Don’t Join the Navy, Be a Pirate

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Dear Daughters,

As you’ve begun to learn in school, modern humans are scientifically referred to as homo sapiens. Part of what makes humans extraordinary is our advanced cognitive skills which have allowed us to create complex social structures - particularly social norms - over thousands of years. And as we’ve evolved, we’ve become hardwired to want to belong to the norms of society.

Which is fine, expect when you want to make real breakthroughs in your life and be that 1%.

A great way to unpack this dichotomy is by sharing a story about Steve Jobs.

It was January, 1983. Jobs needed to motivate the Macintosh team at Apple to create something the world had never seen before. He decided to gather his team at an off-site in Carmel (a place you love to visit). The group was in the midst of developing the personal computer, and some employees felt the project was losing its scrappy spirit. So Jobs offered a slogan to motivate them: “It’s better to be a pirate than join the navy.”

Jobs wasn’t trying to make them lawless and unruly. He was trying to make them unafraid of following the social norms that other companies traditionally followed (e.g. relying on bureaucracy and politics). He knew that following norms would prevent the boldness, creativity and risk-taking that was needed to get the job done. In his mind, needing to belong symbolized the navy, not having that need symbolized a pirate.

His rouse must have worked, because one year later, in January 1984, Apple launched the first commercially successful personal computer in history, featuring the mouse and the graphical user interface.

You and I and every human on this planet are hardwired to seek the norm because the norm makes us feel like we belong. That feeling of belonging - especially to family or a peer group - is like a drug. It makes us feel safe, which is what our primitive brain craves.

Yet at the same time, the need to feel like we belong keeps us playing safe too, preventing us from true personal growth.

In order to bust through all the limiting thoughts in our minds about what we’re capable of and unleash the full scope of our energies and creativity, we have to care less about belonging. We have to be more pirate, less navy.

This doesn’t mean you have to ditch friends, affiliations or above all, family. It just means that you have to be unafraid of not being liked or accepted by them all the time. It means you have to be comfortable with not doing what everyone else is doing. It means you have to get comfortable taking socially unacceptable routes at times. It means you have to get comfortable with some of your peers or colleagues questioning your moves and ideas. It means you have to get comfortable questioning the cues that teachers or professors or friends or society passively offer you.

The more you feel a need to belong, the less you’re able to think independently and the more you lose your sense of self.

Only authentic, independent thought — what poet and philosopher Ralph Waldo Emerson referred to as “self-reliance” — can enable glorious personal (and professional) expansion.

By feeling scared to do what other people who you feel you belong to won’t do, you build a mental wall for yourself, brick by brick. You might still be able to obtain prestigious titles and enviable paychecks, but they’ll pale in comparison to what you’re really capable of.

Of course, this doesn’t mean you have to be some lone wolf. On the contrary, that’s not a smart course to take. What it does mean is learning to accept, work with and love people who might not agree with you while relentlessly looking for others who mesh with your independent, pirate-like thought.

You don’t need many people who will support you being a pirate. One or two is enough.

I will support you being a pirate and will never stop doing that. There are others in the world who will enjoy doing the same. I know you’ll find them.

Love, Mom

p.s. Job’s slogan was so effective, that they created a logo with a skull and cross bones to signify their pirate-mindset affinity. On the company’s 40th anniversary in 2016, the pirate flag?flew proudly?over its Cupertino headquarters.

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