Lenny Rachitsky: belief

Transcript context

…You want to make it something that a second-grader could understand. You want to minimize the cognitive burden on the recipient. So it should be something where they're not having to expend any extra energy understanding the thing, where it immediately paints a picture. Or if you were to make a joke, it has to be a joke that they immediately get, or it's a very widely understood reference. You don't want it to be this inside joke with yourself that other people might get if you explain it to them. So if you were to boil down the essence of let's say your company or your mission, get it to one sentence and then turn it into a sentence that you could explain to a second-grader, and then cleanse it of all cliches and common parlance. And if you can then turn that into an analogy or if you can make it into something that has imagery, then you're probably 80, 90% of the way there. So you've definitely done this on Twitter. It might be fun just to share a tweet or something of yours that has done this that has spread like crazy. I noticed you delete your old tweets, which I think is really smart and I should probably do that. So I couldn't find any examples, but I remember just being like, "Holy shit, it's got a bazillion views." Is there there an example that comes to mind that you could share? Just share something you put out that just went crazy. I actually have a negative example too. I think it's useful to share my mistakes or missteps in addition to what went right, because there's more mistakes and missteps than what goes right. In general, you try a bunch of things every once in a while they succeed. But I think it's useful to think about what didn't land. And so one of mine was when you might remember this because this was the Substack era, when we were taking a lot of incoming for not censoring enough, and we took a stand that we want to encourage free expression. I was actually on maternity leave, so I was a little bit out of the loop, but I wanted to jump in there and support the cause. And so I did a thread about why we're standing by this principle even when it's hard, and the thread was pretty well received, it traveled a lot. I think it was 30 something thousand likes among people that we cared about, people who write on the internet. And then there was one tweet in the thread where I said something like, "Doing this isn't pleasant, but neither for that matter is the sea." Completely esoteric reference, it was fresh in my mind because it was from a New Yorker book review where in that context it was poetic and evocative and beautiful. And I did the thing you're not supposed to do, which is take an inside joke with yourself and release it into the world. And that one tweet was a dud in the middle of the thread where you could see the likes drop off precipitously and people were like, "What are you talking about?" And then afterwards I looked at it with fresh eyes, "Yeah, this makes no sense whatsoever out of a context." And also I'm not a New York book reviewer, so that was a good don't. But the fact that it was such a colorful metaphor actually caught people's attention in an accidental way. I didn't mean for it too. I guess that's a don't, does that serve as an example?…

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