There’s a curiously engaging book called How Proust Can Change Your Life, written by Alain de Botton, that looks at Marcel Proust’s life and works (novels) in the context of universal life lessons. Chapter 2, entitled “How to Read for Yourself,” conveys the notion that Proust believed in novels as “a kind of optical instrument” (Proust’s words) with which to examine one’s own life. De Botton relates the story of Lucien Daudet who had occasion to visit an art gallery with Proust:

Daudet tells us that they went into a gallery hung with a painting by Domenico Ghirlandaio. It was called Old Man and Boy, it had been painted in the 1480s, and it showed a kindly-looking man with a set of carbuncles on the tip of his nose. Proust considered the Ghirlandaio for a moment, then turned to Daudet and told him that this man was the spitting image of the Marquis de Lau, a well-known figure in the Parisian social world.

It is this real-world identification that we bring to content consumption that lends significance to the work. De Botton calls it the “Marquis de Lau phenomenon,” a romantic and somewhat high-brow classification for what is fundamentally pattern recognition, but De Botton breathes additional meaning into the phrase. Specifically, he notes that MLP (as he short-hands it) confers: (1) the capacity “to feel at home everywhere,” (2) “a cure for loneliness,” and (3) what he calls “the finger-placing ability,” referring to a reader’s ability, through content consumption, to clarify in his mind what might have been only a half-formed feeling or thought regarding some aspect of his life.

The Marquis de Lau phenomenon got me thinking about pattern recognition in general. In the venture industry, it plays an enormous role in evaluating new companies and management teams. But it also blinds us to new paradigms. I suspect that it protects us on the downside risk more than it aids on upside opportunity. Is it then in the best interest of the entrepreneur to maximize exposure in order to generate an arsenal of patterns or strictly focus in order to revolutionize? I suspect, at an early stage, the combination of revolutionizing entrepreneur and pattern seeking investor is a healthy dynamic. Thoughts?

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Photo credit: Proust, originally uploaded by louveciennes

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