Nat Friedman: preference

Transcript context

…All right. So let me ask you some questions that we got from Twitter. This is former guest and I guess mutual friend Austin Vernon. Nat is one of those people that seems unreasonably effective. What parts of that are innate and what did he have to learn? It's very nice of Austin to say. I don't know. We talked a little bit about this before, but I think I just have a high willingness to try things and get caught up in new projects and then I don't want to stop doing it. I think I just have a relatively low activation energy to try something and am willing to sort of impulsively jump into stuff and many of those things don't work, but enough of them do that I've been able to accomplish a few things. The other thing I would say, to be honest with you, is that I do not consider myself accomplished or successful. My self-image is that I haven't really done anything of tremendous consequence and I don't feel like I have this giant bed of achievements that I can go to sleep on every night. I think that's truly how I feel. I'm an insecure overachiever, I don't really feel good about myself unless I'm doing good work, but I also have tried to cultivate a forward-looking view where I try not to be incredibly nostalgic about the past. I don't keep lots of trophies or anything like that. Go into some people's offices and it's like things on the wall and trophies of all the things they've accomplished and I'd always seemed really icky to me. Just had a sort of revulsion to that. Is that why you took down your blog?…

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