Missionaries vs Mercenaries

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The biggest creators are just like the biggest companies: Mission-driven.

They win, not by prioritising financial gain, but by obsessing over craft, passion, and mission.

Creators are entrepreneurs. Our content the product. And the audience, our users.

It is this process Francis describes that every entrepreneur, not just creators, must take: Create a great product → Grow their user base → Sell/monetise it.

And just like any business, the better your product, the easier it is to monetise it. For creators, this means that the better their content, the easier building a business around it becomes.

I recently had a chat with Francis, which inspired today’s topic. The spectrum of Missionary and Mercenary creators.

Here are the 3 lessons you can steal today:

There's a lot to unpack here. So let's get into it.

A lot of creators today start with a simple goal: make money.

And the way to get there? Get as many views as possible.

But there’s an inherent problem with this approach: it’s an unwinnable game.

How much attention is enough?

Think about it, if you set a goal of 1B views and you hit it - what now? Would you actually be satisfied? Probably for a bit. But then what? Do you just stop creating? Also, probably not. So you set a goal of 10B.

And you’ve just restarted the cycle.

It can be views, subscribers, money. It’s all the same. To use the title of Andrew Wilkinson’s new book, it’s Never Enough. The goalposts will always just increase. Chasing a number that means “success” is what you aimed for, but when you’re at that number, it becomes your new normal. So you set a higher number. Until that becomes your new normal.

You end up always chasing external metrics that can never truly satisfy you. Because your baseline changes.

Mercenary creators are also more likely to burn out. They become prisoners to what's working right now:

No experiments. No innovation. A sea of sameness.

The constant thought of if I copy what’s winning, I’ll win. But let’s would challenge that.

If you don’t do experiments and if you don’t take risks, you will probably raise your view floor. It will be less likely for a new video concept to completely fail.

But you will be limited.

You will never break the glass ceiling above you and enter that top echelon of creator, you will never be among the Mr Beasts, Alex Hormozis, and Steven Bartletts of the creator world. You will be stuck in mediocrity.

And how long can mediocrity be sustained?

Think about the most famous companies you know. Did they just copy what someone else was winning with? Or did they innovate, creating something brand new?

All of these are now seen as given, as obvious. For those who weren’t there before them, they have probably never even questioned them.

On the other hand, there have been millions of people who’ve found success in not “re-inventing the wheel”. But it’s capped, and often fleeting. It is a different game. A game you CAN find success in, but is it truly winnable?

Without a deeper mission, you build no defensibility. No moat. No reason for people to choose you over the next creator doing the exact same thing.

Every creator hits rough patches:

Seth Godin calls this "The Dip", the challenging period between starting and succeeding.

Here's the crucial difference: Missionaries survive the dip. Mercenaries often quit.

When your only motivations are external rewards (money, attention, subscribers), and those rewards disappear, so does your motivation.

But when you're driven by something deeper. A mission you hold dear. A pursuit of excellence in your craft. You push through because the work itself matters to you. The work in and of itself is the reward.

This leads to a selection bias: More missionaries make it past the early struggles, so there are more of them operating at the top levels.

Here's where it gets interesting: both sides eventually start to look like the other.

But with one important caveat. This convergence heavily skews to the missionary side. Here’s why:

Mission-driven creators quickly realise they need money and systems to not only scale their impact and craft, but to make it sustainable.

Having money solves money problems. Which frees you, as the creator, to focus on creating. You can give more mental capacity to the mission and craft. So attention, money, and subscribers all become important when you realise that they can scale your craft.

The mercenary on the other hand, I believe does not have to discover mission. Unless they want to reach the top of the mountain.

Back to what we said earlier, content is the product. The mercenaries who win realise this and adjust to focus on the craft of content itself.

The better the content → the more attention → the more subscribers → the more money.

I think looking at it from this perspective is important. Because it helps distinguish why there are multiple ways to succeed. Being a creator is not linear. It is multi-faceted and nuanced. And different types of creators excel at different parts of the equation:

But as you start to look up the subscriber count, these different types of creators start to look the same:

Look at the world’s biggest creators: James Clear, MrBeast, Tim Ferriss, Steven Bartlett, Mel Robbins, Alex Hormozi, Codie Sanchez…

They are all building movements around their missions. Codie Sanchez even has sayings she purposefully tests to create a community movement, for example: “Main Street over Wall Street.”

Why does it look like this? I think there are three key reasons why the very (couldn’t bring myself to say tippy) top is dominated by missionaries:

Hiring is arguably the hardest, but most important part of building a business. And success is often at the sword of who you hire.

So this is where the first advantage comes for missionaries. Selling a mission is much more compelling than selling a view count or a bank balance. It makes both talent attraction easier and team turnover lower.

But there’s also another critical distinction here:

Missionaries can attract other missionaries, as well as mercenaries (who see this as a step to more), to come and achieve their mission with them.

But mercenaries are not able to attract missionaries to join them.

So the pool of talent is immediately smaller and filled with more transactional and higher-churning talent. Talent that will leave you for a higher payday. It is a race to the bottom.

John Doerr (legendary VC) has this quote "teams of missionaries, not mercenaries.” He's recognising this fundamental truth: missionaries are focused on the end user (the viewer in this case), and this is ultimately what leads to higher level of success.

There’s this great Jeff Bezos quote that, to me, highlights why Amazon has been a generation-defining company:

This can be likened to creating.

Are you creating to make more money per viewer? Or are you creating to give the viewer more value per unit of consumption?

There’s a crucial difference in how each type defines "winning":

Mercenaries: Winning = external metrics (more money, more attention, more fame)

Missionaries: Winning = pursuing the mission (the craft, the outcome for viewers)

One is inherently a “never enough” game (as we discussed above). The other is a game of craft and process. One that the pursuit itself is the reward. And if the pursuit itself is the reward. You are:

Missionaries don't just make content. They create categories:

The pattern: They differentiate by having something unique to say, not by following “what works”. Mercenaries, by definition, follow proven formulas. They optimise existing categories rather than creating new ones.

The difference is whether you're building something sustainable enough to last that decade.

You can make money as a mercenary. You can be successful. Both paths can work. But those who truly win, are those who find joy and success in the act of creating itself.

Some of my favorite content Francis has written/recorded for Creator Spotlight (this was like choosing a favourite child):

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