Lenny Rachitsky: evaluation

Transcript context

…You need both. So if you only do incremental, you will follow the shortest, the steepest gradient in front of you. So UXR says a user wants to do this and you'll do exactly that and you'll end up random walking through the thing. So you need coherence about where you're going and the way you get that is by creating a North Star for yourself. It should be in three to five years in the future, it should be very low resolution. It should describe a thing that every single person who reads it who has any kind of knowledge that might be useful or relevant agrees that it is plausible. If this happens, I would not say, "Well, a miracle happened." It'd say, "I could see how that could work." And lawyers say, "I could see how that could work." And someone who's worked on this 30 years ago at a similar product that Microsoft says, "I can see how that could work." And that if you got to the end point, everyone would high five because if it's going to be a thing, they're like, "I guess that could work." At the end we'd be like, "Oh yeah, neat." That's not worth it. You want another story would be like, "Yeah, great. Wow, we kick off. We changed the way this entire industry works," or whatever. And now this is your North Star. North Star should update, but it's because it's far off in the distance. It will update. It will slide up across the sky a little bit. It won't be jerking around. You'll be arcing slightly differently. And then what you do is you look in your adjacent possible and you look for the thing that has the steepest gradient that pulls you towards your North Star. So you just want to go in that direction and you want to go in this direction. This one is second most in demand from what you think, but it's pulling you the direction that you believe will pull you there. Go in that one. And then they keep on repeating. That's it. But you need both. Because if you only do incremental, then you'll end up random walking into a corner. And if you only do the long-term, you end up dreaming big and designing castles in the sky that are impossible to actually manifest. To give you a metaphor from an experience I had, I did this silent meditation retreat once, and a big part of Buddhism is to not cling to a specific outcome and not have a plan in mind and be sad if it doesn't work out. And so I asked them just how do you achieve success and want to be successful while not doing that? And their metaphor is point your card in a specific direction that you want to go. Just point your card in that direction, essentially in your example of North Star, and just start walking. Don't figure out this is exactly the path I'm going to take to get to this end destination. Yeah. And you'll know after the fact, you'll say, "Oh, I curved a little bit or I had this little jog than there." And you'll say, "Ah, it would've been more efficient." But we're so focused on efficiency of not wasting effort that we ended up doing nothing at all or doing very dangerous things that don't work. So I'm much sure that I have a path that's slightly inefficient because we're navigating unknowns and we couldn't know no point. I think I've seen the number of times I find where people say, "I need to know for this strategy," that someone was trying to get me to look at and then say, "is this number in five years, is it going to be 93 or 95?" And it's like, I don't know. And it doesn't matter either if it's going to be that order of magnitude. It doesn't matter, and we don't have to do that analysis if we believe that the order of magnitude is of that thing. It'd actually be we had spent all the time to get the illusion of precision, which at great expense, and then it's the people say, "Oh, I'm data-driven. I want to really run the analysis to ground." There's tons of stuff you can't know ahead of time. So if you're getting a false precision at the beginner, that's a comfort blanket. That's just helping you feel like there isn't uncertainty. There's uncertainty everywhere all the time. And trying to ignore it by trying to pin it down with fake numbers that you just made up for yourself at great expense is a really bad idea. And that's why if the ideas are strong enough, things that have a compounding return don't give you, "Oh, we'll either get 93 or 95." It's like, "We'll either get zero or we'll get 1,000." Great. It doesn't really matter if it's 1,000 or 1,001, who cares? It orders a magnitude larger than the alternative, and so it is better.…

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