What Is An Extraordinary Man?
The Moral Imperative To Grind, The Social Safety Net, & The Mournful Middle Class
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I've written before about the school assignment that led to my love affair with Russian literature. From a somber existentialism introduction to a mowing scene that moves me, the genre has left a mark on my soul. None more so than Fyodor Dostoyevsky.
In college I wrote a paper after reading Crime & Punishment for the first time. The concept that captivated me most about the book is a theory belonging to the main character: Rodion Raskolnikov. In an article, Raskolnikov articulates an idea about the great separation of mankind between the ordinary and the extraordinary:
"An 'extraordinary' man has the right... that is, not an official right, but his own right, to allow his conscience to... step over certain obstacles, and then only in the event that the fulfillment of his idea—sometimes perhaps salutary for the whole of mankind—calls for it."
Raskolnikov goes on to articulate examples: Lycurgus, Solon, Muhammad, even (and especially) Napoleon himself.
In fact, not only are these individuals so extraordinary as to defy the bounds of any moral law, but they, in fact, have a moral obligation to violate standards to bring about their greatness:
"If Newton's discoveries could become known to people in no other way than by sacrificing the lives of one, or ten, or a hundred or more people who were hindering the discovery, then Newton would have the right, and it would even be his duty... to remove those ten or a hundred people, in order to make his discoveries known to all mankind."
In the wake of the rise of the extraordinary, we are left with the ordinary. Those lumps of people; a mass that, as Raskolnikov describes it, "exist in the world only so that finally, through some effort, with great strain, it may finally bring into the world one somewhat independent man in a thousand."
Is Raskolnikov right? Do the great masses of the ordinary exist only to give birth to the few extraordinary who, through divine right, can trample on every standard and principle, in pursuit of their unique greatness that they're meant to offer the world?
Its this question of "what is an extraordinary man?" that has, once again, brought me to my summer missive on ambition.
For whatever reason, each summer I have found myself brought low in a deep ponder on the nature of hard work, ambition, and my relationship with it. In August 2022, I wrote "Toil We Must." In April 2023, I wrote "The Renaissance of Rise and Grind." In June 2024, I wrote "The Hardening of the Great Softening."
And now, because of Raskolnikov, I find myself back here again for the fourth year in a row pondering on a similar question. What is an extraordinary man*? And how do we define individual worth in an age of ambition?
The Greatest Generation
Reindustrializing Our Working Effort
When I think of extraordinary, I'm immediately drawn to the generation that built the modern world. From 1945 to 1975, it was the Golden Age of Capitalism. From the UN to the GI Bill, massive access to college education and home ownership, the building of interstate highways, technology revolutions from the nuclear age to the space race and the birth of personal computing.
That massive rate of innovation led to measurable economic outcomes. Real income tripled, the standard of living doubled, over 80% of households owned a car, refrigerator, and color TV, and by 1960 the idea of a 40 hour work week was born.
When we talk about the industrial giants of yester-year that invented the future during the first half of the 20th century, we think of IBM, Boeing, Lockheed, Bell Labs, Fairchild. But one of the common sentiments I sense from people is that they believe we built the future in those decades because everyone was grinding; working 80+ hours a week.
If we want that same ability to shape the world and invent the future, we just have to work as hard as they did. But that doesn't tell the whole story. It's not a simple matter of, "if we want the world to progress dramatically, then we just have to work harder."
Now, it's true that during NASA's series of Mercury, Gemini, and Apollo missions, they were most certainly working around the clock 24/7. But they had built a system of three flight-director-led shifts of 8 hours each.
To make deadlines, some of the greatest industrial organizations in history, like Lockheed Skunk Works, would work "fourteen-hour days seven days a week."
Potentially one of the single most influential industrial organizations in history was Bell Labs. Rather than push for dogmatic, non-stop grind, the organization was built on a meritocratic dichotomy that can feel like a more natural way than Raskolnikov's to divide the ordinary from the extraordinary. As Mervin Kelly, the president of Bell Labs, would often tell new Bell Labs employees on their first day:
“You get paid for the seven and a half hours a day you put in here, but you get your raises and promotions on what you do in the other sixteen and a half hours.”
As important as it is to appreciate that people were capable of building exceptional things without working 80+ hours a week, its also important to note that the spikiest, most important breakthroughs within those organizations likely came from exceptionally hard work. And that's good! World shapers are not typical, average, or ordinary. You rarely change the world within the confines of a 9 to 5. The people who do are, in fact, extraordinary.
IBM's Wild Ducks
Great organizations throughout history have acknowledged these differences. Marc Andreessen tells the great story about IBM's "Wild Ducks." He tells the story of how, for 50 years, IBM successfully enabled both the long-tail of corporate operators and the extraordinary builders of the future:
"Most of the employees [at IBM] were expected to basically follow rules. So they dressed the same, they acted the same, they did everything out of the playbook. Then they had this category of people they called Wild Ducks. They were the people who could make new things.
