A compulsion to run every room you're allowed into can become a business, decades before anyone calls it one.

principle — attributed to Jaclyn Bernstein

Bernstein was Honor Society president in high school, class president all four years of college, a founding sorority sister, and camper captain by her teens, a pattern she describes plainly: I can't not be involved. Whatever the room was, she needed a hand in running it, and her campaign style even then was to tell people what she would do for them rather than attack anyone else. That instinct, unglamorous and entirely personal at the time, became the exact operating method she now sells to corporate clients three decades later. The compulsion came first. The business model was simply the compulsion, scaled and priced.

For understanding where a founder's actual operating instincts were formed, long before there was a company to run.

early-formation, compulsion, leadership, self-knowledge