The Lesson I Kept Missing
For years I tried to bring people into the mission by selling them on the mission itself. The cause. The vision. The shape of the world I want us to build. Sometimes it worked. More often it bounced off, and I walked away confused about why something clearly good could not get the backing it deserved.
The insight I finally internalized is embarrassingly simple: people are extremely selfish, and that is fine. Every real partnership, every real donation, every real yes I have ever gotten was someone's self-interest lining up with my work. Once I stopped being squeamish about that, the whole picture got clearer.
Aligned Is the Modifier That Matters
The cynical version of this is "use people." The mature version is aligned self-interest. Look for the overlap between their selfish yes and your mission. Build the deal there. Everyone wins on purpose.
This only works when values are aligned underneath. Pure extractive selfishness with a values-misaligned partner ends with you holding the bag. Selfishness with a values-aligned partner ends with both sides compounding off each other. The alignment is what turns self-interest into fuel instead of friction.
Two Recent Cases
A global VC partnership. A venture firm with offices in dozens of cities is letting us host workshops in their space. From the outside it looks like they are doing us a favor. They are not. We are creating net new deal flow for them: high-conviction operators who walk into their offices and would not have surfaced through any other channel. Their selfish interest is the deal flow. Our selfish interest is the free venues in every city we want to teach in. Both sides leave richer than they came in.
A school donation. A donor with kids in a high-status private school approached us about turning that school into a flagship for the kind of formation we believe in. His selfish interest is that his own kids grow up in the best environment possible. Our selfish interest is that the funding lets us build a framework we can then open-source to every other school in the country. Both sides selfish. Both sides pulling in the same direction. That is the deal.
These are the shape of every real partnership.
Stop Pitching the Mission Cold
The failure mode I had for years was pitching the mission in its own terms and waiting for people to feel what I felt. They almost never did, because they were busy being themselves. Their kids, their job, their quarter, their reputation, their anxiety about Q3. The mission was my context, not theirs. Expecting them to walk into my context for free is the amateur move.
The professional move is to walk into their context first. Ask what they want. Find where your work actually serves them. Then, and only then, propose the deal where both sides get something.
The Values Check
Aligned self-interest is only useful when the values underneath are aligned. Before building a deal around someone's self-interest, run the check.
- Do they treat people well when it costs them?
- Is the thing they want compatible with what we are trying to build, or are they hoping to co-opt?
- Would I trust them with the keys to something that matters to me?
If yes, go ahead and wire the selfish incentives tight. The partnership will compound. If no, the selfish yes you closed is a trap door. Back out.
This is where heartshare earns its keep at the partnership level. The character question sits upstream of the incentive question. Without it, aligned self-interest becomes the same extractive game everyone else is playing. With it, aligned self-interest becomes the mechanism by which a mission actually compounds.
Selfish on the Reading Side, Too
The same logic holds in writing. Your reader cares about themselves, their family, their business. See write as if the reader is selfish. Partnership is the three-dimensional version of the same discipline: your partner cares about their world, not your mission. Walk into their world first.
The Shift
Once this clicks, the world stops feeling like a place where you have to convert people to your cause and starts feeling like a place where you find the people whose cause already overlaps with yours and build the deal there.
Every durable institution, every scaled movement, every functional partnership runs on this. The sooner you stop being ashamed of it, the sooner you can put it to work.
People are selfish. Values-aligned selfishness is how partnerships get built, donations get made, and movements scale. Stop pitching the mission cold. Find the overlap and wire the incentives.