Julie Zhuo: evaluation

Transcript context

…What actually started me on this writing journey was a piece of feedback I got during a performance review cycle, and I remember I was talking to my manager and he shared that, "Hey, one of the pieces of something you should work on, an area of growth is that you have a lot of really great ideas, and you're always really engaged whenever discussions happen in a small forum, one on one, or there's like two or three people in the room, but whenever there's a large room, we're talking about seven people, 10 people, 15 people, you're just sort of quiet and you're not really telling your perspective. You're not really contributing to these larger conversations, and that's something for you to think about and work on." It was really good feedback because I absolutely felt it. I definitely felt that barrier of speaking up in a large room. I think the fear could be summarized as I don't want to look stupid in front of a lot of people. And so, I had all these barriers. I was like, "Okay, am I sure that what I'm going to say, what comes out of my mouth is absolutely brilliant?" And that was really just this emotion that was getting in the way, and I was like, "Okay, I really want to work on this. I want to figure out how to get that to be less and less of a friction for me." And so, it was around I think the January timeframe. Right? So, when the new year came, I was like, "Okay, here's an idea. What if I just did something," that at the time seemed really scary to me which was put my opinion out there on the internet and just do it, just do it for a year. Okay? My goal was post one thing every single week. It seemed terrifying. Right? I'm not sure what people are going to say. Again, maybe all my ideas are stupid, but I just want to get better at doing that, and hopefully, through that year, get more comfortable with that. So, that's how this whole writing thing began. It came with this kind of New Year's resolution of just 52 times, I was going to click publish on something, some opinion piece. And I was like, "It doesn't have to even be..." It doesn't even matter what the opinion is. Just put something out there and just expose yourself a little bit in that manner. So, that's what I did, and I tried to not have any goals around, well, maybe people will read it, maybe it'll be considered high quality. Those are all just, again, additional barriers that I was putting that would make me even harder for me. The only goal was to hit the publish button. And so, the first couple weeks were actually quite excruciating. I remember I just spent hours on this piece and I just kept editing it, and I was like, "I don't know if this is any good? Should I actually publish it?" And so forth, but eventually, I did it. Right? And again, little by little, it started to just become easier as anything does when it's done a lot. So, by week 10, by week 15, I had gotten into a bit of a cadence, and I realized something that was having an impact on my work. it started to just become easier as anything does when it's done a lot. So, by week 10, by week 15, I had gotten into a bit of a cadence, and I realized something that was having an impact on my work. I realized that it became much more clarifying for me to have that space to be able to write, and it almost became a kind of self-therapy because through the week I would have all these thoughts running around my head, things I wanted to get better at, pieces of product that I was mulling on, and the act of writing allowed me some quiet time to just sit down and try and organize those different threads of thoughts. I approach my writing then and I still do now as letters to myself. This is the framework. This is the advice that I need to give myself that I need to go and really do better, and that is what my writing became for me, and it was hugely helpful for clarifying my train of thought. It was hugely helpful for me to then be able to do a better job of expressing myself, and by the end of that year, I saw a huge difference in my ability then in large meetings to speak up and to become more comfortable. But even after that year, because I had seen all of these advantages in what it did for my clarity of thinking, and I just decided to continue, and it became also a really, I think, a wonderful side effect that other people started to resonate with the writing. They were like, "Oh, this is actually helpful for me, or I was feeling the same thing, or this gave me a little bit of additional structure to think about the problem," and that was also extremely motivating, but I will say that what I think helped me continue the writing habit is I always did it for me. I always did it because I felt that there was a lot that I had to gain from it, and it's been obviously a wonderful experience to connect with readers and other people in the community about it. It definitely made me feel less alone. It definitely confirmed a lot of the ideas that I had about is this the right way to think about something. It led to a lot of really rich discussion with my colleagues and with people who just emailed or responded about the writing. So, that was a wonderful side benefit as well. But yeah, I really credit my ability to think better through the process and the practice of writing. That's such a cool story. I love that it was kind of driven by a manager, but kind of led to so many externalities. One thing I wanted to ask you is how did you find time to this writing? People always want to write and very few people do or find time to. How did you actually make the time and keep that up?…

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