Startup is a school without the teacher

Art of storytelling

Have we ever liked a movie that has no villain or a weak villain who easily gives up? The villain could be in the form of a person or a situation or even non-living being – basically a problem. A movie will fail miserably if it can’t present its villain well enough. People can accept weak vulnerable hero (as we all think of ourselves) – but a weak villain is definite recipe for a flop movie. It is not without reason that in most movies the villains are taller, stronger and more resourceful than the hero. Who would watch a movie where the hero is tall and muscular, double the size of a tiny villain.

This is also the very first lesson in storytelling. Before constructing the character of a hero the storyteller defines the villain, stronger the villain better will be the story. In most stories, eventually the villain is conquered but not before putting a valiant fight that forces the hero to go through several rounds of despair. The villain seems insurmountable in the beginning. If our hero got scared and ran away from the situation there would be no story. Even take our epics like Ramayana – there would be no Ram without the demon, Ravana. If Rama never encountered Ravana there would be no epic. Ravana is central to the story. 

But we hate villains in real life

In real life however we hate villains, we dislike difficult situations and run away from problems. In general, problems are not welcome, we avoid them. We never confront them, we never run into them knowingly. If we ever accidentally get into problematic situation our first response is ‘flight’ and not ‘fight’. But think of a person who never faced any problems in life, his or her life had all the good things – will we ever be interested in a story like that? If there was a king who had lot of wealth and all the luxuries – but if he did not face any enemy, did not fight any war, did not face famine etc. then who would be interested in knowing about that king. For history that life is uneventful, boring and in a way meaningless.

Why do we dislike problems?

Our education system is solution oriented. The teacher asks a question and the students are supposed to tell the answers. No school teaches the student to find problems. Our exams are like that as well. We are supposed to find an answer to the problem. No test explains the situation and ask in the end to identify the problem. This makes us solution focused. Our brain gets trained to solve and not to identify problem.

Ask Google a question, it will respond with scores of solutions. But give Google a situation and ask for defining the problem, it will fail miserably. Finding solution from a problem is easy – one just needs to know the algorithm. However there is no known algorithm to identify the problem from a situation.

In a structured world

In a structured world one can still be solution oriented and succeed reasonably. A large corporation defines its vision, mission and broad problem it is trying to solve. For the thousands of their employees it means faster execution of the intent. In an assembly line setup of a car everyone is just trying to plug in their part of the solution to a larger problem defined by someone else. It is still like a setup in the school only that the teachers have been replaced by the managers. If you have been a good student in your academic world, there is good likelihood of you being more successful in such setups.  

In a startup world

Startups are the best learning schools, just that there are no teachers.

Startups are more like real world that is unstructured and chaotic. Here most important skill that one can have is to spot the problems in a given situation. The real world is too complex for any structured analysis – no predefined algorithms work here. We will have to unlearn the years of structured knowledge to learn the problem identifying skills. Bigger the problem, better could be the reward. The solutions can wait till we have correctly identified the right problem.

Hence it is not a coincidence that many of the successful entrepreneurs like Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, Marc Zuckerberg and Michael Dell have been college drop outs, on the other hand most professional CEOs have come from premier B-Schools.