The article seemed to be referring to dramatic moments of self-assessment when people fundamentally transformed themselves or their businesses. In a startup, I would think that you typically do this many times before finding the winning formula. Does anyone have insight into how often it is practical and useful to do a dramatic re-imagining of the fundamentals of your business? I'm guessing there is such a thing as pivoting too much or too often.

Certainly, I think it is important to practice self-awareness and self-assessment on a daily basis, but there are no shortage of good ideas on a strong startup team. Every few days someone has a great new idea that could be transformative, and from my experience, you try to question yourselves and your assumptions all the time (hopefully in as brutally honest a way as is necessary, though you sometimes wonder if you are fooling yourselves). Perhaps reality is simply more incremental, though it can look dramatic and transformative after the fact. Every sprint planning meeting and every board meeting is an opportunity for rigorous assessment. You just have to work hard to maintain self-awareness, to see things from a truly unique perspective and make big changes when necessary. Outside advisers certainly help. Otherwise, we are human after all, and it is easy to fool ourselves.

If the lack of it is almost perfectly correlated with failure, then wouldn't having it be almost perfectly correlated with success?

I didn't want to phrase that statement too strongly because there are more degrees of success than failure. It may be that avoiding denial is enough to avoid failure, but that to be a big success you need other things as well, like being smart or being in a hot market.

The vast majority of violent criminals in the USA are male, but the majority of males are not violent criminals.

And yet being male still almost perfectly correlates with being a violent criminal. asdfologist probably picks on a loose use of word "correlation", correlation is by definition symmetric. pg is really talking about conditional probabilities, but honestly I think everyone understands what he means.

You're right-I was also thinking of conditional probabilities. I appreciate the correction-I'm trying to learn to be more precise.

I did interpret it to be symmetric, but now that I think about it you seem to be right that colloquially it does (generally) refer to conditional probability. I disagree though that everyone interprets it that way, based on the upvotes my comment got.

Self examination in this case would be a necessary but not sufficient condition.

Not if more people have this trait than are successful.

Talking about startups, does this just mean keeping your eyes on your numbers and doing frequent review or are we talking about something on a more personal level?

I think by definition, self-awareness means something on a more personal level. You have to understand not only the market you're in, the business you're trying to start, your product and your customers, but also must be keenly attuned to your own methods, your "chemistry" with your partners, and the _way_ you approach the business, not just the approach itself.

At least that's been my experience as a self-proclaimed "self-aware entrepreneur" ;)

Actual introspection; metrics can help with that, but they're a very small part of the whole story.