a standard corporate environment.
Yeah good questions!
With ikigai, you are concerned about “what you enjoy” as a first-order concern, where it is actually something that is second-order - CAUSED, not CAUSAL. By optimizing for this as a first-order concern, you wind up suboptimizing the whole function (hence why so many people “pursue their passion” and everyone’s passions are travel, food and self-care… and wind up not being happy)
In corporate, totally going to depend on what is rewarded/not as to whether deeply serving demand gets you rapidly promoted or instantly fired, I assume
I recently designed a guided process to help people apply the Ikigai diagram, and similar to what Rob said, a flaw in the diagram is that some of the Ikigai dimensions are dependent on others.
I found that if I have people start with "what you love to do", things get real difficult, shifty, and ambiguous because what you love to do can change based on whether you're good at it, whether you get paid for it, and whether it matters to the world. And you can also miss a ton of great opportunities if you start with what you love as an initial constraint.
Ultimately I concluded that the best place to start is with "what the world needs", which I also would modify so that "the world" can also mean your industry, your company, your team, your community, etc. Starting here creates the grounded container from which you can derive the other dimensions.
So with the divine lever, I'd see it as a kind of finding and pursuing a pure good of what the "world" needs, then as Rob says, the rest may take care of itself.
It sounds like in your experience a divine lever is found within the context of searching for demand. Do you think it can work the other way around where a founder finds what feels like a divine lever, and this drives the right path to finding demand?
I'm asking from the context of founders who reveal something they feel like they must do or offer or tell the world, where this gives them the drive, energy, and purpose, but might not connect to a real demand.
Yeah interesting. Short answer is I don’t know. I think there is a Venn diagram between “objective, inherent good” and “lever”, and I think you only find what’s in the middle by serving demand (or getting lucky and stumbling upon it, which isn’t impossible)
I really liked this post. One thing I struggle with is that even though I believe in my bones that you need to spend a lot of your time talking to other people—to learn where they’re at and to figure out demand—as an introvert, I find it so draining to have these conversations. Even though I enjoy them, they wipe me out and I’m less able to do other things important for my company’s success (like doing the work for existing clients).
If the divine lever gives you energy, it’s important to pay attention to it to counter that drain. I mean, in some sense, I know this already, since I’ve noticed that the actual work I do for clients once I have them, and writing my own Substack building out new frameworks, both energize me. But I like how you’ve wrapped it up into a coherent idea. After reading this post, I see clear as day that my divine lever is to build and share a comprehensive, practical theory of communication for deep tech startups traversing the valley of death. (Sorry to partially steal your wording!)
Anyway, great post!
I really appreciate you publishing your ideas as you flesh them out and letting us chime in to try to help you. I've listened to the podcast 2x + read this post 2x. I still don't totally know what you're getting at exactly, but I have some general feelings/inklings.
Two things come to mind -- both of these are kind of out there, so apologies if they don't add to the discussion. Keep what works and discard the rest ;)
1. The Beginning of Infinity by David Deutsch. This book changed my life and approach to startups. It frames progress as a search for good explanations. I think this is what founders do when they find their divine lever. Meaning, the founder hits upon a problem that resonates with them personally and so they become obsessed with solving by creating knowledge through good explanations. https://share.google/990hIZQRAR1bwkrUb
2. The search for our place in the world. This one is really out there. I've been listening to the Take One podcast by Liel Leibovitz and the episode for today talks about our struggle to find our place in the world. Hitting upon our divine lever is when there's a "click" and we know where we're supposed to be.
https://www.tabletmag.com/podcasts/take-one/zevachim-47-and-48#4c2c7715e4c1