<aside> 🧚♀️ This is the place to land and figure out your mental map of what we’re doing at Sophonaut and how to get integrated into that flow.
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People run the world and we create pretty much all of our problems. Things that generate insane amounts of conflict and suffering seem to be avoidable if not at least mitigable. The concept of building a “wellness layer” is creating a fundamental stratum that increases the strength of the social support mesh that we all secretly rely on already. In other words: hurt people hurt people, and flourishing people help others flourish! We imagine a world with a critical mass of flourishing people which increases the social resilience of the whole. Instead of dealing with the symptoms of the people side of all problems, or avoiding them and building vertical take-off electric jets, we believe it’s important to face life dead in the eye and help people deal directly with themselves.
Sophonaut means “wisdom sailor” and was started by @Peter DePaulo and @Tyler Capps . It’s a project with the intent of solving several problems that humanity faces by attacking the most upstream problem: people don’t understand and cannot control their own behavior.
The logic is simple: since people cause problems in the world, inflicting their suffering on others, if you can help people improve their own world, at a tipping point they will improve the world around them. No one in the world thinks they are the bad actor.
The approach here is to hijack desire to move people up on the scale of their own development. Our models for this are based on a modified version of Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs, a ton of personality psychology, and Robert Kegan’s model of adult development.
The short version: a tool to help people develop as adults. It’s a coaching platform, and eventually an agent that can solve personal challenges given private, personal data.
We started with reading textbooks, that evolved into a comprehensive literature review of behavioral psychology research, which evolved into offering workshops, which evolved into us accidentally becoming a tech company. We’ve built an implementation of the Big Five Personality Assessment which we’ve been using to collect data and help people orient their lives. The assessment alone has proven to be very valuable. Going from very limited self-understanding to a multi-angle and detailed view is a major leap for most people’s personal development.
Our current focus is on improving the matchmaking process between coaches and their clients. By understanding the relationship between providers who can effectively guide people through change, the fundamental profiles of people undergoing change, and gaining sufficient repetitions, we can scale the process to more people who can’t afford to connect directly with coaches.
We haven’t found a satisfying approach to upstream people problems. It’s not for lack of trying, but we’re taking a different approach. You can read a lot more in Mission, Vision, Values
Well, depends on what you want! At this point, you probably know either Peter or Tyler. Reaching out to one of us is the easiest place since this is so early If you want to get involved, you should definitely check out Start Here