9 Knowledge Grenades For The Work Revolution
This article contains swear words that some may consider “offensive”. If you can’t handle my raw, unfiltered realness, I expect you’re not handling life very well in general.
Last summer I founded my own company.
“What?” I hear you whimper in disbelief. “Founded your own company, in the middle of a pandemic?”
That’s right — while everyone else was queuing for toilet roll, baking focaccia, and making slime, I was building an empire. I wasn’t just going to walk blindly over a cliff with the rest of you lemmings. I made it my mission to go the other way, swimming upstream, like a salmon.
Counter-intuitive? Absolutely. But there’s a reason counterculture is cooler than regular culture. Luke Skywalker taught us that history is shaped by the rebels.
6 months and $4M in ARR later, I’ve got VC managers literally frothing at the mouth to give me funding. Sometimes I can’t believe it, how I’m just constantly winning.
Lucky for you, I’ve decided to share my Winning Formula so others can reproduce my success. I’m gonna pull you along with me, like Michael Jordan dragging the Bulls to the ’98 NBA Finals. I’d like nothing more than to see you 10x my success based on my method. Keep reading to uncover my secrets. You’ll want to bookmark this one.
At Thrustify we have 9 truth grenades — not rules, rules are for corporations stuck in the shadow of their own decay — 9 truth grenades for successful, cutting-edge disruptors. LET’S GO 🚀💪💥💰💰🚀💰📈 💪🔥
1. If you haven’t done it yet, it’s already TOO SLOW
Cheetahs are too slow. Formula 1 cars are too slow. Quantum entanglement is too slow. I do everything at breakneck pace, and so should you. By the time I finish formulating my thoughts, I’ve already acted. It’s as if I don’t even think at all.
At Thrustify, we move so fast we’ve had to come up with a new word for it — RABIDSPEED. It’s the speed at which a rabid animal would move, ripping task lists to shreds before they even get the chance to register what’s happening. Thrustify team members (Thrusters) already know what’s round the corner, because — by harnessing RABIDSPEED — our minds have already acquainted themselves with the corner, wined and dined the corner, reluctantly attended relationship counselling with the corner, and ultimately left that corner the fuck behind. We predicted the pandemic. We know what’s after the pandemic. It ‘aint pretty. But we’re ready.
Want to live in the future? At RABIDSPEED, you would have already finished reading this article by now.
2. Move or suffocate
You know what stays in one place? STAGNANT WATER.
At Thrustify, no Thruster is permitted to live in the same place for more than 3 months. Too extreme for you? Best go back to comfortable suburbia, with your mortgage and your shed and your slug infestations.
By constantly moving, we achieve three things:
A) STIMULATION. Because the brain is constantly getting hit with new stimuli, the mind is elevated to a higher plane. This higher plane unlocks INTENSE creativity and productivity. It’s like experiencing five different acid trips all at the same time.
B) ADAPTATION. People who stay in the same place can’t handle change. A slight rise in temperature leads to total meltdown. A delay to their regular dinner time sees them eating their own arms in panic. But we Thrusters are so used to uprooting our families, the only concept of “home” we have is the one on our internet browsers. Added bonus: you get to see the world. Who wants to stare at the same old garden fence for decades? Not me.
C) ESCAPATION. I’m going to be an honesty anarchist here — not everything Thrustify does is “kosher” in the eyes of the “Government”. A benefit of being on the move is that the slothful arm of the law can never catch up with you. You can’t hit a moving target.
3. Org charts = BORED charts
Org charts are like monsters under the bed. If you believe in them, they might just exist.
At Thrustify, we despise hierarchy. “Who will be my manager?” New Thrusters ask. “What’s a manager?” I reply. Seriously, does life have an org chart? No. No it does not.
Yesterday my social media intern failed to tweet anything about our Brand Reboot 2.0, then told me to eat shit when I challenged her. My response? I applauded, then gave her an immediate promotion.
4. If you’re not making mistakes, you’re dead to me
I make mistakes all the time. Do I start sobbing and sweep them under the carpet? No, I put them on a pedestal on top of the carpet. Then I gather everybody round the pedestal and get them to examine my mistakes, like a botched piece of pottery.
