Lenny Rachitsky: belief

Transcript context

…So this idea of what's my passion and what's my career goal, it can be really intimidating. And it is intimidating. And so this exercise is to make it less intimidating. And you basically come up with nine lives. So you say your first life, life one is the life you have now. So when I did this exercise ... let's pretend I did this exercise when I'm right out of school, taking that job. So life one is I'm working at this big firm, I live in the Bay Area, here's what I'm doing. That's life one. There's two rules. The first rule is all the lives have to start from today. So you can't go back in time. They all start from today. And the second rule is you have to be excited about all these lives. So I might say, "Hey, my second life is I want to start a private equity firm and be a founder and be a CEO." And that's life too. And life three is I want to be an author and I want to write whatever fiction or nonfiction. And then life four would be I want to be a professor and teach. And life five is maybe I want to make videos and be on social media. And life six, I want to be an actor. And you go through this whole list of these lives. And the idea is that ... A couple of things from this exercise. One is let's say that you're in a position where you need to be working in the job you're in. There might be one of these lives that gives you the most energy, and it's the thing if you knew you wouldn't fail, you would do this one. And it's good to recognize what that is and then pull that life a little bit into your current life. So let's say, Lenny, that you were a product manager, but you really loved doing podcasts, and that was one of your nine lives. Do a podcast every other week, and just pull it into your life, which it sounds like what you did. You started doing it as a side hustle. And then that'll have two amazing effects. One is you will just have more energy everywhere else in your life. Forget if you ever do this full time or not; just the act of pulling something into your life you're really excited about will give you a tremendous amount of energy. And then the second thing is you'll ideally find the path that is the thing that gives you the most energy. The other thing that I've learned in doing this exercise is you actually can have pretty much all nine lives. You can't have them at once, but if you're fortunate enough to live long enough, you can have all of these things. So I have had the corporate job, been the founder, been the professor, been a writer, had videos, taught people. I've been able to bring most of those lives into this current life. There's a couple things there that come up as you talk about. One is, on that point, what I do now is my fourth career. First I was an engineer, then I became a founder, then I was a PM, and now I do whatever the heck this is. And I think people don't realize that's how life often goes. You think you're going to do one thing, and then you have many different careers that pivot into [inaudible 00:46:46]. Exactly. And I think that's the thing. It's just trying to make it a little less intimidating. You don't have to have this one life purpose, passion, thing that you do for the rest of your life. If you just follow the thing that gives you energy at each time, it'll probably be a good indication of where you want to be going.…

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