Julie Zhuo: evaluation

Transcript context

…It's amazing to hear that you had imposter syndrome for such a long period of time and you basically ran design for the Facebook app. Right? And so, it's kind of an empowering, inspiring insight that someone at your level went through that for so long and made it through that. Do you have any other advice or thoughts on just for folks that are going through that? Because I had that too for a number of years, just like, "What the hell am I doing here? People are going to see I don't really know what I'm doing, and it's all going to crumble as soon as I make my next mistake." Do you have any other advice there for folks going through that themselves? I think just exactly what you said, Lenny, right? I think so much of it that helped me was realizing that everyone feels this way to some extent, and that's also why I always want to talk about that, right, because I feel like sometimes you can see from the outside. You're like, "Oh, this person has this title. They have this position. They have these responsibilities. Clearly, they've made it. They know what they're doing." But that's never the case, and I mean, logically let's think about it. Right? If you're going to do anything new for the first time, how are you ever going to feel totally comfortable, totally prepared? Every time, there's something new that you hadn't encountered before, it's always going to be a little bit rough. You're never going to feel perfectly at ease. It's only upon doing something multiple times that you start to see the patterns, you start to realize, "Okay, it's going to be all right." And even now the people that I talk to, the people I really look up to, the people who I think are role models and mentors for me, I mean, they regularly also share with me that it's the same. It's like they still encounter things that are unprecedented. Right? And if we work in tech, I mean the rate of change, the rate of the industry and companies and kind of these new experiences that we have, that never goes away. Right? That's just par for the course. And so, I think that feeling always exists. I think that what I have learned is that there are better tools in your toolkit for dealing with it. One of them is of course me just reminding myself that if I feel uncomfortable, it's okay. Other people feel that way too. Everyone does. It's totally natural, but then to also find other pieces in that toolkit. Right? One is I am much better at asking for help now than I was earlier in my career. I used to actually just try and hold it all in. I was like, "Hey, I better fake it until I make it. If everyone thinks that maybe I'm coming to a table like I know it, then I can fool them." And now I realize I was really just, I was preventing myself from being able to get that support and that empathy and that camaraderie and that advice that would've helped me actually grow faster and maybe with a little bit less pain in the process. And so, one of the things I learned is it's okay to ask for help. It's okay to reach out to people who both may be going through the same things you're going or maybe are step or two ahead of you in the journey, right, who have actually gone through that and have lived to tell the tale and can tell you it's going to be okay because often that's just what you need. You just need people to tell you, "It's going to be fine. You're fine. You're good. You've got this." And that's so meaningful, right, whenever we sometimes feel down about ourselves. So, that's another, I would say tool in the toolkit, right, asking for help, finding groups of support. 've got this." And that's so meaningful, right, whenever we sometimes feel down about ourselves. So, that's another, I would say tool in the toolkit, right, asking for help, finding groups of support. And then I think the third is it's also okay to just be vulnerable and just talk to people about it. Right? I found that some of the most meaningful conversations I had, whether with people like managers or whether with my own reports is when we can be much more open about what it is that we find hard, what are we struggling with, and in that way, you actually form deeper connections and people are more able to help out. Right? We can spread the load a little bit. We can put our heads together and brainstorm a better way to solve the problem, and I find that too, even as the head of a department, right, or a founder, it's like I'm not going to solve everything myself. I'm never going to have all the answers. Sometimes by just sharing what the problem is, by sharing the load, we're all going to collectively come up with a better solution.…

Stored transcript either side of the excerpt. The highlighted words are the published quote; the surrounding text is unedited source, never generated.