I've always told people interested in startup to "start a project, not a company." I haven't been able to verbalize why yet until this:
But there is another more sinister reason people dismiss new ideas. If you try something ambitious, many of those around you will hope, consciously or unconsciously, that you'll fail. They worry that if you try something ambitious and succeed, it will put you above them. In some countries this is not just an individual failing but part of the national culture.
How can you know that such an impulse is part of some country’s national culture?
I sometimes think about what sets successful and less successful countries apart, and how profound an effect can cultures have. Assuming that smart people are born everywhere at similar rate, and disregarding unfree societies with authoritative regimes or paralysing religious dogmas, I would naively expect similar outcomes among countries. I would like to know to what degree can the observed difference be attributed to culture, but I guess I will never know.
In Denmark it's so prevalent that it's codified as Jante's Law. It's not a prescriptive law, despite the way it's phrased. It's more descriptive, a satirical summary of the way Danes think of ambitious people.
- You're not to think you are anything special.
- You're not to think you are as good as we are.
- You're not to think you are smarter than we are.
- You're not to imagine yourself better than we are.
- You're not to think you know more than we do.
- You're not to think you are more important than we are.
I may be misinterpreting it here. Although a few points (see point no. 6, 8, 9) help one stay grounded and humble, the other points can be seen as degrading the self-worth of an ambitious person.
In New Zealand, we call it Tall Poppy Syndrome. The typical acceptable way to be successful in NZ without receiving ostracisation in some form is to attribute your success to the country, rather than to yourself.
At a very basic level, it affects children at school. To excel at school is looked down on, here, which leads to the smart kids keeping their heads down and trying to fit in with the average kids. One benefit of immigration from countries with higher approval of academic success is that in many schools you are no longer looked down on for doing well, and I look forward to seeing how that affects the future of my country.
I would like to know to what degree can the observed difference be attributed to culture
I believe you can have a grasp of the magnitude of it by thinking that people are the product of their birth (genes and whatever) and their experience. Certainly we can think of experience as very significative in the way people act and think. Also if you replace the word experience by education (see as being the same thing here), you end up with anything from study environment, to culture to politics that actually determine a lot how people behave.
That's actually my main criticism of the politics in my country. It's not so much that the politicians are saying dumb things, they actually are great people if you look closely. It's just that their politic is not how I would "educate" people, the way people experiences it is the bad part in my feeling.
In short, I think those impulses have a lot to do with experience/education.
> How can you know that such an impulse is part of some country’s national culture?
Singaporean here. I've seen this "crabs in a bucket" mentality since the days of formal education. It's often known as being "kiasu" (afraid of losing to others, in Hokkien dialect) [1] in the 90's.
These days, it's sometimes known as the "sinkie pwn sinkie" phenomenon [2].
But there is another more sinister reason people dismiss new ideas. If you try something ambitious, many of those around you will hope, consciously or unconsciously, that you'll fail. They worry that if you try something ambitious and succeed, it will put you above them. In some countries this is not just an individual failing but part of the national culture.