Gergely Orosz: evaluation

Transcript context

…Plus one on both those. I have a rule of no meetings before 3:00 PM, and it generally works 99% of the time. And the reason I do that is, to your point, if there's a meeting at 11:00, I just can't do anything really deep until that point, and then afterwards I have to get back on track. And having that deep focus time is so important for this work, even though half the time I'm on Twitter and distracted, as long as I get enough time to focus, good things happen. Okay. Opposite. What are some of the most surprising downsides and sucky parts of this path that you've taken? One is obviously it's lonely. I do miss... I had a really good team at Uber, and it wasn't just a team, it was the people. I liked... Everyone has different views on remote work. I actually didn't enjoy remote work as much, because I just liked hanging out with people. I guess I'm that more outgoing type, and I really like walking up to the coffee station and having a chat with people, or at lunch sitting next to someone and talking about it. And obviously in some sense it was annoying, because I wanted to get work done, but for the most part I miss it more than I have. And so I miss not having that. I compensate for that by working in a shared workspace, a shared office, which is a techy workspace. So everyone needs to work in tech. So I actually get to say hi to people and have a little small talk. The structure is weird, because I felt really guilty for the first few months, because I felt that at Uber I was more productive, because I had to be. I was doing so many things. In a day, I would start my day let's say at 9:00 or at 8:30, and I'd finish it up at, I don't know, 6:00 or 5:30, it depends. I would probably have, on an average day, I would have a good eight meetings, I would finish two or three documents, I would send over this, send over that. I actually have... Looking at my output, now I write a lot, but I wrote a lot. I think I wrote almost as much in terms of emails, chat messages, et cetera. So the downside is, I felt very guilty and a little bit frustrated for myself, for feeling that I'm slacking off. That's one. And the other thing, it is surprisingly stressful. So when you start off, it's kind of lonely. Not many people do this, what we do. That's also one of the reasons that we connected, because it's a very small community. And even within the community, I feel, in the newsletter community, it's different. You're all running your own business, and there is some level of competition. So you might not... Because it's a little bit of attention economy as well. People are not going to subscribe or pay for ten newsletters on the same topic, so that makes it a little bit more... It's not the same as when you work in tech, and you just share exactly everything that you do, because you can only win. So there's that part, but there's a lot of external validation, so whenever looking at your subscriber numbers, which brings a bunch of stress that I didn't expect. And I'm a successful newsletter [inaudible 00:45:47] I think my success is quite rare. There will be one or two or a handful of people who have similar success, but I'm an outlier. So that's another thing that I think is just good [inaudible 00:45:58] putting out there. And the downside is, you don't really know how well you're doing. External goals are kind of meaningless. Internal goals, either you smash them or you don't reach them. So there's this constant sense of, where am I? How am I, and how do I judge myself? Did I make a mistake for leaving my job? meaningless. Internal goals, either you smash them or you don't reach them. So there's this constant sense of, where am I? How am I, and how do I judge myself? Did I make a mistake for leaving my job? I actually asked myself for several months actually, after I started. Or did I make a good one? And I think for a lot of these questions and doubts, having past professional experience working at a company is really useful to set yourself grounded.…

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