"Depression is rage turned inward," explains a smart psychotherapist to the head of a mafia clan in the tragicomic TV series " The Sopranos ." One could say that anger is energy that should flow freely and with direction. But what if the object of the anger is under a sacred prohibition? In that case, the impulse is constantly present, but there is no way to act on it. All that power begins to erode, destabilize, and explode the system from within. Realizing that your own energy is working against you is doubly frustrating. It's impossible to resist, but it's also impossible to overcome yourself. One thing is clear – in such a struggle, resources are wasted in vain, dissipating into space.
If you're an experienced entrepreneur, you know what we're talking about. You've either seen something like this happen to a business partner or struggled with it yourself. In addition to being harmful to the owner's health, the "unsolvable paradox" inevitably harms everyone around him (or her) - family, partners, employees, and of course, customers. Since a part of his resources is lost, the founder gives the business everything he has, but it's just crumbs. Yes, the leader is still shaking hands with clients, smiling at investors, and sitting at the head of the table, but one cannot help but feel that instead of him, there's only a shadow, a hologram, a ghost. Over time, this mischief infects the entire company, turning it into a zombie. The attempts of the most stubborn employees to change something are admirable, but they usually have no effect. The intervention of an investor is also unproductive, unless the business has become large, and the investor is a resolute Private Equity fund.
But you know what strikes me the most when I see this bouquet of symptoms once again? The mismatch between the hopelessness with which the situation appears to all participants before X and the freedom that appears immediately after X. It seems that it will require a tremendous amount of time and money to build a bridge over this chasm. But no, it's not about the magnitude of the effort, it's about its point of application. This is what X is. By the way, according to one unconfirmed version, in 1637, Descartes introduced the variable X as a transcription of the Arabic letter ش, the first letter in the word شيء, which means "something".
Yours sincerely,
-Alexander
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