And they got to break all the rules and they got to invent new products. They didn't have to report back. They got to pull people off of other projects to work with them. They got budget when they needed it. They reported directly to the CEO, they got whatever they needed."
Out of 260K+ employees, IBM had eight Wild Ducks or, more formally, "IBM Fellows." Some people compared it to winning a Nobel prize. One such Duck Fellow was Andy Heller, who was the youngest IBM Fellow. As Pmarca explains it:
"Andy Heller would show up in jeans and cowboy boots and amongst an ocean of men in blue suits, white shirts, red ties and put his cowboy boots up on the table and it was fine for Andy Heller to do that. And it was not fine for you to do that. And so they very specifically identified, we have almost like an aristocratic class within our company that gets to play by different rules."
This is a critical takeaway for breakthrough innovation. IBM knew that it wasn't going to be a bureaucratic machine of 6K+ people that invented the next great product. But it was that machine that would enable them to mass produce, market, and sell the next great product. So how do you maintain this massive engine while also allowing these small sparks of creativity to breathe? IBM did that by differentiating how it treated the ordinary rank-and-file and the extraordinary Wild Ducks.
What is critical to understand about this distinction between the extraordinary and ordinary is that the differentiation is not a bad thing. It's not that every other employee at IBM was worthless. IBM couldn't have done what it did if it was just a company of 8 Wild Ducks running around taking their shoes off. You need both.
And being a part of that system in the capacity of an ordinary member of the IBM team meant a pretty good life. In 1968, the average starting salary at IBM was $15K. To put that in even more important context, the median income for a family in 1968 was $8.6K per year, so an IBM starting salary was 1.7x the median needed to live a middle-class life.
What Changed?
Fast forward to working in tech today, and the average salary is ~$104K. That's below the median income for a family in 2025 to live even just a "minimal quality of life," let alone a middle class life, which is estimated at $120K.
It's hard to compare apples-to-apples, one company vs. tech in general. But just plainly, the median income for a family in 1968 was $8.6K; that would be $80K in today's dollars. That's not too different than the median income today. But while that number hasn't changed, the cost of basically everything (adjusted for inflation) has skyrocketed: housing up 129%, child care up 20% (just since 2020), just between 1997 and 2011 healthcare costs rose 63%.
I'm not arguing for a welfare state. But when I hear visions of reindustrializing America and of pouring our souls into creating shareholder value, I feel like we're anchoring to what we perceive as a historical norm. I feel like people believe that when our ancestors built the modern world 75 years ago, everyone was grinding 80+ hours a week non-stop for 50 years, and were happy to do it. But that just wasn't the case.
Were there geniuses? Of course. Were the captains of industry boiling the ocean to find world-shaping opportunities? Most definitely. And they were probably working long, hard hours to do it.
But there used to be a middle-class that was able to enjoy a middle-class life in pursuit of middle-class ambition.
Again, I'm not talking about lazy, entitled, administrative, do-nothing pencil pushers. I'm talking about the people that made these world-shaping organizations tick: Lockheed, GE, IBM, Bell Labs, the whole lot. And they were just as supportive of the mission as anyone else at the organization. They weren't the extraordinary; the Wild Ducks. But they cared just as much about what they were building. Unfortunately, that middle-class ambition attached to a world-class mission has disappeared.
And there's data to back that up. From 1980 to 2005, we saw a massive decline in middle-skill, routine jobs, especially in manufacturing and clerical work. Instead, jobs started to bifurcate into either high-skill (e.g. professional, technical) or low-skill (service-oriented) jobs.
What's more, from 1991 to 2015, the portion of solid jobs held by people that hadn't gone to college dropped from 60% to 45%. Increasingly, you saw this idealistic role start to disappear. The high school graduate who could get a good paying job building the world around them, while making enough as a single-income home to afford a house, 2-4 kids, and a car. That, by and large, doesn't exist for people anymore.
Instead? We're left with a choice between lower-class living or lower-class missions. You can make very little money attempting to act on what you believe in, or you can make quite a lot of money doing things you don't believe in at all. To fill the gaps we feel in our souls, there has risen a generation of companies pitching missions that are, in reality, hollow. Pointless.
What happened to middle-class ambition attached to a world-class mission?
The Death of Middle Class Ambition
In an interview with Neal Brennan, Jerry Seinfeld made a salient point that I've thought about over and over again:
"What the hell happened that money became everything? It wasn't like that in the 70s. In the 70s, it was 'how cool is your job?' If your job is cooler than my job, you beat me. No one said, 'how much are you making?' In the 80s was the first time that young guys could make money fast. Never existed before. Rich guys were Andrew Carnegie; shipping, iron. You couldn't make a lot of money fast in those days. All of the sudden, all sharp (and dull) guys in the 80s could make a ton. And it has poisoned our culture to this day. I said to some kids last night; 'if your work is unfulfilling, the money will be too.’"
