STFU #07 — Sleeping in a Coffin — and the stories we tell ourselves
“There are five kinds of actresses,” Mark Twain once wrote. “Bad actresses, fair actresses, good actresses, great actresses-and then there is Sarah Bernhardt.” No one was or ever had been, quite like her.
Sarah Bernhardt was one of the first modern celebrities and influencers of the 19th century! When she died in 1923, at the age of 79, hundreds of thousands of people lined the streets of Paris as her coffin was transported to the cemetery. The monument was engraved only with her name. Nothing else was needed. The world knew who she was.
Interestingly, Sarah kept a satin-lined coffin in her bedroom in which she sometimes slept. As the legend goes, Sarah, going through some angst of her own, chose her coffin and planned her funeral accordingly. The coffin was lined with love letters and decorated with flowers. And after a few comfy nights spent in it, she was known to sleep there during the night and take naps during the day. As per her reports to the media, she even used the coffin to practice her lines for tragic roles — to understand them better!
Except that — by her own admission, she never liked the coffin and only did it for media attention and stories around it. She sometimes slept in it out of force, but most of the stories around practicing lines and naps were all made up. It was Bernhardt herself who provided the press with a photograph of the coffin, for she understood the importance of self-mythologizing.
Self-mythologizing or making something larger than life is a way to cope for most of us.
Cooking up stories is a natural tendency — something that we unconsciously do all the time in our daily lives — telling stories about how a friend was unfair, or snapping at a colleague because it was ‘her fault’ or leaving our job because the ‘place’ is toxic and unfair — we all tend to externalize things.
But what is interesting is when we make something larger than life and start believing in that ‘myth’ we create for ourselves. Stories where inevitably we are ourselves the protagonist — stories that probably didn’t exist in the first place!
Self-mythologizing by Entrepreneurs
As an entrepreneur, since we are the casting director of our own story, we end up ‘assigning’ the role of the protagonist to ourselves — and keep modifying the narrative as we move along.
We keep telling stories to ourselves (and then the world) about how everything around us is dramatic and full of challenges. How, we as the supreme commander, are the true protagonist, almost saving the universe! How the idea was our ‘purpose’ in life and how we planned for it right from the age of 3.
Stories that make our heroism appear stronger — that make us a visionary, a resilient entrepreneur, a born leader, an astute manager….the list can go on and on.
The fact is — most of us are not all of these. Most entrepreneurs build their startups from one version to another — and their ideas are usually a combination of multiple vectors around that. However, in our quest for seeking attention (some call it personal PR), we end up twisting our own memory cards to make it more interesting — almost building an epic tale, waiting to be told to the neophytes of the startup ecosystem!
Solution: While self-mythologizing and self-deprecating might be extreme versions of our journeys, a balance of both helps us stay grounded.
At True Elements, we never started with what we have today. It is a mutation of some of the earlier things we did — practically, what we do today is an output of some 7–8 iterations earlier. While some principles have stuck to us (on why we do what we do), it was not an output of a dream that either of us ( Sreejith or me) had one night — but a series of motivations that steered the direction for us. As Steve Jobs said in his famous Stanford address, “You can’t connect the dots looking forward, you can only connect them looking backward”
Yes, when we look back, it’s easier to self-mythologize — everyone likes an interesting story. I still recall sharing an honest iteration with a few VCs a few years back, and their lack of inspiration around it.
“So Puru, you did 20 things and then managed to scale 1?”
“Yes”
“Oh — ok, I think you are confused.”
“Aren’t most of us like that?”
“No no — you should have picked up one thing and kept doing it.”
“That’s fine but how do you know which one works?”
“er..that you would know no — you are the entrepreneur!”
P.S. That’s my contribution to self-mythologizing!
One doesn’t need to have a long-term view of things — if you have something in mind, be assured that 9.9 times out of 10, you would end up working on a different version of today.
You can either go back to sleep in your coffin and then talk about it. OR just go ahead and try it out!
Stfu!
Originally published at https://www.linkedin.com.
