Amol Avasare: preference

Transcript context

…Oh, wow. And when you have a brain injury, until you're 100% healed, your risk of another concussion or a brain injury is elevated. When you're 100% healed, your risk falls down to that of a non-concussed population. But until that time, and even if you're like 95% healed, you're not 100% healed. And it was just an innocuous sort of in everyday life getting off a plane, a bag sort of hit me on the head type thing. And I was off work for two months when I... One month into joining Mercury, one month in, I'm like, "Sorry guys, I need to peace out for three months." And then it was a very, very long recovery from that. And I'm actually still not 100% healed. So I'm mostly good, but I have times when I have dizziness and headaches and other things that I need to work around. Overall, I feel like it's one of the best things that could have happened to me, and I think that keeping that mindset helps. And there's a point when you can take that too far when that view is detached from reality, but I think it's just made me so much better and more effective as a person. A lot of the same habits, I don't drink alcohol, I don't drink caffeine, I have to do a bunch of these things for my physical health. I just have to do them. So I keep doing them. I take breaks. This is a really big one. You might think even in a place like Anthropic, how do you survive in this way? It's like even on the craziest days, Lenny, between the start of the day and lunch and between lunch and the end of the day, I take a short break. Even on the craziest days with model launches, et cetera, I'm lucky we have a meditation area in the office that I'll go to. And then the whole side of things around meditation that I talked about in that post, I think both you and I have done a retreat at Spirit Rock and doing a meditation retreat changed my life. And it's something that I do at least once a year now. I have one coming up relatively soon as well. And just I think all of that has helped with better managing the physical side of it because this job is very taxing, and then emotionally having a little bit of space to what happens. So you have sort of awareness on one side, you have the reality on the other side. And reality's crazy here, man. Reality's insane. There's so much happening every day. There's so much noise, it's mind-blowing. And so that relationship between awareness and reality, that's where you have choice that you sort of learn from deep meditation on how to shift that and apply your choice there. I think that that is the thing that has helped me significantly with just keeping a more level head. I think a lot of staying in this game in this level of intensity is just keep your head, just don't lose your head in the crazy times. And I think all of that that I've gone through has helped me do this without resorting to unhealthy coping mechanisms. Wow. Amol, you're such an inspiration in so many ways. There's so many reasons that you would not have been successful and things would not have worked out. And there's so many lessons to learn from just the stories you've shared in the journey you've been on to help people overcome challenges they're having. If you can come back from an insane... Was it like a kick to the head? Is that what happened?…

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