# The way people think drastically changes depending on their context Note that language literally changes how you think Skillsets drive mindsets drive skillsets There’s a common idea that “I/you should <start a successful company/make a lot of money> before you <do or are legitimate ([[Legitimacy]]!) enough to the thing that you want to do>.” This approach won’t work for most people because even if you succeed (which is not guaranteed!) through the process of becoming a person who is successful at the other thing, you do some combination of becoming the type of person who can succeed at that thing and enmeshing yourself in that thing. Concretely: you say you’re going to make a ton of money at a hedge fund so that you can then do science. You need to start thinking in terms of risk, markets, trades and dollars. You enmesh yourself in a culture that values money and outward signs of success, fast talking, and aggressiveness. Even if you avoid the hedonic treadmill where even though you’re making a ton of money you’re spending it on expensive things, you may no longer value the things you said you would support with that money, and *even then* your approach is probably no longer correct for deep research. Same with startups. Anecdote from That when researcher friends of his started a company, they literally stopped being able to see problems and questions that would have occurred to them when they were researchers. I suspect this happens more often than we talk about both on the individual level and on the institutional level ([[Institutions are the second level of a group selection evolutionary system]]). In the same way that an individual’s context shapes what thoughts they can think, an organization’s context shapes what thoughts *it* can “think” — even if there are individuals inside of it who know that it should be “thinking” in a different way. This involuntary thought-shaping at an organization level is one reason why [[Organizations get good at one thing]]— in order to act in a completely different way, it would drastically need to shift its context. It’s been talked about to death but this is perhaps another lens on [[christensenInnovatorDilemmaWhen1997]] Part of this is doubtlessly driven by a deep part of us that normalizes to whatever is around us. The effect is a corollary of [[You are the average of the five people you spend the most time around]] — you value the things that people around you value. ### Related * [[§Specialists vs. Generalists]] [Web URL for this note](http://notes.benjaminreinhardt.com/The+way+people+think+drastically+changes+depending+on+their+context) [Comment on this note](http://via.hypothes.is/http://notes.benjaminreinhardt.com/The+way+people+think+drastically+changes+depending+on+their+context)