Welcome to Hype Theory
Take the double helix of a DNA strand. The two strands are dependent on each other in order for life to exist and DNA to replicate. The DNA’s helix structure serves as a blueprint: one strand denotes faster evolving traits, like hair and eye color, while the other strand carries the stable genetic traits, like the formation of bones, lungs, and so on.
Fundamentally, business works in a similar way. You should have your baselines, like CPAs, lawyers, data systems, and so forth to allow stability in your business and processes, but you should be making mutations in your sales, marketing, PR, merchandising, dealmaking, recruiting, research and development, and other methods in order to evolve and beat your competitors. On one hand, your basic structure and DNA is protected, while on the other hand you are in radical, proactive mutation mode in order to figure out how to create additional wealth for your shareholders.
Likewise, life is a stable baseline that protects our art and us. Art helps mutate our minds and activities to envision the next generation of our lives until we ultimately make ourselves stronger and more appealing to others, which means we can compete better. The stability of rational people ensures that the radically evolving, mutating nature of art does not lead us too far astray but only improves us, just as mutating evolution provides the opportunity to improve an otherwise stable business.
Take a chicken and its eggs. While the chicken is the baseline, the egg has the opportunity to mutate in order to adapt stronger competitive characteristics, so the chicken’s basic genetic stability ensures that the egg does not stray too far while trying to diversify and improve the chicken’s genus.
We know that cash or salary makes employees feel comfortable and stable; however, since it’s a sure thing, it doesn’t make them terribly competitive. This is why stock options are often used as an incentive to motivate them to mutate into more effective, efficient, and ultimately, more profitable workers. However, with no salary component, most employees feel insecure and unstable. The two are mutually dependent to enable an optimized competitive evolutionary environment for your business, much like the double helix DNA structure, life and art, the chicken and its eggs, and other mutually dependent evolutionary models.
Based on the above, I crafted a business philosophy coined “Hype Theory.” Hype Theory holds that two forces, hype and reality, follow the same patterns of natural selection discussed above, and they are mutually dependent on each other for optimal success. Hype and reality working in concert enable a powerful evolutionary force as does a DNA strand.
- The Reality: you work hard every day on creative processes and products to make your clients happy.
- The Hype: at the same time, you can project the proposed greatness of your future company to the press, your prospective clients, and others.
You are simultaneously protected by your base reality (of excellent plans, products, employees, intellectual property, financing, and so forth) and can therefore safely project your hyped up confidence in the market, which is likely to appeal to new customers and help uncover a variety of potential opportunities that you are qualified to leverage. Again, you are creating a self-fulfilling prophecy by projecting your real world confidence.
Here is our attempt at an equation to explain Hype Theory:
Life + Art = Nature + Nurture = Chicken + Egg = Cash + Stock = Reality + Hype
They all feed off their mate and are intrinsic to the other to create success. They engage in codependent, evolutionary, symbiotic, mutual self-preservation. One stabilizing force allows another force to radically explore options and adopt the best of them without destroying the sanctity or functionality of the base business. So to the extent that you hype and simultaneously believe in your own services, others will follow, which will advance your business just as the other parts of Hype Theory work together to guarantee successful evolution.
