Ami Vora: preference

Transcript context

…At which point in your career was this overcoming this fear and uncertainty? Was it sometime within Facebook? It was sometime within Facebook. It was really when I was stepping into the bigger ads jobs, getting to be Head of Product for Facebook ads. I got feedback, I got a lot of feedback over the course of my career and some of the stacking of feedback was basically like, you could be the smartest person in the room, but it doesn't matter if people don't like you, which is very complicated feedback and I wouldn't give that feedback to anyone else, but I took it very seriously. It was coming from so many different places, it was coming from people I'm really trusted. And so I went out of my way to be more likable, which for me ended up being shrinking myself a little bit and not being so aggressive and not being so opinionated, being more unobjectionable. And the weird part is that it worked for a long time. People were more likely to work with me, they were more likely to say nice things. I mean, I take this to extremes. I wore earth tones for two years because I was just like, I got to fade back a little bit. And then at some point I actually had to do a leadership job and my team was like, well, what do you think? What's your opinion? And I was like, you've been telling me not to have an opinion for so long. And so it took a little bit of work to get back to, oh yeah, I have a lot of opinions, I have a lot of thoughts. It is okay for me to express. It is needed, my team needs me to have these opinions and thoughts and be a leader who can take ownership and be visible. Thanks for sharing that. Do you think that was the right approach, going and indexing far to the other end and then realizing that maybe that's too far, or do you think you would've done things differently looking back?…

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