Legend has it Ernest Shackleton ran this ad to recruit crew for his 1914 attempt to cross Antarctica:
Over 5,000 people applied.
I’m recruiting for a similarly hazardous journey, so figured I’d borrow Shackleton’s tactic:
Why I’m Recruiting
Shackleton believed crossing Antarctica was possible because, five years earlier, he’d turned back only 97 miles short of the South Pole.
Similarly, I believe it’s possible to decode what makes a person different and design their job of a lifetime around it, because I’ve gotten dangerously close myself.
My first attempt was in 2024. Loaded with a decade of life logs, reams of self-assessments, my blog archive, and a shelf of psychological research, and armed with Claude’s LLM powers, I homed in on my “superpower.”
An exciting early discovery! But could I help others discover the same for themselves?
I recruited a handful of guinea pigs to test my approach on them. One used it as a spark to leave consulting and lead strategy at a sports brand. But the rest didn’t do much different with the insights I presented to them.
Undaunted, I recruited another handful of guinea pigs to explore further. I interviewed them, assessed them, and met with them regularly for months. Unmistakable patterns emerged in what made each of them different. The self-mapping was getting clearer and clearer! The question became what to do about it. I failed to help them answer that. A couple founded exciting new ventures. The others wandered off, never to be heard from (by me) again.
But I kept going. More guinea pigs. More experiments. More research. More refinement to my methods. More discoveries. More failures.
My biggest failure was doing too much of the figuring-out myself. I’d done so much decoding, discovering, and mapping what made each guinea pig different that I was extremely confident in what they were capable of. But they weren’t nearly as convinced. Definitely not enough to use as a basis for making risky moves.
Even so, I had seen enough. I know my dream of decoding people’s differences is as achievable as crossing the Antarctic.
So I endure.
The Next Endeavor
I have endured because I’m my own guinea pig. I’ve done the work discovering what makes me different. This gives me the confidence to act on it, which brings in new evidence to refine my self-understanding.
My adventurous nature makes this possible. While I’m not crazy enough to have responded to Shackleton’s ad if I were born 100 years earlier, I’m less sensitive than most to the financial and social risk of exploring the unknown.
So for my next endeavor, I’m not recruiting guinea pigs that I can analyze. I’m recruiting an adventurous guinea pig (or a herd) to explore alongside me.
They will need to put in even more effort than I do to decode and map themselves. Then they will need to act upon the findings.
Like Shackleton, I can’t guarantee success. Unlike Shackleton, I don’t know where we’re headed. But together, a fellow adventurous guinea pig and I will decode what makes them different then decide where best to aim it.
If successful, we will demonstrate the possibility and power of designing the job of your lifetime from the inside out, and make it easier for others to follow in our footsteps.
Plan
Decode
We’ll map out how you uniquely operate at your very best and design work that puts it to good use.
To do so, we’ll collect data:
Interviews of you
Interviews of people who know you.
Psychological assessments.
Analysis of your work.
Then we’ll analyze. You’ll tell me what you see. I’ll share my perspective. We’ll chip away until you get to a solid, spiky self-understanding you can explain, question, and use.
Experiment
We will use this understanding to design a specific experiment—a project, a product, a pilot—that tests our hypothesis of what you are uniquely built to contribute.
While I’ll help with the design, you must take the action yourself. That means investing your effort, reputation, time, and probably some money into using the best of your abilities to try to make an external impact.
Iterate
Even if your first experiments underwhelm, like mine did, they’ll give us data. We’ll use that to refine our understanding and decide what to try next.
Endure
Keep going.
If you’re willing to endure with me, we’ll earn a story worth telling no matter what, and if we get it right, the job of a lifetime, too.
Cost
$0.
But you must invest significant time, effort, and reputation. And you must be financially self-sufficient.
Application
Send a brief letter to c@legantlabs.com with:
Evidence of adventurousness: What is something adventurous you did that was outside of the “norm”, and what happened?
Evidence of spikiness: What is another story of an external contribution you have made with your unique abilities? If possible, provide links or other forms of proof.
Why now? What makes this the right time for you to embark on this endeavor?
Aim to write it in thirty minutes or less. Informal bullet points are fine. I want to see raw evidence, not polished prose.
I will respond to each application and invite some to chat 1-on-1 to get into the details and decide whether we’re a fit.
Ultimately, I’m looking for up to three adventurous guinea pigs. Maybe none. We’ll see.
Please forward to any adventurous guinea pig you know.
Applications close September 25, 2026.
Society sands people smooth. I call it conformity waste.
The Zag is my running investigation into reversing it: decoding what makes you different and putting it to work. I publish what I find every 2 to 3 weeks. Zero spam.
About the author
I’m on an adventure developing better systems for understanding and designing around what makes each of us different. The Zag is where I share what I’m learning.
