Lenny Rachitsky: evaluation

Transcript context

…We've already touched on I'm not a big fan of talk based meditation, which will probably get me some comments I would imagine. I'd say the other one that's worth mentioning is I think that we vastly underestimate the impact of burnout, particularly from a bottom line perspective. There was a research report that I did a couple of years ago where we interviewed these leaders and they'd all experienced burnout of some degree. And we said, if you were to estimate how much this costs your startup or business, what would you say? And the median response was a hundred thousand dollars, which I imagine is more than most people would think. And most people aren't actively investing in burnout insurance. Like it's not something that's on many people's radar besides meditation practices and things like that. And I think part of the reason that the cost is higher is because there are these second and third order consequences of talent attrition, of opportunity costs, lost productivity, you lose great leaders, make shitty decisions in the run up to the burnout itself. There's also this idea of emotional contagion, which there's some research from Wharton I believe, and they show that the leader or the CEO has a disproportionate impact or their emotional state has a disproportionate impact on the people in their team. So something I'd like to say is the nervous system of an organization is a reflection of the nervous system of the CEO. And so I think that's just something which I would like to see talked about more. Just on this idea of burnout, I don't think you're saying don't work really hard If you want to work really hard, it's that you need to maintain your body and mind and nervous system if you're working insanely hard. If you're working long hours, feel free, but just know there's debt you're building up and you need to be doing things to pay off that debt as you're doing that. Precisely. It is very much like building technical debt in the early days of a startup. It's worth doing, but just do it intentionally. Know that you're doing that and that. So let's say you work really hard for eight months, you give yourself a month or two off to really downshift. And it's also really worth building that nervous system capacity. It's great to be able to push it really hard and focus and then combine it with that rest ethic as well. So do NSDRs, kind of find a way to downshift so that way of working can be sustainable.…

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