Evidence receipt / belief
Published · transcript-backedAlex Komoroske: belief
3 Oct 2024 Lenny's Podcast Thinking like a gardener not a builder, organizing teams like slime mold, the adjacent possible, and other unconventional product advice | Alex Komoroske (Stripe, Google)
“I think people who watch the work that I do and the indirect impact it has realize that I'm doing something that is working even if they don't fully understand how it works.”
Source trail
Everything needed to verify it.
- Speaker
- Alex Komoroske
- Attribution
- Verified speaker
- Claim type
- belief
- Recorded
- 3 Oct 2024
- Publisher
- Lenny's Podcast
Transcript context
…Yeah. I have a lot of folks in my broader space who obviously have used it. So I never personally have myself, but I find there's various ways. The transcendent mindset is this feeling of being part of something much, much, much larger than yourself and losing your ego in this thing. There's different ways of doing it. Some people will find it in hiking and being out in the wilderness alone. Some people find it being at a concert and thousands of people perfectly in sync to this thing. Some people find it in religious experience. Some people find it using psychedelics and others to help get there. But a lot of it, it's that same just being willing to be in awe. There's so many times that people feel the feeling of awe or wonder or curiosity is treated as a not very serious or childlike thing. And I just don't get that because that is how you are open to disconfirming evidence. It's how you see beyond the current limits of what you... Your ego gets hurt when you get disconfirming evidence. You don't want to hear it. And so you'll construct the world around yourself to not get that disconfirming evidence. But disconfirming evidence is what makes systems strong. It's what makes you strong. And so how do you put yourself in the situation to get that information and really receive it? And part of it is just coming in terms of the fact of early in my career, someone called me kooky a bit. Oh, man. I must be embarrassed. I'm like, "Okay, fine. Yeah, I'm kooky, whatever." I'm totally at peace with the idea that some people track me as kooky and not particularly serious. I think people who watch the work that I do and the indirect impact it has realize that I'm doing something that is working even if they don't fully understand how it works. To start to close our conversation, I want to throw out one more seed that might land with someone in the right time. You have this concept of the adjacent possible, which I think is a really powerful concept. And it's basically argues that a lot of people jump to big bold ideas, and instead the better approach is think about what's a constraint you have and lean into the constraints and use that as a guide. Can you just talk about this and how this might inform how people think about product and strategy?…
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