Mercenaries vs Missionaries

In startups, the successful founders are either mercenaries or missionaries.

I think I could almost never become a mercenary. I cannot work on something for more than a week unless I really really care about the problem that I'm solving. I must work on things I'm obsessed about, otherwise I become one of the laziest people you could ever meet.

Is it a good thing? Maybe. That's how I try to look at it. I think there are enough problems in any given field, and you could make a unicorn in almost any problem space. There's also something about the idea of being on both ends of the productivity spectrum that empowers you. In the end, this is actually what meaning is about. We handle thousands of decisions every single day, and being able to be obsessed by a small subset of things means you know your meaning to some extent, because the only function of "purpose" is to help us choose some things over others from the medium of infinite choices we have.

In the end, you can boil down these two archetypes of founders based on what they really want or what they're chasing in life. One of the founders feels insecure and is searching for social validation, and is very volatile with regards to the path he's taking. He doesn't care what he's doing as long as it's a viable business model that will make him "fuck-you money" kind of rich. Sure, a mercenary has some morals in place, otherwise he'd probably just choose to sell crack, but other than that, he could work on the most boring soul crushing enterprise SaaS bullshit. He'd probably be very successful at it too... But would it be fulfilling in the end? Would it be worth it to wake up at 35 or 40, past your prime, looking at the pile of cash you accumulated, and be known as the successful enterprise bs guy who now has to pay thousands of dollars in medication for the damage he did to his health by working +100h/week?

Being a missionary doesn't necessarily mean that I'm not interested in anything but a few topics in which I want to revolutionize the world, it's just that my reason for wanting to revolutionize the world is motivated not by a need to prove myself, which is what drives mercenaries.

When I talk to a mercenary, I like telling them to imagine they're an alien that has no context whatsoever about the social norms here on Earth. The whole thing would seem ridiculous... You're just an insignificant being in this vast Universe, living on a speck of dust... you're going to die anyway, there's nothing you can really do right now to stop the Universe from killing you, your loved ones, everything you know, and the Universe itself... Still, you're worried about what people think of you?! I get it, you're insecure because you had some traumas back in your childhood; that's actually what drives missionaries as well, but I think that missionaries are the kind of people who at least don't really care if they fit into society or not.

So, the question I started to ask myself more often: Do we even acknowledge the amount of mini-games we've created and sucked ourselves into, to the point we can't escape most of them?

As humans, our core functionality is to simplify the world, as much as possible. The world is super complex; just think about it. We wouldn't find it helpful to be able to see things at a micro scale, we don't see infrared light either, we cannot hear sounds which have a frequency below 20 Hz. Although we can't do that ourselves, we've created tools that can help us navigate the world beyond our physical limits. We, as humans, are each an algorithm that tries to simplify the world as much as possible. We no longer need to hunt for food every day, because we just go to the supermarket. In this way, we have solved a core human problem, but created ten others. We do that because it's one way to go a level of abstraction higher, and therefore improve our understanding of the world, because we free up a few GB of RAM that were used on previous problems, and are now used on something else.

As Naval put it: "I locally reverse entropy"

In short. We're here to play. It's like a child building sand castles. There's no point in doing them, because you know the next big waves will wash them off, but you still keep doing them, because it's fun. Because with every castle you build and gets destroyed, you learn to polish your skills.

I guess everyone chooses to live their life as they wish, and it really doesn't make a difference if you had fun or not, the ride goes on and on. There's no reason why you can't play complex games you like, it's just harder to find a complex game you truly like. And don't forget to be aware if you're having fun or not, or you might get caught up in the game for too long, and you'll look back realizing you played the wrong game all along.

The Universe will do its thing regardless of whether you have fun or not.