Lenny Rachitsky: belief

Transcript context

…Yeah. Maybe the other thing I'll mention, and as I reflect on setting priorities and just working, I think a big lesson for me is that chaos is good and chaos is actually great. And sometimes you want to create chaos in an organization to push the organization to think creatively and to actually make leaps in product development. And so, I mean, I kind of, as I reflect on my life, I like cleaning up messes, I like when things are very organized, I liked when there's a lot of clarity on how things are put together, and chaos is scary, right? And I think that this is very natural for a lot of people, for chaos to be scary, but I've seen examples when just a bit of chaos is so, so helpful. Just to give you an example, I remember me talking to Brian one day, and he was like, "Hey, I just don't feel good. Something just feels off right now." And I remember asking him, "What do you mean?" I was like, "Our numbers are up and to the right, we're chipping quickly, everything's great. What do you mean? What are you unhappy with?" And his response was, "Things are just too calm. I don't like it." And I was like, "Okay, what do you mean? Calm is great," like I operate in calm. And he then picked a project that he thought was important - I think it was actually host onboarding at the time - and of course, on this project, I remember we had this perfectly crafted timeline. We're going to design this for the next four weeks and then we're going to start building, and we're going to deploy in certain pockets of users, we're going to learn, we're going to iterate, et cetera, very rational timeline. And he said, "Yeah, I don't care about any of that. We're going to design this in 24 hours." And I was just like mind blown own, right, like, one, how? Two, the ripples that's going to send through the organization, because I knew all the people that were involved on building this, and we had this whole neat flow. And we did design it, actually, in 24 hours, well, it took a little bit longer, but we designed it very quickly, and what I learned in that moment is that ... Very quickly, and what I learned in that moment is, that was actually an example of chaos that he inserted into this very calm building process, and that chaos forced us, with our artificial time constraint, to dial up our intuition and to think a bit more creatively than maybe we would have in the past. Now, that didn't always work, because there were examples of this where you're just like, "I don't know what the answer is. I need more time to design this, and to think about this problem." There were definitely examples of that, but there were many examples where it was actually a great forcing function to go with your gut and actually innovate. That's an amazing story, and it reminds me of something else, just to take a quick tangent here. Brian is incredible at just asking people always, "That's a great goal you have there. What would it take to 10x that goal?" He'd get to the FP&A projections, and he's like, "Great. How do we 10x this? " I found that to be really scary, but also, really effective in helping people think a lot bigger. Is there something there you can share about just what you learned from Brian about thinking that big? I think it's less about hitting the goal. I think a lot of people, when they see really big goals, they get immediately afraid of the goals, because they think, "Oh my God, I don't know how to hit this. If we don't hit it, what happens?" You start thinking about all the downstream consequences. The reality is, it's not about hitting the goal, it's about thinking how to hit the goal, and going through that creative journey of, what does the world need to look like for this to be true, this crazy goal to be true? How should we think about it? Oftentimes, it pushes you to test extremes, when the whole world is going to operate this way, or nobody in the world is going to operate this way versus something in between. Usually, it's when you start testing the extremes that you begin to realize, "This is the path that we should actually take."…

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