Lenny Rachitsky: belief

Transcript context

…Well, here's what I noticed about everybody. I've coached a ton of people in my life. I have managed big teens and the people who are most successful are not the people who had no failures, who were lived charm lives, head up into the right careers and got promoted every cycle. The people who were most successful were the ones who actually through adversity, learned to turn stumbling blocks into stepping stones. They were the ones who got hard feedback and then came back stronger because now they learned what to do differently. They were the ones who products failed, but they said, "You know what? I'm going to turn this failure into success. I'm going to take those lessons and make this company stronger." When you live a charmed product life, you always work on everything that's easy. You don't actually... Trees are strong because they bend in the wind, because they're tested, because it's cold, because it's windy, because there's conditions. And that's how a tree goes grow strong and tall over many generations. And I think sometimes we think, "Oh yeah, I wish I lived a charm life." And that is not what we want. You want to have enough adversity that you learn to overcome so that you can build stronger over time and build resilience in your career. I've seen that so much, which is the best product leaders I ever worked with are the ones that have the toughest stories, that had the hardest feedback, but also the ones who were able to bounce back quickly and make it happen. We have a segment on this podcast called Failure Corner where people share a failure they went through kind of along the same lines and something we learned from that experience. Is there an example of that from your career where a failure made you stronger? Yeah. I remember there was a job that I really wanted at Facebook and I'd been there for a long time. I had been leading different teams. I was a VP of product and then GM. There was one job that I never got to do, so I got to do all the jobs I wanted and Mark gave it to someone else. I told him at the time when he gave it to the first person who was amazing at it, I said, "If this job were open, I'd like to be considered for it." The job opened up later, gave it to someone else. And I said to Mark, again, "I really wanted that job." And he said, "Not only will I not give you that job, you'll never have that job at this company."…

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