Daniel Gross: belief

Transcript context

…Is your office messy or neat? When you walk into someone’s office or workspace, do you judge them one way or another on how talented they are, depending on how messy it is? Steve Jobs, famously, said someone asked him that question, and he said, “Everyone says an organized desk is an organized mind, but most desks that I’ve seen that are organized are empty.” Would you say an empty desk is a what mind? He famously had a very messy desk. I do think Zoom has created this, although it has reduced the amount of entropy or information you’re getting from someone in an interview. I think everyone here can probably attest to the Zoom interview as not as enticing, exciting, revealing or interesting as a real-world interview, but it does reveal other information. Net, you’re still getting less, but you’re suddenly getting this new, interesting information in the background. Where they are, the cats wandering around — okay, that’s interesting. I don’t know that all of our mental models, built around decades of calibrating on real-world interviews where you don’t get that information, now suddenly have to be readjusted to that. I think it’s a good question. The desk is a reflection of the conscientiousness, I think, of an individual. For some roles, conscientiousness, to the extent it moves at a continuum that pulls down openness, which the big psychometric theories would disagree with you, meaning they would say the Big 5 aspects scale are totally independent of each other. But you do really wonder. The person who’s hyper conscientious, who really dots every i and crosses every t — it’s exceedingly rare, I think, to find someone that is really, really conscientious and also really open. So, I do tend to believe that they affect each other a bit more than we realize. I think that can be a revealing thing in either direction. I don’t know that you would necessarily want, say, your product designer to have the most organized desk that, to Steve Jobs’ parlance, is also quite empty. I don’t know that I would want to see my accountant have an incredibly disorganized desk with all sorts of returns and Post-its and papers flying around. Much depends on the role. What about your co-author? Tyler, you know why I’m asking you this question.…

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