Imaginary experience of the venture
The psychology that was taught at M.I.T. was Skinnerian and modeled humans as if they were rats. I knew that wasn’t on track. The many economists whose work I studied suffered terribly from myopia. They each assumed that everyone else in the world was like them and their theories modeled what they would personally do in a situation and assumed everyone else would. Given that any eight year old child would disagree with that premise, I knew the answer didn’t lie with them, either. When I told Dwight that I wanted to develop a system to model humans, he said, “Good luck” and left me to it. It actually took me 18 years and wasn’t realized until after I’d created and run a number of successful companies and had gone back to school to do a doctorate in business so as to learn what I’d been doing right and wrong. Unfortunately, I found I knew a lot more about business than my professors. One of the businesses that I had started was called Recognition Terminals, formed in 1969, and I’d intuitively used an early version of the Cybernetic Transposition techniques to almost instantly generate the $2.5 million in investment funding that I required.
I knew from my research on venture capitalists that obtaining funding from them was not only very difficult but extremely time consuming, often taking six to eighteen months before the first dollar was seen. So I decided that wasn’t the way to go. Instead, I turned down the lights in my office, sat down in my most comfortable chair, and created an imaginary experience of someone, an investor, happily giving me a check for $2.5 million. I then focused on the investor, in my imagination, repeatedly asking him for his name and how to contact him. After a few hours of refining this imaginary experience, writing it down, editing it to make it “perfect” and building a “perfect” imaginary experience of the venture, the name popped into my consciousness. I’d heard of his company and name once.
I immediately located his company’s phone number and called him. Logically, that didn’t make sense because it was a Saturday but I knew that I had to call him. He was in and I immediately got through to him. We talked about fifteen minutes and he said he was interested. He told me to wait by the phone and his executive vice president would call within an hour. After about 35 minutes, the phone rang. It was the executive vice president and we set up an appointment for Monday at my attorney in Washington, D.C.
Tags: executive, experience, imaginary, immediately, investor, Management, million, minutes, phone, president, venture