Alex Komoroske: evaluation

Transcript context

…It reminds me of something Ed Catmull shared in Creativity, Inc., this idea of the ugly baby, that every new idea is an ugly baby and nobody wants this ugly baby. Everyone's just like, "Get this out of here," because every new idea is bad initially. Yeah, it sucks. They're just like this ugly thing that barely works or... But this is why what I try to do is I try to see the greatness, the seeds of greatness in everything. Everyone and everything around me, I look for, I try to find and see, man, what is the most compelling part of this? And let me lean into that. And so one of the things I try to do when I meet with people, when I mentor them, I try with it within the first session or two, whenever I can get a hypothesis, I say, "I think your superpower is... " And I describe to them what I think I can see them being truly exceptional at. And sometimes I get it wrong, especially if I try to do it earlier, but when people feel very seen and they feel acknowledged for that, they now are willing, they're going to stretch farther and they're going to respond to nudging feedback even better because they know that you're not trying to tell them be different. You're trying to tell them be more, and you now the nudges will feel less like a stop energy and more like someone who gets me and can help me grow even more. And you can get some amazing things out of people when you just treat them with the respect. I assume that everyone I talk to, everyone I talk to is interesting, has seeds of greatness in them, even if they don't recognize necessarily where they are. Someone described to me actually this morning in one of my little dirt clubs I run about they help facilitate about treat everybody like the Buddha. I think is I'm messing this up, but this notion of imagine everyone you talk to is the Buddha, in a Buddhist mindset, and how do you see and find those seeds of greatness and treat everyone with respect intrinsically as an end of themselves. This is one of those things that you do to be a compassionate human. It's also, I believe, a way to maximize the amount of value, direct and indirect value, that's created. So it's one of those win-win-win-win-wins where just it's the right thing to do as a person and a member of society, and it's also the thing that can create a lot of business value and create real value in the world. This episode is brought to you by Coda. I use Coda every day to coordinate my podcasting and newsletter workflows. From collecting questions for guests, to storing all my research, to managing my newsletter content calendar, Coda is my go-to app and has been for years. Coda combines the best of documents, spreadsheets, and apps to help me get more done, and Coda can help your team to stay aligned and ship faster by managing your planning cycle in just one location, set and measure OKR's with full visibility across teams and stakeholders, map dependencies, create progress visualizations, and identify risk areas. You can also access hundreds of pressure-tested templates for everything from roadmap strategy to final decision-making frameworks. See for yourself why companies like DoorDash, Figma, and Qualtrics run on Coda. Take advantage of this special limited-time offer just for startups. Head over to coda.io/lenny and sign up to get six free months of the team plan. That's coda.io/lenny to sign up and get six months of the team plan, coda.io/lenny. Coming back to a phrase that you used earlier, slime molds, I want to spend a little time here. So interestingly enough, the first time I heard about you and what got me interested in your stuff is I did a newsletter post with the company Perplexity about how they build product. And as they were describing how they organized their team, the co-founders described they organized like slime mold, and he linked to your deck about slime molds and I was like, "What the heck is this?" Can you just briefly describe what you mean when you talk about slime molds and how slime molds are related to the way companies are organized and how they should think of the organization?…

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