we are animals

What do you learn from walking on another world? We sat with Charlie Duke, the youngest man to step on the Moon to find out.

Chaco recently had the privilege of helping tell one of mankind’s greatest stories by designing and building general’s Duke brand new site, the best designed and most comprehensive site of any astronaut.

90 Seconds of Wisdom

1- “It’s hard to balance your life on a two-legged stool”

Charlie came to the conclusion that we are “three-legged stools”, made of one body, one mind and one spirit. It is important that you develop not just one or the other, but each of them to the best of your ability. 

Just like you can exercise to improve your physical body or get the best possible education to sharpen your mind, one benefits equally from developing a sound spiritual side. “I try to keep my life in balance in that way”.

2- Understand the personalities

As you’d expect, team-work is crucial to any project: it is essential for all to be on the same page and eventually become one.

But how do you become one with team members you didn’t get to personally chose?

“You need to understand each other’s personality and dampen your own, until you meld together. You have to say OK let’s figure this out so we can, in our training over the years, develop an integrated personality for the crew. That took some work, but eventually, by the time we flew we were as one”.

3- Focus

One of the most difficult things is to prevent your mind from wondering, losing sight of long term objectives as well as the immediate tasks at hand.

It is important to learn to stay focused throughout. Boresight focus is essential to the thorough planning, preparation and execution needed to overcome unforeseen circumstances, which then lead to outstanding performance.

”you had to have almost boresight, tunnel vision if you will”.

Quick Bio 

Born in 1935, Charlie Duke is the youngest man to walk on the Moon, where he spent a record 71 hours. As an astronaut he participated in 5 Apollo missions, and it was to Duke that in 1969 Armstrong said “the Eagle has landed”.
Before joining NASA, Charlie was a USAF fighter pilot stationed in Germany, a test pilot in California and earned his masters in aeronautics at MIT.

This interview is part of Chaco’s 90 Seconds Of Wisdom series: our mad attempt at countering oceans of information with drops of wisdom.

An environmental start-up wanted to become the go-to brand for sustainability in the Spanish speaking world. This is how we helped.

OBJECTIVE identify the most promising positioning and design the brand identity.

CHALLENGE an improvised brand, tiny budgets, a crowded market.

INSIGHT the environmentally passionate were already onboard. To acquire scale, Sustentator had to recruit the 99% who were turning a deaf ear to the depressing news of melting ice caps and climate change.

SOLUTION first we re-positioned Sustentator as the Pragmatic Optimistic: when speaking of commuting by bike for example, we went from talking carbon footprint to calories lost and money saved instead.

Then we designed the brand identity, with a clear brand architecture: the Sustentator master brand on top, supported by distinct B2B and B2C business units, each with its own branding and online presence.

Today Sustentator holds annual conferences, provides solar energy solutions to an ever-growing number of farms and houses and LifeGuard stations along Argentina’s coast.

Facebook fans jumped from 5,000 to over two million and counting.