Life lessons…Glean what you will.

I don’t care about your resume. I care what you did when the plan failed and nobody was coming to save you.

Street fighters had been in real violence with no rules. Farm boys had fixed broken equipment with no manual. College athletes had performed with crowds watching and everything on the line. None of these backgrounds guaranteed success. But they all proved someone had faced chaos and found a way through it.

Skills are teachable. Character isn’t. You can teach someone to shoot. You can’t teach them to stay calm when they’re being shot at.

Homogeneous teams are predictable but fragile. When everyone solves problems the same way, nobody has alternatives when that approach fails. The Annapolis graduate thinks systematically. The Brooklyn street fighter thinks opportunistically. The farm boy understands mechanical systems intuitively. The college athlete reads performance under pressure.

Put them together and you get cognitive diversity that can’t be trained. Each one sees solutions the others miss. Each one catches blind spots the others have.

I watch how men handle failure. I don’t care if you succeeded at the task. I care how you responded when you didn’t. Did you make excuses? Blame others? Quit? Or did you analyze what went wrong and try something different?

The men who stay calm, make decisions, and keep functioning under pressure are the ones I want. They don’t panic when things go wrong. The street fighter lost fights and learned from them. The farm boy had equipment fail during harvest and improvised. The athlete had games fall apart and adjusted.

They make decisions with incomplete information. They take responsibility for outcomes. None of them came from backgrounds where you could blame the system. If you lost the fight, you lost. If the crop failed, you failed. If you missed the shot, you missed it. That builds a different kind of man.

When things go wrong, most people wait for instructions. The men I want start moving. The street fighter doesn’t wait to figure out the optimal punch. He throws what’s available. The farm boy doesn’t wait for the right tool. He uses what he has. Doing something imperfect beats doing nothing perfectly. That’s not recklessness. That’s understanding that reality punishes hesitation harder than it punishes mistakes.

Early Bitcoin had the same accidental selection. Cryptographers understood the tech. Economists understood the theory. Libertarians understood the politics. Entrepreneurs understood execution. None of them agreed on everything. But they all saw a truth that contradicted consensus and acted on it anyway.

A team of just cryptographers would have built something technically perfect that nobody used. A team of just economists would have theorized forever. The diversity created a system robust enough to survive because each perspective caught what the others missed.

The same thing is happening on Nostr. Bitcoin maximalists ensure it stays decentralized. Privacy advocates ensure it stays secure. Developers ensure it’s usable. Content creators ensure there’s a reason to use it. They don’t all agree on the best approach. They don’t all share the same values. But they all understand that uncensorable communication matters enough to build it without guaranteed outcomes.

Don’t hire for credentials. Hire for character under pressure. The person with the perfect resume has proven they can succeed in structured environments. You need people who can succeed when the structure breaks. Test how people handle failure, not success. Anyone can look good when things are going well. Build teams with diverse backgrounds but unified character. They don’t need to agree on methods. They need to agree on mission.