Lenny Rachitsky: belief

Transcript context

…Twitter's fascinating. I mean I tune into it every couple of days and see what's going on and it is just an amazing rumble of opinions and statements. It's much more interesting than it was five years ago. There's a lot of diagnosing and not a lot of concrete actions. But anyway, I wanted to come back to the element about power. I think when people are thinking about power, it may not be clear where that plugs into the diagnosis, the guiding policy and the coherent actions. Where should you be thinking and implementing this idea of where my power is when you're laying out your strategy? To undertake a strategy that you think will work, you've got to have a reason that it makes sense and that reason is derived from some source of power, some source of advantage. Ultimately, your power or your advantage is something based in history that has the feel of reputation, or institutional skill, or it's some kind of symmetry or knowledge that you have that others don't have. So it's a resource that you can use that your competitors or others don't have equal access to because you've either have mastered it or you own it or you inherited from the past. All those things are sources of the power that you use to make it not an even bet. So when you walk into a casino, well maybe if you play poker with skill, you can expect to make some money, but the general casino games, you're going to expect to lose. And in business, statistically, if you come to me and you say, I'm going to open a new restaurant. What should my strategy be? My answer would be don't open a restaurant. Invest in the S&P 500 because the statistics are that new restaurants fail. So what makes you think that you can succeed? Oh, I really want to succeed. Not good enough. I trained under a chef who's been very successful. Oh, that's interesting. Tell me more. So there, where's the asymmetry here? Where's the source of power where you go from the odds... The standard odds in this game are against people where you think the odds are in your favor. That's the source of power we're looking for. We're looking for this information, this skill, this thing in the field, the way the resources are arranged, that's going to give you this edge. And some of that is sort of part of the situation and some of it's how you shape and focus your actions. Strategy tends to be surprising when we see it, when we see it work, and surprising because we don't expect it. We expect people to bumble around. We expect Arby's to bumble around. We expect nation states to bumble around. We don't expect them to execute coherent strategies. The United States went to Afghanistan and it wanted to catch Osama bin Laden, but at the same time they didn't want to put an army in the shield to actually catch him because it would the embarrassing to have that many Americans in the field. That's what happened in Tora Bora. The Secretary of Defense said, no, we don't want to make it look like we're taking over the country, so they didn't try to catch him as hard as they could. And we want to have the education of women and we want to have a democracy and we want to have a long list that we would have no opium production, but at the same time, our allies are the opiate producers. It was the Taliban that got rid of opiate. Americans didn't do it. So we had all these different objectives. It doesn't work. You need to have a focus on something achievable. What's achievable? [inaudible 00:46:03] Nation-building is hard stuff. It takes a century.…

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