Now that I’m entering my fourth week maintaining this blog, I’ve decided to come back to the subject of why I really believe that these three topics are intertwined. These three topics are the reason that I named this blog Psychohistory, and these three topics seem to completely dominate my education and professional career.
The reason for this belief is crystalizing, and it’s remarkably simple:
I truly believe that incredible opportunity lies at the intersection of the irrational (human emotion) with the rational (finance, technology, business).
Behavioral Finance offers us the opportunity to design financial systems based on the basic insight that the way that human beings relate to money involves far more emotion than intellect. To understand economics, you must understand your very human economic actor.
Product Design is based on the premise that deeply understanding the ways that people interact with technology can lead to profoundly more useful (and desirable) designs and products. To understand product design, you must understand your very human customer.
Entrepreneurship offers us the opportunity to build companies by figuring out how to replicate the economic miracle of creating billions of dollars in new value by unlocking the very human emotions of inspiration, motivation, cooperation, and self-determination. To understand entrepreneurship, you must understand your very human entrepreneur.
Like all good elevator pitches, I probably need to reduce this in complexity by an order of magnitude before I’ll be happy with it. But I’m excited about this insight, and more importantly, I’m already seeing incredible leverage from it in my industry, where everyone is talking about the intersection of technology, commerce, and community.
Psychohistory 