And Seinfeld is right; this emphasis on money has clouded what ambition used to represent. Ambition, greatness, success, vision. We have an unsettled framework for how we define success. And as more emphasis has been put on large financial outcomes, everything has fallen away in pursuit of that. To some extent, that has shaped the mindset of a lot of “young men trying to make money come out of their computer.” This is a back-and-forth I had on Twitter a few months ago with Pratyush Buddiga at Susa and Michael Dempsey at Compound
The disappearance of middle-skill jobs means that, as Pratyush describes, "The idea of 'solid middle class' life that a man in the 1970s might have aspired to basically seems like it’s disappearing and is certainly not aspirational anymore." We can't aspire to that middle-class ambition anymore. For anyone who does want to have notable ambition, the hollowing out of the middle forces them up the risk curve, as Dempsey has written about.
You're either perpetually poor or your dogmatically overworked; there's not much in between.
That has also manifested in what kids attach their north star to in life. I've written before about how kids absorb what they get exposed to. And what kids are exposed to today is outlandish, outlier, hard-to-achieve levels of wealth. 60% of people aged 18 to 42 say they're confident they'll reach their goal of retiring as a millionaire. I heard one teacher say he was increasingly saying teenagers respond to the question of "what do you want to be when you grow up" by saying they wanted to be a billionaire.
You have a 1 in 578,508 chance of becoming a billionaire. Is that the only ambition people should have? Usage of the word ‘millionaire’ peaked in 1904, shortly after the Gilded Age. Adjusting for inflation, thats ~$37M today. Usage of the word 'billionaire' is peaking now.
While people have increasingly placed their focus on wealth as an ambition worth dedicating your life to, its not to say that American's haven't sought prosperity. Becoming a billionaire may be setting unrealistic expectations for what qualifies as "ambition," but becoming a millionaire is more tenable; that's a 1 in 15 chance. And there's something about the American spirit that has always embraced those odds. There's a great quote from John Steinbeck where he said:
"Socialism never took root in America because the poor see themselves not as an exploited proletariat but as temporarily embarrassed millionaires."
So on the one hand, you have a fundamental American characteristic of focusing on eventual success (e.g. temporarily embarrassed). On the other hand, you have a more recent development where that "success" is tied explicitly to optimizing for money (get rich quick). The increasing emphasis on wealth has hollowed out the deeper value of ambition and worthy pursuits for those who are seeking high-class success. Meanwhile, it has also hollowed out the existence of low-class success.
The Great Hollowing Out
Lower-Class Success
I mentioned before that one estimate of the cost of a minimal quality of life for a family of four was $120K because of the way costs have exploded. However, the reality is that ~70% of households in the US make less than $120K a year. Many of them are living far less than a minimal quality of life.
I came across a Wall Street Journal article earlier this month about how often hardship is overwhelming American families. 10M children live in poverty; the highest number in the last 7 years. Beyond that, half of all kids live below the bottom rung of the middle class; 35M kids. And it's not getting better. Legislation passed in the Big Beautiful Bill will likely cut food aid and health coverage for millions of those kids. The WSJ piece told the story of specific families that were struggling, expressing heartbreaking sentiment like:
"It feels like I've been in survival mode my whole life. Worked and worked and worked. Worked for nothing."
When I think about the hollowing out of middle-skill labor, I was reminded of a story where even "not great jobs" used to be able to be provided within a system that could offer a great life. Coincidentally, I wrote a piece exactly a year ago for last Labor Day. In that piece, I talked about the Endicott-Johnson Shoe Company. It's a story I first heard about on a podcast in April 2015 about "The Square Deal."
It's a story I've come to love so much that I bought a book from 1935 that goes into even more detail. The TLDR is George F. Johnson ran the Endicott-Johnson Shoe Company over the course of the first half of the 20th century.
The philosophy of George F. (as he was called) was that workers should be provided a "Square Deal." Good pay, treated with respect, and provided for. Over time, Endicott-Johnson would build company towns that defied the infamous reputations of similar setups. They provided hospitals, schools, libraries, and a plentitude of merry-go-rounds for workers in their shoe factories. Endicott, NY. Johnson City, NY. Binghamton, NY. These places thrived.
George F. explained how he saw labor not as a cost center, but as an investment that was worth making:
"The trouble with most employers is that they don't see far enough ahead. If they did, if they had real vision, they'd see that they would be better off paying good wages and helping their workers to lead normal, happy lives, owning their homes and being a real part of the community. But the short-sighted employers want to make quick money, and think they can get it by paying as little as possible, exploiting their workers and the people who buy their product.”
