Doing important work
Exploring purpose and impact with how most of society spends time.
Doing important work
Before they began, the group codified a set of organizing principles, dubbed the “Pirate Paradigm,” that would dictate how they worked together:
- Don’t wait to be told to do something; figure it out for yourself
- Challenge everything, and steel yourself for the inevitable cynicism, opposition, rumors, false reporting, innuendos, and slander
- Break the
How NASA's Pirate Paradigm Challenged The Status Quo — NOBL
NASA Pirate Paradigm
“I know a lot of people who make things who don’t stand proudly by their stuff, I don’t know if they’re too cool or they don’t want to look thirsty, but they’ll put a song out once on their stories — and that’s it.
You went through something. You figured something out in a structured format. You recorded it. Not just one take. Parts and parts. You
Every time you talk to someone, you should be asking at least one question which has the potential to destroy your currently imagined business.
Rob Fitzpatrick • The Mom Test: How to talk to customers & learn if your business is a good idea when everyone is lying to you
On people who are INTO it:
Have you ever had the experience, Jerry asks, where you look at something and go, ‘Wow, whoever made that—they were INTO it!’? “That’s what I care about. That’s all I care about. I don’t care about traits or techniques, I don’t care what you do or how you do it—I just want to see people and talk to people and be around
... See moreGrowing up, I thought making $100,000 a year made someone rich. When I made that amount for the first time at 27, I felt like I had more than I could ever need. Yet I opted into an identity that didn’t accept such complacency. Everyone around me was always moving forward towards the next achievement.
Paul Millerd • The Pathless Path: Imagining a New Story For Work and Life
“Escape competition through authenticity.” Basically, when you’re competing with people, it’s because you’re copying them.
Tim Ferriss • The Almanack of Naval Ravikant: A Guide to Wealth and Happiness
We’re good at learning by tinkering—which is fortunate, because we’re terrible at getting things right the first time.
Bent Flyvbjerg • How Big Things Get Done: The Surprising Factors That Determine the Fate of Every Project, from Home Renovations to Space Exploration and Everything In Between
Incentives are the strongest force in the world. They explain why good people do awful things, why smart people do stupid things, and why ordinary people do amazing things. Nearly everyone underestimates how much their own beliefs and actions are influenced by their incentives, many of which are designed to fulfill someone else’s goals.
Morgan Housel • Big Beliefs
“Beyond the very extreme of fatigue and distress, we may find amounts of ease and power we never dreamed ourselves to own; sources of strength never taxed at all because we never push through the obstruction.”