Lenny Rachitsky: belief

Transcript context

…It can also help you avoid doing unnatural things that you actually regret to grow. So if growth at all costs is just the thing, there's probably ways you could, "Grow the newsletter," that you would just say, "I just wouldn't be proud of that. And the newsletter's doing so well, that I don't need to do that." And so again, maybe that's a softer version because growth hasn't actually stopped, but okay, it's a softer version of, "I certainly don't agree with growth." You might say, "I certainly don't agree with growth at all costs. I want to grow as much as possible within the things that I'm proud of. If we grew fast, but the content was crappy, I'm just not willing to do that. It's not the point." And so it helps set up these boundaries of like, "Wait a minute, not if ... " And early on, we may not have that flexibility. You could argue that you should have those values early on because that's who you are, and that's what you're doing, and people respond. So I could argue you should have that all along, but I could also argue that at the beginning you're just trying to do something where you don't die, you're starting to blog, you're probably copying other people's style. You probably don't have that much unique things to say. So there's a lot of ... That's okay. You're just trying to get going. It's okay. 20 years later, if you have no style, and no voice of your own, and nothing new to say, that's probably not good, but to get going, sure. So sometimes we have this thing where we get going with maybe looser ... I don't want to say values. I'm not saying that's unethical, but looser bar or a pride that we have in our own work, and we tighten it up as we're able, as we can afford to, you might even say. So good, but then that becomes a nice filter here of like, "What is it in a greater sense I'm trying to do here, I'm willing to do here?" So if you're not growing, you're dying fair, but that has to come with these limits. And the more successful you are, the more you can be serious about those limits. I think an important element of this is also the product you're currently working on, maybe it's okay for it just to not grow. This is a good opportunity to do something else, have this thing maybe running on the side, maybe sunset it at some point, but it's a good opportunity to be like, "Okay, wait, what else is out there?" We had a recent podcast conversation with Matt MacInnis, CPO at Rippling, and there's some really good advice he shared on just when to quit, when to quit your startup, just like, "If it's like four or five years in and it's just not clicking, maybe it's time to move on." And even though people do succeed years in, most likely it's not going to be you. I have a book almost out now that's on pre-order about topics like what we've been talking. The next book I want to write is on this topic of how do I make these decisions of uncertainty? Like, "Maybe it is time to quit. Maybe I should move to a different city. Maybe I should marry this person. Maybe I should launch this company. Maybe I should use this strategy where you want to use probability and expected value. It's unlikely that ... " But the truth is we don't know what the probability is. We don't know what the probability curves look like. We actually can't use expected value. And anyway, even if you could have expected value, I am a human being. This is my life and I either sell the company or I don't. And so all this stuff about probability, and like, " That doesn't apply to me. I need other ways of sorting this out." So I guess I would just say briefly, probability is not going to work for these decisions. So that doesn't say what is right, but it's not that, which is nice, because you could put those tools down. "I'll do some market research to see if I should sell my company." Nope. That's not where the answers are.…

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