Entrepreneurs think they’re badass

It's beyond me to pick apart another person's relationships, but at the end of the day, there are very few things humans like and seek out in relationships that are not related to power. We find attractive the things that convey status and economic security; we love our parents (and our children) because they provide for us. There's a reason why beautiful people have straight teeth and clean features rather than looking disheveled. Even in subcultures predicated on being so ~nonconformist~ and iconoclastic, people brush their teeth.

I'm sure your family and your relationships are very different and that all the love in your life is totally unconditional and moreover, totally uncorrelated with your ability to command resources. I hope you never fall upon hard times but if you did, I'm sure every relationship you have would survive it. Best of luck with your startup, it looks like a great idea and you're obviously good at executing. More resources look to be on your horizons.

>Further, there's no particular reason to think it was a huge evolutionary driver for us.

http://books.google.com/books?hl=en&lr=&id=bV9yeFV6_ckC&oi=f...

>People are naturally violent, but we mostly set that aside

This is the most demonstrably wrong thing. Try killing a man and say that you are naturally violent. Humans are social animals and to commit violence against one another is very difficult for us. The people who do not have this trait we call sociopaths. The people who harm others for a living do so at the cost of massive psychological trauma, probably unhealable, and the best and most effective killers have to be taught how to kill for years and years by people who have made it their job to teach how to kill, based on years of research and development of new ways to break people down and build them into war machines.

The most common response to seeing death is to vomit, and you say people are naturally violent? What do you know of violence?

>Could you be pulling our legs? When you call him arrogant and then explain how only you understand the deep, hidden truths of the world, it's kooky enough that I wonder if you're just trolling.

I think it's condescending and ironically, a status-grab to say something like "I pity people who directly pursue the thing I acquire by doing other things. I am better than they are, because I pursue these other, distinct things, that wholly coincidentally lead to the thing these other people pursue. How pitiful they are."

To do any serious analysis of entrepreneurship you must include a population in your study that "did everything right" and still failed.

Studies of successful entrepreneurs are nothing but confirmation bias in action. Sure you can point to N successful people who did X, Y and Z, and follow that with an unjustified claim that X, Y and Z are the keys to the kingdom, but unless you go out and scour the ground for people who also did X, Y and Z and failed, you've said exactly nothing interesting.

In particular, you have not increased the posterior plausibility of the claim "people who do X, Y and Z are more likely to be successful" more than a tiny little increment.

I say this as a successful businessperson who has worked for a number of failed startups and knows a fair number of people who came within one business decision of "success" (defined as being a millionaire with less than five years of work).

These studies of only successful business-people are completely vacuous. It isn't enough to show that "People who were successful did X, Y and Z." You must also show "People who did X, Y and Z had a better chance of success", which is a completely unrelated question, and whose answer can only be ascertained by investigating a reasonably large sample of people selected on the basis of doing X, Y and Z, not on the basis of being successful.

"Everything in the world is about sex, except sex. Sex is about power." --Oscar Wilde. [https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/6218-everything-in-the-worl...]

Mate competition is a powerful force in human evolution. Evidence: males are 20% larger than females, and the ancient male breeding population is about half the size of the total male population (these are utterly uncontroversial facts, and if you ask any biologist about them without mentioning the species they will say, "Mate competition, moderate polygamy.")

"Power" is the power to mate with the highest status member of the opposite sex available. You'll note this is a gender-free definition.

To deny this is to deny evolution, as it applies to humans. As you correctly point out, what is in our evolutionary history is not what is "right", but unless we are willing to surface that history and examine it in the cold light of day we're like to make a large number of very bad decisions.

So the OP is correct: "No human alive doesn't want power". It does not follow from this "Seeking power by any means available is right." Nor does it mean "Formal hierarchy is the best form of social organization." Sometimes "power" means "the power to boink the lady of the manor". Or as Aristotle might have put it: "Power is said in many ways."

But compared to all other influences on human behaviour, mate competition is pretty important. We forget that at our peril, because it might lead us to weaken social institutions--like monogamy--that tend to undermine mate competition's role as a social organizing principle.

> It's a matter of ambition, and degree, isn't it? Plenty of people who are otherwise powerless take power through drugs. It's the same game. Some people win more objectively than others.

By the rules of your game, a driven executive who makes hundreds of millions of dollars but can't find real satisfaction is more "objectively winning" than a guy who's straddling the poverty line but has everything he needs and is very happy with his life. You don't even realize that the second guy isn't playing the same game. You're playing Monopoly, leaning over to the guy playing checkers across the way, and screeching that he's a loser because he doesn't have any hotels.