Lenny Rachitsky: recommendation

Transcript context

…Yeah, your brain is just going to feel agitated when you're around vision. But, I mean, you can still do it, right? You can still ask people to translate. The key tactic is, okay, it's not this you're predestined to suck, it's more if you're low and openness, especially if you're also high in conscientiousness, then recognize your native language for ideas is a mismatch for the native language of vision and really, really good strategy. And then you can be open about that and you can ask for some translations, and you can ask for... I mean, trust doesn't have to be non-participation, you can actually say, it would help me trust if you could explain this gap. A great example would be a second order effect, why should we have awesome documentation? How are we going to make more money if we have awesome documentation? Great question, don't be hostile in the way you asked it, but just help me understand, what thread are we pulling? Well, we're pulling this thread of customer satisfaction, retention, recommendation, et cetera, Stripe is really good at this, especially from the early days, that great documentation justifies all sorts of second order effects that then will lead us to this first order effect you're asking about. Awesome, okay, that's really great. And I was going to go one direction, but I want to talk about this real quick. Something that comes up a lot on this podcast is the power of leaning into strengths and not feeling like you have to be amazing at everything, and that in this example, I have a low openness, high conscientiousness, I can still be very successful in the role by, in my opinion, leaning into things I'm actually really strong at, say conscientiousness, and I'm also high in agreeableness. I don't like the sound of that. Thoughts on just, it's okay if you're not amazing at vision because your openness is low, but you can be better at other stuff and together you can be really successful no matter how your personality. Absolutely right, yeah. I mean, the truth is we look at, taking that Canva example of coaches and managers, not only does that change the way an employee feels about the way this connection they have is invested in them, but it also changes inherently a lot of the meeting dynamics and teaming dynamics from hierarchical feeling things manager to more mesh based intellect. And within the mesh, you don't have to worry too much about the hierarchy anymore. You can say, this is the nature of my contribution. So even in the vision and strategy piece, maybe your contributions to idea generation, there are going to be some, and they're probably going to be good. But those are not ideas to protect in the state that you brought them to the table, they're ideas to set on the table so that people can surround them and improve them. And then as other people contribute ideas that aren't as natural to you, kind of just realize we're not in the phase yet of judging and ranking and prioritizing these ideas, that's not where we are in the overall storyline. So let it happen, and then if you can improve those ideas, improve them. And once ideas have that early stage, that kind of like what Jony Ive described as the infancy of an idea, when it's really weak and delicate and susceptible, if you can nurture that idea to adolescence where it has a little bit of ability to defend itself, then now you're in a situation where your conscientiousness can start to think about things like how would we resource this? What sequencing makes the most sense? What is the ROI of these things relative to each other? And consider the second and third order effects, and so on. And what would the project plans, and to your point of being both conscientious and agreeable, you are this master of coordination and alignment naturally. So when that phase of the project begins and we have to get people bought in, high functioning together, getting on the same page, staying focused, getting the project done, all of the people that were good at the beginning with all the vision and strategy, they are just a complete disaster in that phase. That's just how things really work in the real world, and I think we're so, again, focused, like we talked about at the beginning, we alluded to the fact you have to unpack enough complexity. I love the Einstein quote, " Make things as simple as possible but no simpler," and we've made things way simpler than possible in business by saying this is the right way of doing the whole thing. It's like, no, no, no, if you've ever lived a day in real life, building a real product, the dynamics shift a lot throughout the course of product life cycle, as an example, or really any life cycle as an example. And the peak humans as the dynamics shift are very different, peak humans. Lenny is awesome here, contributes here 10%, contributes here 98%. Evan contributes 98% here, please get Evan out of the room when it comes to these meetings, that's great.…

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