The Golem — Pygmalion Spectrum

TL;DR

Hey, I’m Tim! ☕

A bit of a long one today but it’s worth it.

You’ll read about why you feel such high highs and low lows as a cofounder and how to deal with them.

Here’s the one thing to remember: you can find contentment either by lowering your expectations to nothing or by exceeding all expectations, especially your own.

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Let’s get into it ⤵

DEEP DIVE

“High achievement always takes place in the framework of high expectation.” —Charles F. Kettering, who was GM’s head of research and held 186 patents.

Prophecy Power

Expectations can be self-fulfilling prophecies. They influence the way you behave, thus further reinforcing your expectations. Two interesting phenomena:

• The Golem Effect

  You perform worse when people expect less from you. It’s named after the golem from Jewish mythology, an ugly creature meant to protect the Jews from blood libel but that became increasingly corrupt and had to be destroyed.

• The Pygmalion Effect

  You perform better when people expect more from you. The term comes from the Greek myth of Pygmalion, a sculptor who’s love for the perfect statue he crafted was so intense that Aphrodite brought it to life.

That’s pretty self-explanatory. You’ve seen it happen in school, at work, and in sports. For cofounders, it’s no different.

Where it gets interesting is the bottom 5th and top 95th percentiles, where people seem to defy the odds:

• If expectations are extremely low, you rebel. You want to prove everyone wrong.

• If expectations are extremely high, you burnout. You suffocate from stress.

Daymond John from Shark Tank started working at only 10 years old when his parents divorced, handing out flyers for $2 an hour. Later, he juggled full-time school, a full-time job at Red Lobster, and launched his company in between shifts.

He’s now worth $350 million.

In 2007, Arianna Huffington was riding the wave of The Huffington Post's massive success, working 18-hour days to keep up with millions of readers. Eventually, exhaustion took its toll and she collapsed, hitting her head and breaking her cheekbone.

She woke up in a pool of blood.

How did Daymond overcome those challenges and how did Arianna shift her working style to be successful yet sustainable?

It's often your perception of these expectations that drives you to push yourself to extremes. Depending on where you fall on the spectrum, ask each other: should we amplify or reject expectations?

But wait, there’s a paradox.

TIM’S TAKE

L’eggo my Eggo

People expect a lot from cofounders. You’re smart, resourceful, ambitious, resilient, and passionate. In fact, given your potential, the opportunity cost for pursuing your startup instead of taking a cushy job is quite high.

On the other hand, people don’t expect a lot from startups. They’re broke, unproven, fraught with uncertainty and risk, plus Google can come along and copy their product. Every startup story is an underdog story.

How do you reconcile those differences as a cofounder? You are the company.

Here’s a story from back when I was teaching entrepreneurship at UW:

I was meeting with Alan, the prof I was working with, to discuss our students’ performance midway through the quarter.

“You know that old ‘L'eggo my Eggo’ commercial?” he asked me, “the one where they’re playing tug-of-war with the waffle?”

“Yes, of course.”

“Well, you and I are the waffle. The superstar students are pulling us one way and the struggling ones are pulling us the other,” he said, gesturing with a jerk of his thumb.

The question was how do we serve both? How do we push the high-achievers beyond the curriculum and how do we make sure the failing ones don’t get left behind?

We thought about it for a moment. And that’s when I came up with my evil genius plan.

Since the students were already in teams for their business projects, but took individual exams, I proposed a new kind of midterm.

They would take it individually like they would any regular exam. The catch? They all received the same final score as the lowest scoring person on their team. Neither the stars nor the slackers liked the idea, but it forced them to study together.

Like it or not, your cofoundership is the same.

Expectations are simultaneously high and low, and they don’t revert to the mean. Your cofoundership is only as strong as its weakest link.

Here’s something concrete.

1. Avoid negative expectation cycles.

   The more extreme the expectations, the more they need to be vocalized. Letting them marinate in your mind is when they become irrational.

2. Ground your own expectations.

   Build an honest record of achievements and traction that speaks for itself. People will doubt you, but you’ll have undeniable proof of your capabilities.

It’s demoralizing when investors reject you left and right, so use that to motivate each other to iterate. It’s exciting to pull all-nighters to ship a much-anticipated feature, but remind each other to recharge.

This is your only lifeline to keep from spiraling into despair or drowning in overload. Open up about stressors that are pushing you to either extreme.

Work fast, live slow.

Related Resources

• If you want to read more scientific research on expectations, task effort and performance, here’s a study done by UC Berkeley.

• Searching for a cofounder? Try StartHawk for online connections and or meet people face-to-face through LFC.DEV's events in NYC.

• Both Superpowers for Good and FundingHope are crowdfunding platforms dedicated to empowering marginalized and underprivileged founders.

LAST LOOK

Make sure your cofounder sees this — either pass it along or get them to subscribe. A solid relationship takes everyone's effort.

Looking for a cofounder coach? Hit reply.

PS: Not every edition will be this long. You'll still get weekly, quick and easy, actionable bullet points. But some topics need more than 300 words to dig into.

Tim He
Founder & CEO