Lenny Rachitsky: evaluation

Transcript context

…To be clear, not everyone ends up in that level of depression, but the hack, if you will, is consciousness. So what do I mean by that? Part of what makes radical self-inquiry radical is we're socialized not to ask certain kinds of questions. So for example, someone says, "It's really important for me to be ambitious and achieve a particular goal." What's radical, a radical question to ask is, and what will that do for you? What is it that you believe being "successful" will do for you? How do you define success? Where does that come from? In Reboot, my first book, I tell the story of what I refer to as my pursuit of lemon drops. And briefly, when I was a boy, there was a lot... I grew up with an enormous amount of chaos and insecurity, financial and otherwise. And a big source of stability in my life were my mother's parents, my grandfather and grandmother. And Grandpa Guido, who was an ice man and emigrated from southern Italy in early 20th century, always seemed to have, well, he had this endless supply of lemon drops, and they were always kept in this green pantry outside of the kitchen. And for me, the stability and what I considered wealth seemed to match to this notion of this endless supply of lemon drops. And when I got to my 30s and I was outwardly successful and I was a hot shot BC, I had lemon drops, but I didn't feel safe, which was a mindful. And so, I told that story in Reboot as part of my exploration into the core question of how did my relationship to money shape my career choices, shape my school choices, shape my own sense of safety and self-worth? So long-winded response to your question, what I encourage people to do is to ask themselves these kinds of questions so that they can raise their level of consciousness so that they can be in the driver's seat of their lives and not some learned behavior that they developed as a child to answer perhaps their parents or grandparents' anxieties. I feel like a lot of people hearing this are afraid to ask these sorts of questions. The reason they don't ask these questions is because they worry that this is going to be like, okay, I got to quit my job, move to the woods, give up all these luxuries they have. I don't even want to think about that. I got a whole family to support. I got to succeed. Advice for getting over that hump of just like- So let's just pause, Lenny. Okay, so what you're doing in this moment is empathetically imagining what may be going on for your listener, but the empathy is actually based on your own question because you invited me on the show, you knew I was going to get to this point. So I'm imagining that as you take this in, that thought stream shows up for you. "Jerry," says Lenny, "If I open up that closet, all the shit's going to fall out, and what am I going to do with it?" Does that resonate at all?…

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