Through the Great Depression, George F. made a commitment that they wouldn't fire a single person; and they didn't. When unionization was sweeping the US because workers had been so poorly treated, over 80% of Endicott-Johnson workers came out against unionizing because they believed George F. that the unions couldn't provide anything better than what he was offering them.
By crazy coincidence, when I was reading the story in the WSJ earlier this month about how much people were struggling, I happened to realize that the setting of the town where these struggling people lived? Endicott, NY.
The Endicott-Johnson Shoe Company eventually gave way to globalization and couldn't survive the shifting landscape around it. But during the time the company was poised for success, it took care of the people working for them.
Upper-Class Success
Contrast that with the other industrialist that set the tone for the latter half of the 20th century: Jack Welch.
I read a book this year called "The Man Who Broke Capitalism: How Jack Welch Gutted the Heartland and Crushed the Soul of Corporate America―and How to Undo His Legacy." That book lays out why Jack Welch, and what he did at GE, was the antithesis of George F. Johnson. Where George F. saw workers as human beings worth investing in and treating with dignity, Jack Welch saw workers as a cost center that should be optimized, subsidized, and cut out whenever possible.
Through a new system of shareholder capitalism, Jack Welch built a corporate empire that was optimized around short-term earnings, stock buybacks, massive M&A, opaque financial engineering, and putting the fear of God into the ordinary rank-and-file of GE. While that led to short-term attractiveness, with GE beating earnings estimates for over 80 quarters in a row, it ultimately led to the downfall and death of a 132-year old flagship of American industrialism.
What's more, Jack Welch's philosophy bred in the corporate mindset like a virus, and triggered a swarm of Welchites across the American industrial landscape, damaging the reputation and capabilities of companies like Boeing, 3M, Ford, Home Depot, Caterpillar, DuPont, Walgreens, IBM, and Intel.
While the capital allocation mentality of Jack Welch has been cried down, his mentality about how to treat workers is alive and well. These days, massive teams in tech are, as Bucco Capital puts it, "all waiting to be harvested for earnings during a downturn." And harvested they have been. You've seen companies dramatically reduce headcount.
You hear stories about people being laid off after working hard, often 60+ hours a week for 25 years, without much consideration. The tech industry is getting more cutthroat and, as some people point out, the idea of loyalty doesn't really exist among companies either.
Another common characteristic of the industrial superpowers that built the future in the 40s to 80s was the concept of a "company man." The idea that, if you worked hard for a company, you could expect to have a job forever. That doesn't exist anymore. In 2013, Boeing's CEO admitted explicitly, "We no longer think that we're hiring people forever. We understand that we are not going to get fiercely loyal people who will never leave like we did in the 1950s."
So, you see the impact of the Great Hollowing Out in both directions. On the one hand, people are struggling to make ends meet and stuck in lower-class success hoping to make just enough to survive. At the other end of the spectrum, upper-class success has become a knife fight requiring more and more from everyone with very little sense of security. The existence of middle-class ambition has all but gone away.
One important caveat is that I'm not against the idea of companies "getting healthy." Who's to say that these tech companies really needed 100K+ people to do what the company was built to do. It's not that companies should be forced to stay inefficient, just for the sake of job protectionism. But this represents a fundamental disconnect between the culture of the Great Industrial Generation and the builders of today: the Golden Age of Capitalism had worker respect built in as a feature. Today, our pursuit of greatness doesn't have those same characteristics.
Where Do We Go From Here?
I want reindustrialization. I want to build great things. I want to improve the quality of life for everyone. But as I look back at the precedent that has been set, I'm not sure we're starting from the right mindset. Hearkening back to Raskolnikov's "Extraordinary Man" theory; he believes the extraordinary person has a moral right to eradicate any normies who stand in his way. But I see greatness as so much more nuanced than that.
When I seek out the extraordinary in life, I want more than just a brainwashed army of grind warriors in pursuit of the next grand KPI. I want something more. I want a return to what greatness used to have the potential to mean: lifting the quality of life for everyone. Where is THAT greatness?
The Reality of Greatness
The pursuit of greatness is not based in universal truth. "To the world, you might be one person. But to one person, you might be the world." From raising children, to changing lives, to lifting the downtrodden, to breaking the sound barrier, to conquering the stars, to conquering our fears. Greatness is defined by those who seek it.
That isn't to say its all subjective. But to all those who seek to be a great parent? There are standards. To all those who seek to be the greatest basketball player or investor alive? There are standards.
Understanding greatness is understanding what it is to you. What it is to everyone else. And, maybe most importantly, what it is not.
Defining Your Values
First, I think its important to distinguish that the idea of a personal value system from a universal value system. People try and foist their value system on to everyone else.
