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Lying & Entrepreneurship

Jonah Lehrer wrote a very interesting piece recently entitled Lying & Creativity. In it, he makes the profound point that learning to contain our inclination to confabulate, or lie, is fundamentally at odds with our urge to create.

Quoting Picasso, Lehrer writes:

“Every child is an artist. The problem is how to remain an artist once we grow up.” From the perspective of the brain, Picasso is on to something, as the frontal lobes (and the DPLFC in particular) are the last brain areas to fully develop. And so the super-ego settles in, and we become too self-conscious to create. Obviously, we need the frontal lobes to function…but every talent comes with a trade-off. When we repress our urge to confabulate we also repress the urge to create.

In reading this, I was struck by how similar this idea is to something I’ve often observed in entrepreneurs.

Talented entrepreneurs seem to have a unique ability to put aside fear and convention and channel creativity and persistence with an almost reckless abandon. Nothing will stand in their way.

So is this quality of entrepreneurship, or business creativity, unique to certain types of people?

For those of us out there contemplating taking the plunge yet having difficulty doing so, take comfort in Jonah’s claim that this is something we all have within us. As he says about a patient in his piece:

Such confabulations tells us something important about the mind: spontaneous creativity - the ability to make up a story on demand - is a fundamental feature of human cognition. We’re all natural storytellers, weaving narratives out of the confusion. In other words, SB’s brain damage didn’t lead to some special new mental capacity, which the rest of us are missing. Instead, it released a latent creative capacity that we all have, if only we learned how to stop holding it back.

So if you’re out there cooking up an idea, but afraid to jump in with both feet, lie to yourself. You may get something out more beautiful than you imagine.