Why Founders Stall: Patrick Gentempo on Hidden Contradictions

Mar 5, 2015

5 min read

Updated: Oct 29

Patrick Gentempo's napkin is four words borrowed from Ayn Rand: "Contradictions lead to destruction." Patrick is a chiropractor by training and an entrepreneur who built a diagnostics business over 20 years, with 9000 units on six continents. His claim is that people are not fundamentally lazy. What stops a founder from acting, even a very successful one, is a contradiction in a philosophy they don't even know they own. Two beliefs that cancel each other out. Find the contradiction, remove it, and action follows. Patrick sees this most in how entrepreneurs think about money. You can build a successful business and still fail financially because of what you picked up in the back seat of a car at six years old. This is the second of our two conversations about practical philosophy.

Inspired by Paper Napkin Wisdom Episode 111 with Patrick Gentempo.

What causes inaction in capable leaders?

Patrick closed a TEDx talk with this idea. He doesn't believe people are fundamentally lazy. Some may have picked up the habit of laziness, but something caused it. And plenty of successful people could be taking actions that would make them more successful, and don't.

His answer is that people are paralyzed by contradictions in a philosophy they don't even know they own.

We live in a universe of cause and effect. Two contradictory beliefs cannot both work in your life. They cancel each other out, or they do damage. So personal development, to Patrick, is simple. Identify a contradiction, remove it, and move to the next level of effectiveness. Nobody is ever completely contradiction free. That would be perfection. But the habit of finding and removing them changes a life.

When you become conscious of your philosophy, you start to see the contradictions in it. As you resolve them, momentum and movement take place.

How a hidden belief about money holds an entrepreneur back

For entrepreneurs, Patrick sees a big contradiction around money. He thinks a clear, non-contradictory view of money is about the most important thing any human being can work out. It is one he has had to work on significantly himself.

He calls the pieces belief elements. Picture a six-year-old in the back of the car. The parents are struggling a bit. They see the neighbors' new car and say rich people are thieves, or life isn't fair. Decades later you don't remember hearing it. But the premise is still running, and you end up sabotaging your own efforts to make money.

The hardest one, in Patrick's view, is the belief that material wealth and spiritual wealth sit at opposite ends. If you think you must choose between the moral and the practical, your options are practical but immoral, or moral but impractical. He calls that the most hellish contradiction on the planet. Unless you replace that belief, financial success becomes remote. And if you get there anyway, you can't enjoy the money.

How to find your own contradictions: what do I believe, and why?

Patrick maps philosophy in three branches. Metaphysics asks where am I, the nature of reality. Epistemology asks how do I know it, your rules of evidence. Ethics asks now what do I do. Purpose, he says, emerges from ethics. A lot of people like to start with purpose, but philosophy comes first.

The practical test runs through the first two branches. Name the belief. Then ask why you believe it. Often you find you heard it somewhere and have no good evidence for it. That is the opening.

The guest on the very first Paper Napkin did this to me. After hearing my story, she said that somewhere along the way someone convinced me life goes in cycles, up and down. Why did I believe them? I did believe it. I thought I couldn't be healthy and run a business at the same time. Patrick's point is that she asked it perfectly. She named the belief element, then asked for the evidence.

His parenting example shows how easily we miss our own. A mother teaches her son that good people don't lie. Twenty minutes later the phone rings and she tells him to say she's not there. Neither of them notices the contradiction.

Contradictions in your business can become the product

Patrick found his diagnostics business by spotting a contradiction in his own chiropractic practice. He was promising patients improved health, but the evaluations he did couldn't measure what he was promising. He was selling a thing he wasn't sure he was delivering.

So he set out to build technology that measured it. Once he solved the contradiction for himself, he took it to his profession. He was having the same problem as everyone else, and those 9000 customers bought the solution.

It led me to notice something. A lot of what we call disruptive technology is exposing and resolving a contradiction. Patrick agreed. Disruptors expose an existing contradiction, name it, and offer a way to fix it. A magazine once profiled him under the title The Disruptor, because he pointed out contradictions and named them.

The same applies inside a team. Alignment, as Patrick puts it, means non-contradiction. It means nothing is blocking the flow.

How fast does this work, and what does it cost?

It is easy and hard at the same time. In his 12-week class, Patrick hears people describe radical shifts by week two, three or four. Sustaining the new habit takes work. Some beliefs are set deep in one area of life and need real digging.

He also sees leaders who are conscious and thriving in the business while the relationship at home has broken down. They haven't brought the same attention there. His view is that you can have great health, a legendary romance and a successful business, if you live consciously enough. You don't have to sacrifice one for another.

And the cost of not doing it is higher. Living consciously can be painful. Living unconsciously, in Patrick's view, is far more painful. You become more of a victim and look outside yourself for why things aren't right.

Patrick has no academic background in philosophy. He learned it after being hit by a truck in Manhattan in 1986, laid up on his back with a big book. That's where he read that contradictions lead to destruction, and something clicked.

How to apply this in your business this week

Pick one area where you have stalled. Money is a good place to start.

Write down three things you believe about it. Be honest about the ones you'd never say out loud.
For each one, ask why you believe it. Where did you hear it? What evidence do you really have?
Look for two beliefs that pull against each other. That is where the paralysis lives.
Check one message you give your team against what you do the same week. Notice if the two match.
Look at your customers. Is there a contradiction they live with that nobody has named?

Warren Rustand once told me that when you change the way you look at the world, the world you look at changes. I wonder what would move this week if one contradiction were gone.