"If you're not the kind of Dad I think you should be, then you're not a great Dad."
"If you don't work the way I think you should work, then you're not a great operator."
This is nonsensical. Who made you the arbiter of greatness?
In our money-drenched status-obsessed world, we often equate greatness with professional success. Try as they might, that is not the reality. As Dharmesh Shah, the co-founder and CTO of Hubspot explains, your pursuit of greatness can entail work-life balance. It can also entail breakthrough startup success. Either of those can make up your value system. The important reality though, is that you can rarely have both.
Some values are mutually exclusive. That's why it's so important to understand that when I say you must first determine your value system, you can't default to what most people think your value system should be. Because what you believe your value system is, and what others believe it should be may very well be mutually exclusive.
Understanding value is the only way that you can leverage arbitrage in your life. There is a book that explains this idea of value offsets:
"The businessman looks for partners to a transaction who do not have the same definition as he of the value of the goods exchanged, that is, who undervalue what they sell to him or overvalue what they buy from him in comparison to his own evaluation."
You may be willing to take less money for more time with your family because you value that time more than the employer requires it. You may be willing to take less cash in exchange for equity because you see the long-term potential of the asset in which you want to be an owner. Determining your value system enables radical prioritization.
How Will You Measure Your Life?
There are those whose only measure of life is the mission. We'll come back to them.
But for others, the mission is a means to an end.
In a book about Albert Einstein, you find Einstein reflecting on the life of his recently deceased friend, Michele Besso. While Einstein had lived his life measured only against the mission; the science, Besso had lived a life that, in contrast, illustrated the sacrifice Einstein had made for his "single-minded devotion to science":
"'[W]hat I most admired in Michele as a man was his ability to live many years with his wife, not only in peace but in constant accord, an endeavor in which I have lamentably failed twice.' [In other words,] Einstein had chosen the perfection of work, Besso the perfection of life."
There are many greats who have expressed a similar sentiment.
Muhammad Ali was once asked if he was going to teach his son to be a fighter, and he said no. His response illustrated Ali's perspective on why he fought and, I'll give you a hint, it was NOT because it was the fundamental driver of his life. When asked why he wouldn't let his son be a fighter, he responded, "For what?"
"I had to be a fighter. If I could have went to school and got education and could speak, say, three or four language fluently and got a good trade in life, I'd forgot all about fighting. I didn't know the value of [education]. I was a little black boy in Kentucky."
You're telling me perhaps the greatest boxer in the history of the sport would have forgotten all about boxing? That's because the mission was not the measure of his life.
A more modern example is something I wrote about a few weeks. I haven't stopped thinking about the comments from Scottie Scheffler:
"I'm not here to inspire somebody else to be the best player in the world, because what's the point, you know? This is not a fulfilling life. It's... it's fulfilling from the sense of accomplishment, but it's not fulfilling from a sense of, like, the deepest, you know, places of your heart. I'm blessed to be able to come out here and play golf. But if my golf ever started affecting my home life, or it ever affected the relationship I have with my wife or with my son, you know, that's going to be the last day that I play out here for a living."
You're telling me one of the greatest golfers to ever play the game would give it all up if it had a negative impact on his home life? That's because the mission was not the measure of his life.
You can say that's a place of privilege; once you've made it, you can wax poetic. But there are countless other greats who have clearly lived their life consumed by the mission. And we don't dismiss their dogmatic commitment to the craft as the luxury of being able to keep at it.
Muhammad Ali and Scottie Scheffler seem to focus the measure of their lives on a fundamental life; family, education, a good trade.
In some cases, people look for balance. As Josh Kushner puts it, there is an opportunity to measure your life in terms of balancing the mission at home and the mission at work:
For others, it can be the pursuit of something that drives them and determines their value system.
Joy In The Journey
Something that Signull, on Twitter, wrote about is how "people chase metrics because they’re scared of the silence. If you don’t know what matters, you optimize for what’s easy to measure. money. title. reach. growth. prestige." Instead, they focus on "fun." Not lazy fun, but "real, bone deep fun." Fun is often in the journey, not the destination.
Others have pointed out that working towards a goal represents steps to success. Even when you fall short, it's not failure. Success is, in the words of Walt Disney, the ability to "keep moving forward."
In fact, one study of 70K people found that "those who obsess about being the best have much worse outcomes than those who are focused on being the best at getting better, and who define success on their own terms."
Be Cringe
The concept of defining success on your terms is very similar to defining your own values, but its even more ongoing than that. Being willing to define success for yourself is being committed to the idea that, once you've determined your values, you're willing to stick to them even if society balks at that decision.
Speaking of another work from Fyodor Dostoevsky, in The Brothers Karmazov, he wrote that "almost all capable people are terribly afraid of being ridiculous, and are miserable because of it.” Someone else interpreted that as "his way of telling you to follow your heart, to be cringe and free."
