Recently I asked Matteo, the founder of Eightsleep, for his advice on hiring the founding team of Rork. He said: "Learn if a person is a missionary or a mercenary. You don't want to partner with mercenaries."
His words struck me as a non-obvious truth. Obviously, you want a team that will stay for the long term. But the idea was that great work comes from missionaries.
I always tried to filter out "money-only people" in work and life partners.
I used to think I did it because of how I grew up. In Russia, a lot of “good people” hated rich people. The assumption was that if you were rich, you must have done something wrong, with many examples of it being the case. I wanted to win and stop being poor, but still be good. My thinking changed after reading Ayn Rand. I was convinced that wanting money is good, so I started living in mercenary mode (she also inspired me to name our company Rork)
Ayn Rand said "money is the root of all good". So if money isn’t evil, why should you look for missionaries?
I gave it more thought, and realized
In a capitalist society missionaries are the ones who become the biggest outlier successes (see Elon as the clearest example)
It is definitely a counter-intuitive idea, as initially it seems that rationally optimizing for money at every moment in time will bring you the most money overall, and thus mercenaries should be richer in the long term.
First, let's understand why a founder should hire, partner with and marry missionaries instead of mercenaries.
Missionaries will believe in the vision much earlier than most people, thus being much more helpful during the time you need it the most. They will be energized and motivated even when things go bad, which inevitably happens, and will not leave you till the end. The conversations with them will be very deep, insightful and inspiring, and you'll leave full of great ideas of what you should do next.
They will inspire other people and infect them with the vision. They will care the most about doing the greatest work they can, and be more fulfilled and happy because they love their work. That means the people who do the best work are often missionaries: as no amount of money will drive you to go the extra mile on that design, or come up with ways to delight your users beyond what they expect. That extra care creates loyal customers, cults, and eventually the most successful companies.
Missionaries believe in something bigger than themselves. They are usually motivated not only by ego and the desire to be loved (though I suspect it is still a big part), but also by the desire to be remembered and avoid death.
It means they will either work on something no one cares about and have no success until they die, or pick the hardest, most important problem and tackle it until they solve it. In capitalism, if you solve a hard and important problem a lot of people care about, you will be highly successful with very little competition.
Missionary founders also tend to think more long-term than short-term. Mercenaries often optimize for the short-term as it is very scary to make long-term non-obvious bets, in other words, outlier bets. If you understand that the biggest successes in the world are exponential curves, you'll get that outlier exponential bets can come out only from missionaries.
Also, since the most talented people are often missionaries, a missionary founder will have a much easier time convincing great talent to go after them. Which, again, improves the probability of success.
Every person is inevitably a combination of a missionary and a mercenary, and often switches between the two depending on their financial/social status and the specific mission in question (you might believe more in one mission vs the other).
The fundamental truth that I realized is that most people want to believe in something bigger than themselves. That's why religion and cults consume the lives of hundreds of millions of people.
Is it bad to be a mercenary? I don't think so. Mercenaries are the biggest drivers of economic growth and prosperity in the world. They buy expensive goods, run banks, star in movies, live beautiful lives, and invest in stocks & companies, including the missionaries. A person could also start living as a mercenary, and once their financial needs are fulfilled and they see a mission they believe in, they can switch to being a missionary.
Being a missionary is a choice, not a trait of character.
Can you motivate yourself to be a missionary? Yes, I think you can. If you see yourself stuck doing work you don’t like, even after succeeding at chasing money and status and still not feeling happy, just quit. Start from zero and find something to believe in, even if small. Find and join other missionaries and try to infect yourself with their vision of the world. Start journaling, as writing makes you think, and ask yourself "why" you are doing things until you get to the deepest answer, even if uncomfortable. If you find out that you are a hedonist that just wants to live a beautiful life, there's nothing wrong with it. But what if you find a purpose? Wouldn't you have a more fulfilling life?
You also don't want to be a missionary without resources and/or incapable of acquiring them. That would be charity work and suck the life energy out of you. You need to be able to work in mercenary mode or have mercenaries on the team to make sure you have the most resources to achieve your mission.
Just remember, if you're a missionary founder who wants to do great work:
Partner with missionaries, and get mercenaries to help.