Wolfgang Hammer

There's a thing in character development where the character at the beginning of a story will have a concept of the world that they believe is fixed.

And it's very often a flawed concept.

This is always attributable to a lack of self-knowledge.

And I think with the case of a great founder who feels that they're building something that's working, and then they feel that perhaps the way they're thinking about the context wherein this product lives is limited.

With big companies, sometimes they have a product that perhaps is not as good anymore as it used to be, and that the conception of the world is antiquated and they don't quite know how to pivot it.

And then there are all these superficial answers that come and you grab from the world.

What the answers might be that you need to structure your company around

And my suggestion is always to pull that from the inside.

So to access it through self-knowledge.

So with a founder, they're simply trying to find access to some buried truth that they haven't looked for in the right way, but it's in there.

The way I think of it is story works in three layers.

One, there's the external mechanics of how the character interacts in the world and you can substitute character for product.

That's a requirement.

And in the case of technology, it's technical.

You got to have something that works.

And then there are two more layers, which is a subjective layer of why is this series of events important to me?

And what does it mean to me personally?

And then there is a philosophical layer.

And on a philosophical level, it's probably where you try to find out, and you have to steel man this, and it's very easy to straw man it, but you got to steel man it, how you believe the world works today and what people believe makes a good world.

Because everyone, most of the time, believes they're doing what is the right thing.