Worldview Drift

I didn’t realize until my early 30s how deeply startup culture had permeated my life.

After I turned 30, and after a decade in startups, I had begun exploring life paths beyond entrepreneurship. As I leaned more into coaching and nonprofit work, I realized I was scared to fully leave behind life as a founder.

While I’d worked on some nontraditional projects in my 20s, they had all in some way been about building skills or exploring ideas that I hoped might turn into a meaningful startup one day. When I considered leaving that behind, I was surprised by how existentially threatening it felt. 

I’d originally gotten into startups as a way to eschew traditional ideas of success—in the early 2010s, startups felt like a punk rock alternative to building a career in finance or consulting. Yet here I was, a decade later, stuck in my own culturally reinforced narrative about what a meaningful life looked like. 

I like to think of the above as “worldview drift”—it happens when we unintentionally and uncritically adopt another person or culture’s view on life as our own.

We are constantly being influenced by those around us—by our families, by the companies and industries we work in, and society more broadly. The more deeply immersed we are in a culture, the easier it is to take its worldview for granted as simply a fact of life.

In this piece, we’ll explore a framework for analyzing the worldviews we exist in, so we can understand how they influence us—and learn to more consciously choose them.

As an example, let’s take a closer look at the worldview behind startup culture—and where better to explore this philosophy than at its source: the essays of Paul Graham (PG). 

Many people have contributed to modern-day startup culture, but PG’s essays have held particular cultural weight. For all intents and purposes, his writing is considered canon for anyone who seriously wants to start a company.

Religious studies scholar Stephen Prothero offers a simple framework we can use to analyze the worldview behind PG’s writing.

His model proposes that worldviews can be broken down into four parts:

• Problem: the proposed core problem of life
• Solution: the proposed solution to that problem
• Path: a defined path people can follow to move from problem to solution
• Exemplars: archetypal figures who have modeled what it's like to walk the path

Prothero originally developed this framework as a way to analyze the major world religions*, but it can be used just as well to analyze secular worldviews, like nationalism, socialism, or organizational cultures. 

While it might feel odd to analyze startup culture through a religious studies framework, modern scholars have argued for blurring the lines between “religion” and “non-religion,” classifying both as belonging to the super-category of “worldview.”

Here’s a look at how the framework applies to PG’s writing:

• Problem: working for a salary is a poor way to build wealth
• Solution: don’t work for someone else, take equity in the projects you work on
• Path: start a company, do things that don’t scale, focus on 7% weekly growth
• Exemplars: Mark Zuckerberg, Elon Musk, Drew Houston, etc.