Sometimes we believe that we know what is expected of us. But we haven't stopped to unpack whether we expect it of ourselves, or if that expectation has been thrust upon us.
I'm reminded of an exceptional exchange between Uncle Iroh and Prince Zuko in Avatar: The Last Airbender.
Frustrated by his own failings, Zuko proclaims: "I know my own destiny, Uncle."
Iroh claps back: "Is it your own destiny? Or a destiny someone else has tried to force on you? It's time for you to look inward, and begin asking yourself the big questions. 'Who are you? And what do YOU want?'"
When Zuko chooses to act against the destiny that he felt burdened by, he later falls ill. Iroh explains that his actions were "in such conflict with your image of yourself, that you are now at war within your own mind and body."
In some cases, people are most unwilling to be cringe in front of that "image of themselves." As Carl Jung said:
“People will do anything, no matter how absurd, in order to avoid facing their own souls. One does not become enlightened by imagining figures of light, but by making the darkness conscious."
Whether you are forced to embrace the cringe in front of the expectations of others, or the expectations you have of yourself, your true value system will only be on display once you embrace that discomfort.
Putting Your Own Dent In The Universe
One fundamental value system may be an emphasis on putting a dent in the universe, even if it means you're not going to own the entire universe. The biggest champion of this worldview is David Heinemeier Hansson (aka DHH), the founder of Basecamp (among several other companies). He's been a constant critic for over a decade of the domination worldview that is common among founders and VCs. As he wrote in 2015:
"Part of the problem seems to be that nobody these days is content to merely put their dent in the universe. No, they have to fucking own the universe. It’s not enough to be in the market, they have to dominate it. It’s not enough to serve customers, they have to capture them."
There are lots of people who are quick to criticize because DHH and his companies are not the multi-billion dollar outcomes that Silicon Valley is trained to point at after their blinders are firmly affixed to their faces. But the reality is that DHH has "made outstanding amounts of money and pays his employees super well and provides an amazing balanced Life for people to pursue leisurely activities of their choice."
DHH, and his co-founder Jason Fried, consistently rag on the Silicon Valley Grind Porn like this:
So in some cases, your value system may lead you to optimize for putting your dent in the universe rather than completely owning it. And that's okay too.
The Courage To Be Normal
Your value system may enable you to be great, while ensuring that family or faith comes first. Your value system may empower you to live for yourself, rather than for the performative satisfaction of others. But ultimately, there is the possibility that your value system will not lead to "greatness" in the eyes of the rest of the world. Are you okay with that?
I read another book this year called The Courage To Be Disliked. In it, there is a conversation between a young man and a philosopher who discusses the ideas behind Adlerian Philosophy. One section, in particular, struck me, called The Courage To Be Normal:
"PHILOSOPHER: Why is it necessary to be special? Probably because one cannot accept one’s normal self. And it is precisely for this reason that when being especially good becomes a lost cause, one makes the huge leap to being especially bad—the opposite extreme. But is being normal, being ordinary, really such a bad thing? Is it something inferior? Or, in truth, isn’t everybody normal? It is necessary to think this through to its logical conclusion.
YOUTH: So are you saying that I should be normal?
PHILOSOPHER: Self-acceptance is the vital first step. If you are able to possess the courage to be normal, your way of looking at the world will change dramatically. You are probably rejecting normality because you equate being normal with being incapable. Being normal is not being incapable. One does not need to flaunt one’s superiority.
YOUTH: Look, accepting what you call “normal” would lead to me having to affirm my idle self! It would just be saying, “This is all I am capable of and that’s fine.” I refuse to accept such an idle way of life. Do you think that Napoleon or Alexander the Great or Einstein or Martin Luther King accepted “normal”? And how about Socrates and Plato? Not a chance! More than likely, they all lived their lives while carrying the torch of a great ideal or objective. Another Napoleon could never emerge with your line of reasoning. You are trying to rid the world of geniuses!
PHILOSOPHER: So what you are saying is that one needs lofty goals in life.
YOUTH: But that’s obvious! “The courage to be normal”—what truly dreadful words.
There are those Greats of History again. Napoleon. Alexander The Great. Raskolnikov is basking in the recognition of these grand exceptions.
But the fundamental conclusion of your value system may be the need to emphasize self-acceptance over any outward achievement. Not everyone will come to that conclusion but, in line with defining your own value system, that may be the right conclusion for you.
Identifying Mission
We've talked about those for whom the mission is a means to an end.
Now I want to return to those whose only measure of life is the mission.
The Extraordinary Few that Raskolnikov points to are the geniuses that shape the world around them. While I balk at the logical extreme to which he takes their moral exceptionalism, the reality of their existence is undeniable. There truly are Wild Ducks who are hell bent on forming humanity in pursuit of progress. And that's not a bad thing.
