Lenny Rachitsky: belief

Transcript context

…Different questions trigger different things with people that could be helpful, trigger in a good way. So here's a few more. If you didn't have to make money, what would you do? And that'll answer what you enjoy. Naval Ravikant has a great question, which is, what's play for you that is work for other people? So for you, Lenny, that might be a podcast. That might be play for you; that's really fun. You're always going to do better at that. You're going to spend more time, you're going to enjoy it more. That's a good one. Another one is, what's the thing you really want to do? But you're just too embarrassed to say it? And my answer to this question was that I wanted to be a motivational speaker like Tony Robbins. And I was super embarrassed to say that, but that actually works into a lot of my life at this point. Another question, who are some people that you admire and want to be more like, and what do they do? Where do you find those people? What are some things you want to learn and how do you want to grow over the next five, 10 years? So I know a lot of your listeners are working in tech. So five, 10 years from now, you're amazing, you're best in the world at X. What's X? And how do you start to work toward becoming great at X? So there's just a few more other questions you could throw in to help you figure out some things you're excited about. You mentioned this idea of limiting beliefs. And I think a lot of people listening to this are probably having these beliefs right now of, "Okay, but I have a family to support. Am I going to go start a charity in Brazil? That's absurd. It sounds easy, but I can't actually change my life this radically." Can you just share something to help people get past that in some way? Sure. The first thing I would say about limiting beliefs is they're the most powerful and the most dangerous when you don't even know what they are. So when they're in the recesses of your subconscious mind, that is 95% of your thoughts, that's when the limiting beliefs are the most dangerous. So a simple example might just be like I have a limiting belief that I'm not funny. That's in my subconscious and I don't even realize I have it. So I avoid things where I'm trying to be funny or tell jokes. I mean, that's a silly example. But let's use your career now and come up with some maybe deeper ones. Let's use that charity example, the Brazilian charity, "I'm going to start a Brazilian charity." What are the limiting beliefs? Well, oh my gosh, there's a million. "I don't know how to start. I don't know how I would pay for myself. I have business school debt. I don't really know what I'm even talking about. I don't even have a plan for it. How would I get funding?" Those are all these things that are flooding your mind. So the first exercise is just write all that down. Just get it down on paper, and then two things will happen. One is when you get it down on paper, it will almost immediately strip that limiting belief of a lot of its power and a lot of its scariness. Because now it's just something like, for example, "How would I fund this?" So the second thing that is that a lot of that scariness becomes just a to-do item. In the recesses of your subconscious, that is a very scary, limiting belief that will actually keep you from doing the thing you love. Once it's on paper, now it's just a to-do item that you can actually deal with with your conscious mind, just like you do anything else. So, "How would I fund this," just becomes a plan, like, "I need to design a plan where I'd get funding for this charity." And then that just is a problem like any other problem. It's not this nebulous, scary fear. It's just literally a to-do item. So the first part of limiting beliefs, write them down, understand what they are, look at them in the cold day of light on paper, and then translate them into things that are just obstacles to be overcome. And by the way, if you're listening to this podcast, you've overcome millions of obstacles in your life, and these are no different once they're down on paper.…

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