🏴☠️ Missionaries & Mercenaries 🪙
Finding people who are motivated by something more than money is incredibly rare. True missionaries care about making a contribution to something more important than themselves. Mercenaries will wilt.
Please play this song to set the mood for the writing:
There are some of us
Who do not accept the dreams of dragons as their own
No matter how grand those dragons might say they are
Yes there are some, who refuse to drop the candle
Even when pushed into a dark cave and locked there behind a stone
genius.com/Llorca-the-novel-sound-lyrics
🪙 Mercenaries 🪙
I keep having to refine my filter for mercenaries—they are everywhere. Here are the hallmarks of a person motivated purely by personal gain:
A focus on being paid immediately
An obsession with that they can gain
Drawn to short-term wins that can pay out fast
Poor personal ethics around what their time is worth
Terrible standards for people they will partner with to win
Zero interest in where their gains actually come from
No appreciation of how hard it is to create value
Obsessed with contractual obligations
Counts every single hour
These people are just hired guns. They have no sense of a greater mission to their work. They will flock to you when the treasure chest is full and flee the second someone else flashes something shiny in their face.
They have no soul. No sense of purpose.
Mercenaries are just economic agents optimising for one move of the chessboard. They care way more about themselves than others. They are totally inwardly focused. They do not truly care about their work or the impact it could have.
If you focus on what you are going to make in the next month instead of what you are going to create over the next decade, you are not going to make it.
Now, I am not saying it is a bad thing to make money. I have had to work dead-end web design gigs to pay the bills. Also, you may need to provide for your family way more than you want to risk your time. However, I am saying that if you are thinking about starting new things, you should not be optimising for short-term gains. You should care about creating something valuable for the long-term.
For the purposes of this post, “mercenaries” is the term I use to distinguish folks who are trying to make money from crypto. Missionaries are searching for something completely different.
🏴☠️ Missionaries 🏴☠️
There is, you must recall, the kind of serious study
That will give you confidence to strike your match to the mighty wick
Which will illuminate yet another portion of the darknessYou must be willing to accept that the pain
Is a part of the process of revelation
You must be willing to take the field and stay on the field
genius.com/Llorca-the-novel-sound-lyrics
Throughout my travels in and out of the worlds of startups and crypto, I have encountered a bunch of truly incredible people who are on a mission. They demonstrated a bunch of similar characteristics:
Obsessed with solving a really big problem for people
Totally committed to a cause for many years
Focused on crafting a fantastic product
Uninterested in market fluctuations
Willing to help anyone who is on their quest
Interested in the long term upside more over cash
They say no a lot so they can say yes when it matters
These people are a rare breed. They are looking for something much deeper than personal gain. They are trying to make a contribution to the collective energies of the innovative. What they do is who they are. What they make is what makes them. Finding people who truly understand that is the best feeling in the world.
There are so many things that can test a person’s resolve. I remember hosting Vitalik in my hacker house in 2014 when I was burdened with credit card debt. I remember being fired and forced out of companies I co-founded and funded. These financial strains have left me with mental scars and strengths for life. These experiences helped me see what I was doing wrong. They helped me find my mission.
This is the state I was in for a long time. I was searching for a mission worth fighting for. That leads me to my next category, which I have discovered through writing this post:
🧭 Searchers 🧭
Many of my friends and I have spent years searching for our mission. It was not a calling that was obvious to us from a young age, it was a search that took quite a long time. It required us to try many things and get a lot of them wrong. It required us to make new things, meet new people, start new projects, and mess it all up. Again and again.
I really admire searchers. The search can test you.
If you are still searching for something that is inspiring to you, I encourage you to watch this talk. It has rejuvenated me many times:
This man worked on Apple for his principles. He still does to this day.
Bret Victor is a missionary’s missionary.
🧙♀️ Searching for Searchers 🧙♂️
At Balance, a few of us believe there is a huge opportunity to get Apple & Ethereum to understand each other. Today, that takes the shape of a simple wallet app that demonstrates the power of the platform and the protocol. In the future, there is a lot more to the mission that we cannot share here.
If you have been searching for a mission, join our Discord:
I found it oddly relieving that you were a searcher too, from the outside I didn't realise. Time to watch that talk from Bret. :)