Lenny Rachitsky: belief

Transcript context

…Yeah, I think that's right. I think that's right. Yeah, the combination, yeah. My friend, Larry Summers, had a different version of the Scott Adams thing, which is he used to tell people, he said, " The key for career planning is," he said, "don't be fungible." He's an economist and so that was economic speaking. What that means essentially is don't be replaceable. And so don't be a cog, and what that meant was don't just be one thing. So if you're, quote unquote, again, just a designer, just a product manager, just a coder, then in theory you can be swapped in or out. But if you have this E or F laying on the side kind of thing, and if you have this combination of things that's actually quite rare, then all of a sudden you're not fungible. Not only you're not fungible, you're actually massively important because you're one of the only people in the world who can actually do that combination of things. And yeah, your ability to not become one of those people is just titanically enhanced with AI as compared to anything we've ever seen before. This is so interesting because I've worked with people that are good at these two skills and they were always called unicorns at the company. She can code and design, oh my god. And what I'm hearing here is this is what you need to become. You need to become really good at at least two things there. I think you used the term smoke stack or something where it's like PM over here, engineer design, and what I'm hearing here is you need to get good at at least two of these skills. The silos of these two roles are disappearing. That's right. That's right. And again, I can't overstress the following, for anybody listening to this, the thing about AI that I think people are just not getting enough benefit out of yet is just it will teach you. This is amazing. There's never been a technology before where you could ask it, "Teach me how to do this thing." And so I always feel like it's like people spend too much... it's one of these things where it's like so much focus on figuring out how to use a large language model is like, "Okay, what am I going to try to get it to do for me?" which is of course very important. But the other side of it is, what can I get it to teach me how to do, and it's just as good at that. And so again, this is this level of latent superpower. People who really want to improve themselves and develop their career should be spending every spare hour in my view at this point talking on AI, being like, "All right, train me up. Super empower me. Train me, train me how to be... I'm a coder. Train me how to be a product manager." It will happily do that. It knows exactly how to do that. Run me, make me problems... yeah, make me assignments, then evaluate my results. It will do that just as happily as it will do work, quote unquote, for you.…

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