Lenny Rachitsky: belief

Transcript context

…If you'd called me earlier, I probably would've been on it with you. But anyway, we're together now. I thought it'd be fun to start with this question of just what frustrates you most about what people still don't get about the things that you teach, particularly Crossing the Chasm. You wrote that, I think, 33 years ago at this point. You have a lot of follow-up books around the topic. What do you think people still don't really understand or often get wrong? All the books I write are about frameworks. They're conceptual models about what patterns should you be looking for as something evolves? Because in disruptive innovation, there's no history. You're always projecting a possible history, and then seeing if you can make it come true. So that implies there's a lot of freedom to exercise the framework however you choose to. People sometimes do that in ways that are just... They actually end up being very misleading about what's possible. I can remember one person early on saying, "Yeah, we're Crossing the Chasm. Our beachhead segments the Fortune 500," and you went, "Well, I don't think maybe you're as clear on this as you could be." To be fair, that's what the function of any third party advisor is, is to say, "Look, time out. You might be looking at this through an inside-out lens. Maybe you should be looking at it from an outside-in lens." That's probably number one. Gosh, after that, I'm just empathetic with the fact that their world's more important than my world, so I try to work with their world.…

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