Lenny Rachitsky: evaluation

Transcript context

…Yeah, yeah. I don't think that there's any single shortcut on how to get better besides that. I do think that being fascinated by a topic and being excited about it makes it more likely that you're going to find it fun to try all these different things and try different ways to get through to people. So, I would approach it with a hypothesis-driven experimental mindset and almost like a game. Like, "When I do this, how does that other person react? If I frame it this way, do I get a different reaction? When I try this, am I able to cut through the noise more?" Yeah. So I really think it's about practicing. And I will say that the way not to do it is to try to incorporate 30 different tactics at the same time and then beat yourself up when you don't remember to do them. It's really easy when you are learning a new field or function to get overwhelmed when you're learning a new skill. And the way to build a habit is usually not changing so many different things at once. It's picking one thing that you want to try and keeping that top of mind, trying it in a bunch of different settings in different ways. And getting it better at that thing before moving on to the next thing. So that's like a really common thing I see in my course is people feeling overwhelmed. And I always remind folks that, "You are building a new habit here. And be patient with yourself, take it step by step." There's a lot of stuff we're talking about here that a lot of people might be like, "This is so minor. What? I just bullet point sentences, be a little... Tell them the why at the beginning." And I just want to share in my experience the biggest jump I made in my career was actually getting better at these very specific skills. I had this manager, Vlad, who's been on the podcast and I talk about him regularly, who was such a stickler about communicating well and being very clear and concise and thinking and just spending more time on documents and emails, on strategy docs. Just like, "No, this isn't ready. Spend more time, here's something that's not clear." And just doing that was such an accelerant for me. And it's all these little things. That's what's interesting about it. It's like everything seems really minor but it all adds up to a lot of impact because to your point, people see it, "Okay, cool, I get it, let's go." Versus like, "I don't like this idea." And then it's like it all falls apart. So I guess any reactions to that? Yeah. All these little things compound and make a big difference. I often hear people think, "Well, this individual instance, this individual email, the Slack message is not worth spending a couple more minutes on. It's just an email or it's just a Slack message." The problem with that line of thinking is that no one instance of something is ever going to feel important enough to spend a little bit more time on that. And then, but when you zoom out, that's like, "Well that's all your work then. This is literally everything you've touched. This is all your work output then." because any piece of that process you thought wasn't worth spending time on and now this is just the quality of your work and it's not as good as it could be. So yes, these might seem minor but A, it compounds. And also B, all the "big things," everyone else is already doing. So, there's not a lot of alpha in that. Whereas if you are paying attention to skills that people think are boring or too basic and realizing that's a lever that you can pull, that someone else thought, "Oh, we're hitting diminishing returns on that. I'm not going to spend more time on that." But you realize that there's actually more juice left to squeeze there and you decide to squeeze that juice. Well, now, you have extra juice that the other person doesn't have. So yeah, in my experience I find that people claim the point of diminishing returns way too early. And this isn't just for communication, this is for strategies, tactics, et cetera. They'll try something once, a mediocre attempt and be like, "This channel doesn't work. This tactic doesn't work." It's like, "Really? Because it's working for a lot of other people who are getting really creative with it." I'm not saying that everything has to work for you but for you to claim, "This thing just doesn't work," feels a little bit intellectually dishonest. It's more likely that your skill level, your creativity, your execution ability was not good enough. And that's fine. Let's admit that to ourselves because if we admit that, then we can do the hard work of getting better at those things.…

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