Emotion drives our decisionmaking (see USC professor Antonio Damasio’s groundbreaking research here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1wup_K2WN0I), but what do we do about emotions that we refuse to even acknowledge? Our Jungian shadows.
I headed to the Big Island of Hawaii for the Lobby Conference 2019— the time away helped me think about my relationship with my own shadow: the parts of myself that drive me that I don’t even think about. This is something everyone faces, but not everyone is aware of these internal forces.
The shadow is a moral problem that challenges the whole ego-personality, for no one can become conscious of the shadow without considerable moral effort. To become conscious of it involves recognizing the dark aspects of the personality as present and real. This act is the essential condition for any kind of self-knowledge.” — Carl Jung, Aion (1951)
If you hate a person, you hate something in him that is a part of yourself. What isn’t a part of ourselves doesn’t disturb us - Herman Hesse
“I don’t like that man, I must get to know him better.” — Abraham Lincoln
Thanks to Cameron Yarbrough, Stephanie Lim, Tony C Yang, and Dani Metz Shuval for watching drafts of this.
I’m Garry Tan, venture capitalist and cofounder at Initialized Capital. We were earliest investors in billion dollar startups like Coinbase and Instacart, and we’re spending time with some of our best founders to learn the secrets of their success and see the future they’re building. I’m doing my own run-and-gun one man YouTube channel with no staff or crew — we're going for raw and unfiltered, not perfect.
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