Emotional Rawness
In fact, those who are consumed by a mission will experience a lower quality of life if they do not pursue that mission. Yet another line from Dostoevsky comes to mind:
"You sensed that you should be following a different path, a more ambitious one, you felt that you were destined for other things but you had no idea how to achieve them and in your misery you began to hate everything around you."
Augustus Doricko has described those who aspire to greatness as getting "mentally and spiritually obliterated daily. They're not without joy, wisdom, or purpose, but constantly raw."
Henry David Thoreau has described "the price of anything [as] the amount of life you exchange for it." There is that rawness that you're willing to give up.
The calming call of the pursuit of greatness is what G.K. Chesterton describes as the strength demand of those who would seek to change the world:
“No one doubts that an ordinary man can get on with this world: but we demand not strength enough to get on with it, but strength enough to get it on. Can he hate it enough to change it, and yet love it enough to think it worth changing? Can he look up at its colossal good without once feeling acquiescence? Can he look up at its colossal evil without once feeling despair? Can he, in short, be at once not only a pessimist and an optimist, but a fanatical pessimist and a fanatical optimist? Is he enough of a pagan to die for the world, and enough of a Christian to die to it? In this combination, I maintain, it is the rational optimist who fails, the irrational optimist who succeeds. He is ready to smash the whole universe for the sake of itself.”
That fanatical pessimism and fanatical optimism is a matter of obsession. As Adam Sandler has said, "obsession will beat talent every time." When people develop a workaholic mentality, it is a representation of that obsession.
These would-be world benders may feel that feeling. But to where do they direct it? Towards the quest.
The Quest
I have said over and over again that the essay, Choose Good Quests, by Trae Stephens and Markie Wagner is one of the most important essays you may ever read. Understanding your quest is a fundamental part of pursuing your mission. In the words of Dylan O'Sullivan: "You're not depressed, you need a quest." Understanding your quests focuses your mind. A wandering mind is an unhappy mind; a quest is a focusing function.
Stating that quest is a critical element of pursuing it. This past year, Timothee Chalamet won a SAG award and in his acceptance speech, he articulated his quest:
"I know we're in a subjective business, but the truth is I'm really in pursuit of greatness. I know people don't usually talk like that, but I want to be one of the greats. I'm inspired by the greats. I'm inspired by the greats here tonight. I'm as inspired by Daniel Day Lewis, Marlon Brando, and Viola Davis as I am by Michael Jordan and Michael Phelps, and I want to be up there."
Some people criticized Chalamet, saying "that should have stayed in your journal. Those are inside thoughts. Be humble!" But his pursuit of greatness is an example of that raw emotion that consumes those who, themselves, have been consumed by the pursuit of greatness. Similar to the value system of finding joy in the journey, the danger is that the Quest may end up consuming your everything.
The danger of the all-consuming mission is if it subsumes everything about you. The Quest is the mechanism through which you focus your mind. But the Mission is the Why. Why do you do what you do? What do you hope to accomplish? Some would say making the world a better place. But what does that entail?
What Makes You Think You Can Change The World?
I saw a rabbit hole around making the world a better place over the course of a series of retweets.
When Samantha Power was fired from USAID, she claimed that the people working for the organization "wanted to make the world a better place." Someone responded to that saying that "I cannot stand people who want to make the world a better place." That person believed that such a statement indicates the speaker is either a fool ("I cannot even make myself a better person") or an expression of hubris ("a philanthropic mask for the will to power")
Someone else's response quoted Curtis Yarvin as saying that when a young college graduate says "I want to make the world a better place" or "I want to have impact" what he really means is "I want power."
The final tweet that exposed me to this whole thread brought it all together:
"In a nutshell, everyone leaving university subconsciously decides if they want power, money, fame, or knowledge. You may want all four, but three are means and one is an end."
A few months later, I saw a tweet from Ahmed Shubber, the founder of Lumina, expressing the same sentiment:
Fame, knowledge, money. All means to the end of power. But Ahmed brings it full circle. "I want the power to do good in the world." Which brings us, again, to the moral reality that it is not bad to work hard. It is not bad to be single-mindedly fueled by a mission. It is not bad to want power. The pursuit of greatness is inherently a pursuit of power. But the overarching value system of why do you do what you do? In pursuit of what outcomes? That is the fundamental reality of true greatness.
Expecting Commitment By Default?
For some, a belief in the reality of greatness leads them to believe that greatness is everywhere. That every mission is worth dedicating all of your life force to. And that everyone should be willing to dedicate themselves to grind levels of work.
There was a tweet that blew up recently of an early stage CEO dragging a candidate because they passed on a job offer, saying that they "value work life balance."