You think I’m joking? Every Friday we hold a Fuckup Mashup, where we celebrate mistakes by rapping about them while drinking sambuca — the alcoholic version of a grave mistake. If anyone fails to bring a suitably grave mistake to the Fuckup Mashup, I immediately subject them to one of my fabled emotional shakedowns.
DO NOT come to your Thrustify interview clutching your greatest achievements. Your “CV” should be a 15-minute video (at least) of you reciting all the mistakes you’ve ever made.
5. The universe doesn’t say thank you, why should you
Platitudes like please, thank you, and sorry are drilled into toddlers by insecure mothers who believe the world is made of marshmallows and cotton-wool snowflakes. Well, the world is full of broken glass and fire. It is HARSH. If you drift through your dreamland, apologising to every Tom, Dick, and Harry, you’ll be ripped to pieces. You might as well hang a sign from your neck that says: Please trample all over me. Thank you.
Also — since we work at RABIDSPEED (see Truth Grenade #1) — we don’t have time for frivolous linguistic decorations.
Here’s just a sample from our 83-page Glossary of Soft, Time-Wasting Terminology That’s Forbidden At Thrustify:
Hello
How are you?
Nice
Like
Love
May/might
I don’t know
Just
Would you mind
Favour
Appreciate
Good job
Nice work
Kudos
Take care
Get well soon
Thoughts and prayers
Sorry
Happy birthday
6. Silence is NOT golden
It’s probably the colour of shit.
If you’re not saying anything, I assume you’re doing nothing. At Thrustify, we have a native application built into every laptop that encourages Thrusters to announce their Wins. At the click of a button, you can send an eardrum-bursting airhorn, explosion, or HADOUKEN! to the entire company. And we’ve modded our computers so you can never turn down the volume! Tony, our bean counter, spilled his coffee and burned his hand the first time he heard it 🤣
7. Crave the crunch
We adopt a flexi-hours approach here at Thrustify, in that you need to bend over backwards to respond to the call of duty, any time of day.
Do the “government” go home for tea and biscuits when there’s an imminent nuclear attack? Did the emergency services leave the Twin Towers burning so they could get 8 hours of uninterrupted sleep? We’re constantly being bombarded by our competitors — so I expect you to be on the front line when it matters.
If you’re sheltering under your duvet when the going gets tough, believe me I will come over and drag you out by your feet. I don’t care if your daughter/son/cat/goldfish is watching. If anything I welcome it.
Fortunately, with state-of-the-art monitoring tech, you can rest safe in the knowledge that everyone at Thrustify is online when they need to be, ready to CRUSH IT.
8. Be an Honesty Anarchist
Most people go about their work lying through their teeth, rewarding shoddy execution and instilling a false sense of self-worth in others. “Oh, I like what you’ve done there.” “That’s fine!” “You certainly put a lot of effort into it.” Well I’ve got news for you: I don’t like what you’ve done there, that’s not fine, and you put as much effort into it as Hodor puts into communicating effectively.
I tell it how it is. Lots of people can’t handle that — and those people don’t work at Thrustify. Sometimes I broadcast my Honesty Anarchism to the entire company. It’s a one-to-one-to-many interview format in which I give one of my Thrusters some Hard Truths about their work. Many consider it an honour. “You changed my life,” Thrusters have written to me afterwards. This is Honestly Anarchism at its finest.
Best fetch a napkin, because my shit sandwich doesn’t have any bread — just shit. Bon appetit.
9. BURN IT ALL TO THE GROUND
My buddy Mark famously coined the mantra “move fast and break things”. Some find this idea way too extreme, but he didn’t go far enough — Facebook isn’t even in the top 50 largest companies in the world.
We don’t break things, we DESTROY them — burning them to the ground, then pouring sulfuric acid over the embers for good measure. When I see something that doesn’t work, I don’t think about how to make it better. I think about how to dismantle it.
Because without the ashes, we never would have witnessed the MIGHTY PHOENIX.
Burn it. Burn it all.
We’re hiring! Want to work at Thrustify? Just fill in this screening form to see if you’re the right fit.
