Farhan Thawar: evaluation

Transcript context

…Advice that I've heard you share with people often is when they're trying to decide amongst a bunch of options is to choose the harder path because that makes life easier down the road. Share this advice why it's so important, where you learned, where you developed that this is the right approach. But the short version is that if you have a choice and you choose the easy thing and it works great. If you choose the hard thing and it works great, you did more work, but if it doesn't work and you chose the easy thing, you've actually not learned anything because you chose the... You haven't done a lot of work, you haven't probably worked with the smartest people because they're not usually around on the easy path, and what happens is you've gone through this exercise and now you're like, I've kind of lost. I lost the choice, or I was trying to do something, it didn't work out for me. But if you do the hard path and it doesn't work, actually you still win because you've now done something hard. You've probably worked with smart people, you've learned something along the way that is valuable, and I can give you a quick example. So I meet lots of job seekers and they're like, I go, "What are you doing to try to find a job?" I'm like, "I'm sending out 10 resumes a day." I'm like, "Okay." That sounds kind of easy, and are you really learning anything from sending out 10 resumes a day? Versus I would say to them, "Hey, you know all these companies you're interested in, Shopify might be one of them. Why don't you look at the API Docs and build something, build a Shopify app, build an admin extension, build something on top of Shopify." Even if you don't get a job at Shopify, which is maybe your goal, you've learned something, you've built something, you have things in your GitHub repo now and you can show people. You're learning about the product that might translate to a job you might get somewhere else. So I think that even though it's harder, right? Of course, you can't every day build an app on a different platform. Maybe you can once a day. You will learn something in the hard path. And the same thing happened to me in taking hard courses. I would get worse marks, but I ended up meeting smarter people in those courses because they were there for the same reason I was because the content was hard. And so that's something that I've just realized in my life that if I do the hard thing and I just naturally tend towards doing that, I ended up doing... I went to Waterloo and I did a minor in electrical engineering on top of computer science, and when I did my MBA, I did a minor in financial engineering because the smarter people were in that path and they're still my friends today. So building on the last point you just made, people could hear this and think, okay, if it's harder, that's going to be the right path. Sometimes harder is still a bad idea. For example, joining a terrible company that's extremely frustrating to work at or building, I don't know, a house in a really dumb way, but it's just really hard. What else do you find is important to think about when you're thinking it's not just harder, but also XYZ should probably be true?…

Stored transcript either side of the excerpt. The highlighted words are the published quote; the surrounding text is unedited source, never generated.