The War Worth Fighting

Everyone’s optimizing the wrong variable.

The leadership industry — and yes, it’s an industry — has spent decades telling you that great teams come from great compensation, great perks, great management frameworks. Transparent salary bands. Quarterly offsites. The right OKR cadence. And sure, those things matter the way oxygen matters. You’ll die without them, but nobody ever climbed Everest because the oxygen was good.

The leaders who get people to do genuinely impossible things don’t win on comp. They win on meaning.

Say what you want about Elon Musk — and there’s plenty to say — but the man understands something most founders never figure out. He doesn’t walk into SpaceX and say “let’s build rockets.” He says “let’s make humanity multiplanetary.” He doesn’t pitch Tesla as a car company. He says “we’re going to harness the power of that giant thermonuclear reactor in the sky.” Same work. Same hours. Same brutal difficulty. Completely different frame.

And the frame is everything.

When someone believes they’re building rockets, they go home at 6. When someone believes they’re making humanity a multiplanetary species, they sleep under their desk and thank you for the opportunity. That’s not exploitation — that’s the difference between a job and a mission. People don’t burn out from hard work. They burn out from hard work that doesn’t mean anything.

I’ve seen this from both sides. I’ve managed teams grinding through the unglamorous reality of restaurant delivery — routing algorithms, driver ops, the deeply unsexy work of getting someone’s pad thai from A to B. The teams that thrived weren’t the ones with the best comp packages. They were the ones who understood that every order delivered was a family’s dinner, a late-night worker’s only real meal, a small restaurant staying alive. Same work. Different story.

Purpose isn’t soft. It’s the hardest kind of engineering — you have to architect it into the mission from day one, not bolt it on later with a values poster and a pizza party. It’s a design problem. What is this company actually for? Not what does it do. What does it mean? If you can’t answer that in one sentence that makes someone’s pulse quicken, you haven’t found it yet.

And here’s what most leaders miss: this scales down. You don’t need to be colonizing Mars. A five-person startup can have a mission that makes people run through walls. “We’re making it so no small business owner has to choose between growth and sleep.” “We’re building the thing that gives people their evenings back.” The scale of the mission doesn’t matter. The authenticity of it does. People can smell manufactured purpose from orbit.

The conventional playbook says retain talent with golden handcuffs — vest them in, make leaving expensive. But golden handcuffs make prisoners, not warriors. The leader who needs equity cliffs to keep people around has already lost. The leader who gives people a war worth fighting can’t get rid of them.

Comp gets people in the door. Culture keeps them comfortable. But purpose — real, felt, specific purpose — is what makes someone look at an impossible problem and say “yeah, I’ll figure it out.”

The best people don’t want a job. They want a war worth fighting.

Give them one.