I was doing some research recently when I came across a line attributed to Arthur Schopenhauer: “We forfeit three-fourths of ourselves in order to become like other people.” It sounded profound, although 75% seemed suspiciously precise for a nineteenth-century philosopher, so I checked. Schopenhauer did write it, or at least that is how T Bailey Saunders translated the line in Counsels and Maxims. It was an aphorism, not a statistic, as nobody had been wandering around Frankfurt measuring people for lost personality.
How much of yourself have you edited out?
Even so, the line stayed with me. It made me wonder how much of themselves business owners give up while trying to make it. It happens gradually, through a word removed from the website, an ambition made bigger because the original one did not sound impressive enough or a business model adjusted to resemble those everyone else admires. Each decision looks sensible on its own, only when we stand back do we see how much of the founder and business has disappeared.
Stand out… but make sure you fit in
Fundraising may be where this pressure becomes most obvious. Pitch decks have their own grammar, TAM, SAM, SOM, scalable model, defensible technology, rapid growth and credible exit. Investors need evidence and a route to getting their money back. The problem begins when a useful investment template becomes a universal definition of a good business, including for businesses that will never raise external equity and should not be designed as if they will.
The entrepreneurial ecosystem contains a peculiar contradiction, founders are told to stand out, while the selection processes require them to remain reassuringly recognisable. Be distinctive, but not too different. Be ambitious, but in an approved way. The instruction is “stand out”, while the system often rewards “fit in”.
This is reinforced by the single agent model, which assumes a standard entrepreneurial actor and applies that model far beyond the group for whom it was designed. The acceptable founder is externally funded, high-growth, internationally scalable and exit-oriented. That may be right for some businesses. It becomes a problem when every founder is encouraged to behave as though it is the only serious form of entrepreneurship, regardless of their objectives or appetite for the consequences.
Social psychology has a name for this tension, psychologist Marilynn Brewer described our competing needs to belong and remain different as optimal distinctiveness. Too different and we risk rejection. Too similar and we lose our identity. Fundraising raises the stakes because acceptance controls access to capital. Founders begin editing themselves before an investor has asked them to, imitating the patterns and reshaping the plan around what they think funding wants.
If the business succeeds, do you?
That is the real danger in Schopenhauer’s 75%. Every serious business involves compromise. Customers have needs, cash has limits and evidence should defeat wishful thinking. The danger is surrendering the qualities that made the business worth building, the founder’s judgement, their reason for starting, the work they want to do, their appetite for risk and their own definition of success.
This is why I keep returning to the founder. We ask whether a business has product-market fit, but spend far less time asking whether it has founder fit. If it succeeds exactly as planned, will you still want to own it? Will you enjoy the role it creates? Will its growth produce the life you wanted or a more demanding version of the job you were trying to escape? These are not soft questions to consider once the serious strategy is finished. They are part of the strategy.
Have the courage to be you
This is what I mean by having the courage to be unacceptable. It is not permission to ignore customers, reject evidence or become impossible to work with. It is the courage to reject a model of success that was never designed for you. Build the business you want to build, for reasons you understand. Decide what success means, what role you want and which trade-offs you are prepared to make, then fund that plan appropriately.
That funding may come from making sales, eventually sourcing debt, customers or external equity from angels, private equity or venture capital. If the plan genuinely requires external equity, pursue the right investor and structure with your eyes open. If it does not, stop twisting the business into something that does, capital is a tool and it should not become the architect of your identity. The objective is funding that fits your plan, not fitting you or your plan to the funding.
I cannot tell you that founders literally give up 75% of themselves. Schopenhauer was making a philosophical point, not publishing a dataset. I do wonder, however, whether the parts surrendered first are often the best parts, the awkward conviction, independence and refusal to copy that made the founder and the business interesting. Make the funding fit the plan, not the plan fit the funding, and do not give up your best 75% before anybody has even asked you to, as that is a lot to give up when you don’t need to.
