Ken Norton: belief

Transcript context

…Nope, [inaudible 00:12:06]. ... [inaudible 00:12:06] on the other side of it. It's a whole new journey. Look, he's a smart kid. He's going to do great. But it helped me actually think back to when I learned how to drive. Actually, what I think is maybe a little bit more important here is before you learn to drive. And so, if you think about it as a ... When you're a kid, cars just go places. You get strapped in and you just wait and you get impatient. Then eventually you go somewhere. You're not even consciously aware of the concept of driving. Just cars just happen and you're not even aware of it. As you get a little bit older, you start to become curious. You start to figure out, oh, that wheel has something to do with it. You turn the wheel. Maybe you start to understand there's pedals. But it also just seems really simple. Just like you get in the car and you drive it and you go somewhere. Maybe as you get older, you end up maybe even being a little bit of a smart Alec about how easy it looks and you start talking to your parents about, like, "It doesn't look hard. I can do this." Now suddenly you're behind the wheel of the car. This is what my son is doing. Wow. Is it different than you thought it was going to be? Is it way more complicated? You have to remember check your mirrors. You've got to look before you turn. You didn't even know what that sign meant. You didn't know what those stripes meant. It is just overloading with complication and your internal mindset for confronting this challenge is not going to suit you the way you used to approach the world. Maybe to put it in product leadership, product terms, everyone around you has got some real pithy advice about the things you're forgetting to do. It's like, "Hey, don't forget to check your mirror." Everyone's got a framework. It's like, "Ah, do you know about the 10:00 and 2:00 framework?" "Wait, what's the 10:00 and 2:00 framework?" "Oh, you just put your left hand on the 10:00, your right hand on the 2:00. That's the only thing you're missing. Here's a great medium post about that." Then you're like, "This is a problem is I have not adapted to the complexity of the world around me." And so, there is this sense that what is interesting about driving is the world hasn't gotten any more complex. Driving's always been driving. But now your place in the world has shifted such that the internal meaning-making and self-complexity that is required requires a complete reboot of the internal operating system in order to allow you to thrive there. And so, when you talk about this question of how much of this is skills, how much of this is tactics, how much of this is learning versus how much is internal growth, the answer is it's both, but the shift that is required is very much around how your inner self can make meaning and respond to the demands of the world around you so that you can succeed and thrive in this mindset shift that happens. hift that is required is very much around how your inner self can make meaning and respond to the demands of the world around you so that you can succeed and thrive in this mindset shift that happens. The skills matter, but by this point, you're beyond the place where you've learned the skills. There's mastering the skills, but there is this sense of what developmental psychologists call self-complexity, the ability to respond and adapt to that. And so, I think we go through a lot of those shifts in our career. The driving example is simple. Actually, probably too simple, because the world is actually getting more complex for those of us that work in product. I mean every day something changes. It forces us to respond and adapt. So there aren't even rules of the road in product. But I think this is what we're talking about, this question of the internal operating system I develop my ability to restructure it such that I can succeed given the demands that have been placed upon me.…

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