For some, this was quintessential mediocrity. "At 22, work life balance means you're lazy."
The founder's company is "Tinder for Jobs." So some criticized the call to a mission that seems "meaningless."
For others, this mentality from the founder was indicative of someone who had never really had a job before.
One of the responses that I thought was most salient (and, based on the likes, so did much of Twitter), touched on the differentiation of people.
"Your life should be the company's mission." As if its default true. Regardless of the mission, or the role, or the ownership. Just because greatness exists does not mean YOU are great. Or the mission that you pursue is worthy of the life force of someone else. It seems like a generation of builders who have had the definitions of what greatness really means warped around a sense of money and generic "mission," making them incapable of differentiating between a mission worth dedicating your life to.
Spor, an account on Twitter, made the point that work-life balance is a myth. But they don't come to the same conclusion that "it's a myth, therefore just work harder!" Instead, they embrace the nuance:
"Life is totalizing, it is everything, it is all you have. work is a part of life. you cannot balance a part with the whole. when people sneer at “work-life balance” it is because they want your work to become your life. when others clamor for “work-life balance” it is usually because they want to minimize the part of their life that is work. the real balance, as it has always been, is to find a middle ground where work is both an important + enjoyable part of life, but not the entire thing. For each instance, one should just ask themselves what it’s worth. If you want to do something truly great, you are probably going to have to make work your life. If you are 22, then this means trading your precious youth for greatness. Are you willing to take this deal? some will say yes, others will say no - i don’t judge either way, people have different values and always will."
I loved another response to this idea of trading something for greatness: "In my experience, 99% of the people offering to take my youth away in exchange for greatness had no greatness to offer."
What Is It To Be Extraordinary?
I'll say it again, just to be sure I'm not misunderstood. Greatness exists. Extraordinary people truly do bend the world to their will. The Wild Ducks of old have shaped the arch of time and they will continue to do so. But they are rare. As Marc Andreessen put it:
"The sheer number of people in the world who are capable of doing new things is just a very small set of people. You’re not going to have a hundred of them in a company…you’re going to have 3, 8, or 10, maybe."
As we return to the story of Crime & Punishment, we explore the journey that Raskolnikov's beliefs take him on. Convinced of his own extraordinary nature, he murders a woman believing he has "the moral right" to remove her. But soon after, racked with guilt, he begins to question his own worldview. Rather than a broad binary bifurcation of mankind into the ordinary and the extraordinary, Raskolnikov comes to the conclusion that life is actually more about one critical universality:
"All have sinned, and come short of the glory of God."
We are all sinners. We are all weak. We will all fail. No matter the person, the technical ability, the net worth, or the passion of purpose. We are all fallen, sinful, broken creatures.
As much as G.K. Chesterton would seek to measure a man based on whether he "can hate [the world] enough to change it, and yet love it enough to think it worth changing," he recognizes that circumnavigating the globe, either physically or spiritually, pales in comparison to acknowledging one's fallen state.
"Being good is an adventure far more violent and daring than sailing round the world."
In terms of the pursuit of power, I'm reminded of a scripture that places priorities in perspective:
"I seek not for power, but to pull it down. I seek not for honor of the world, but for the glory of my God, and the freedom and welfare of my country."
We are all broken. But we all have infinite, eternal potential. We can seek for power, riches, and glory, but ultimately we seek in vain those things that moths can rust and thieves can break through and steal. No, it's not the honor of the world that is forever lasting. It is the glory of God.
In Crime & Punishment, Raskolnikov comes to the very Russian conclusion that he can either end his suffering by ending his life, or give up his suffering by turning to Jesus Christ. He chooses the latter.
In the pursuit of answering the question: "What is an extraordinary man?" I'm met with the conclusion that to be extraordinary is to seek out the glory of God. The glory of God is the benefit of other people.
If you are consumed by a company "mission" for the sake of having a mission, then you have missed the mark. If you feel entitled to the life force of those around you because you put up your hand and started a company, you are not a good steward of the life force of others.
But if you seek to do good. If you seek to make the world better. If you seek to lift up the broken hearted. If you seek to shape the world around you so that others who sit upon that world may sit a little higher, then you have found vision. The mission that you pursue will be worthy of your time and eternal potential.
And don't let anyone tell you that their value system is the only appropriate bar for measuring that mission. Whether it is raising a family, lifting up the sorrowful, demonstrating kindness, or transforming the way the world works with technology. It's all a function of who you really are and what you really want.
*Side Note: Crime & Punishment implies the existence of extraordinary people, men and women, but "man" is in the quote I focused on and how its in my head, so the piece is gendered.
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I’ve truly enjoyed this read and have shared it with many. thank you for reminding us what’s important in life.
Love this. Dostoevsky is as modern as he always will be. Thank you for writing this. This made a lot of sense to me.