Peter Deng: belief

Transcript context

…I want to get back to product, but first of all, I know something that you think a lot about along these lines. This came up in many conversations I had with folks that you worked with. Is your emphasis on the power and importance of language, being really good at thinking about the words you use both in writing and speaking. Just talk about how you think about that, just the importance and power of language as a leader. I remember taking this class that really stuck with me in college. It was called Language and Thought. And it was taught by Herbert Clark. And he had this thesis that kind of blew my mind, which is that, "Language actually affects the way you think." That's one of the parts of the thesis. And once I heard that and read that in his book and listened to the lecture, I couldn't stop thinking about that because it just rang so true. I grew up speaking Chinese and I think that there's a lot of things of just the Chinese language that I feel like I noticed, I thought differently when I learned English. And there were some studies around this too, I think that there's, I think in, I'm not sure exactly, I just have to go check up on this. But I think in Russian there are two different words for blue, there's a greenish blue and a bright blue or something. I speak Russian but it's like... I moved to the U.S. when I was 6 and so my Russian is not great. So, I'm trying to think of this as you say it, but keep going.…

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