Lenny Rachitsky: belief

Transcript context

…rked for, well-known companies such as Duolingo. At the time, they weren't well known. They were a tiny little startup. They didn't have an Android app. And that's how I started working with Duolingo. Because their head of marketing connected with someone they had worked with at Flickr and said, "I noticed Tumblr grew a lot in Brazil last year. Can you recommend a company or an agency to help?" And they said, this girl. And I was 26. And so that's how they connected me with Duolingo, and I started helping them grow in Brazil as a consultant. They were like, this is great. Can you help us grow in Chile, Argentina? And I was like, yes. They were like, how about Mexico? And I was like, yes. Did I know anything about these places, Lenny? Did I know people there? No, but you can figure it out. And then they ended up asking me to come on full-time, do that across the world. In Japan, China, Korea, Turkey, Spain, France, et cetera. And then to own growth, which ended up meaning communications, social media, government partnerships, anything to grow. And then eventually became an AB testing growth engine with engineers, and PMs, and designers of which I knew nothing about. And even after that, I left Duolingo five years later, didn't know what to do with my life. You'd think, oh wow, you have it figured out now. You left Duolingo, you have the world in front of you. And I'm like, maybe I can finally go work for nonprofits, which is what I actually wanted to do in the first place. Tried my hand at that, had a couple of experiences before going to work for the Mike Bloomberg campaign. Working for the Mike Bloomberg campaign is impressive, but you know what? Mike Bloomberg didn't win. He's not the president. So that was not a successful campaign, if you really look at it. And yeah, latitude seems like it's a really promising path. But there's A days and B days. So it's just a lot of that, and just staying resilient, and believing in yourself, and getting back on the horse when you fall on your face. Amazing. That's such an important message. I think one of the threads from what you're describing, something that I think about a lot, is people kind of underestimate how long their career is. There's just so much time to do stuff, and for things to start to work. This is going to sound really fancy, but I think Marcus Aurelius has this quote about how our life is actually very long, we just use it really badly. And we just waste a lot of our time. Wow. I think you're so right, Lenny and I love that. Because people are going around being like, life is short, life is short. But that's so true. We waste so much time. But also I think we don't recognize how much opportunity we have in front of us. And as a 26-year-old, I definitely thought my career was over. I was like, I blew it. And looking back, it's funny.…

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