Ami Vora: preference

Transcript context

…Okay, so you've heard what he said about you? Okay, cool. So let me read this and then I want to learn from you how to do this. So here's what he said. "Working with Ami, it was like watching an alien because she could have the most profound disagreement in the world with somebody and they would say something that she thought was not just wrong, but crazy wrong, and she would respond, 'Fascinating, you have to tell me more why you think that.' And she meant it from the core of her being. She saw this schism and rather than reacting as if it was a threat, she reacted with the most genuine and profound curiosity. I just watched it absolutely tear down walls between points of view. Embracing curiosity in those moments of challenges completely changed my life and I owe that to Ami Vora." Oh man, I love Boz, what a great guy, and so kind of him to say that. I mean, I will say that this did not come naturally to me. I really enjoy being right, I love to be right. I think most of us love being right, and at least in my childhood, part of my identity was built on being the person who was right and being the person who knew everything. And then it turns out that in the working world, that did not serve me so great, it wasn't great to walk into things and be like, all y'all are wrong, I am the only answer, everyone please to listen to me and stop talking. And what really happened was that someone pointed out to me that not only... One of my old managers pointed out to me that not only was I spending a lot of energy trying to think through every possible thing by myself so I could be totally right, I was often not really coming to the right answer. Other people have a bunch of information that I do not have. And so I'm just ignoring that, I was letting my ego overtake my desire to get to the best outcome, which is just, that's a silly trade off and an unnecessary one. The thing that changed there is me just saying it's more important for us to get to the outcome and I very selfishly just like to learn more things. And so by deciding that I already knew everything, I was cutting myself off from learning the things that other people were really good at and it's so easy to just open the door instead and say like, hey, you seem to know something that I don't know yet. Why not tell me about it? I'm going to get better. We'll probably come to the right outcome. Maybe you'll have a better time. Why not? And so it was a little bit just accidental evolution in that direction. But it's made work and life so much more interesting to just be like, hey, what does this person know that I don't know yet? It means that every meeting you walk into, you're probably not going to get bored and I get bored a lot, but if you assume that every person there knows something that you don't know, then it's not just wait to get to the right answer, it's like, discover the thing that they know that you don't know and it becomes just a little bit of uncovering. For people that want to learn to be good at this the way you are, a couple things that I take away from the historian and the way you're talking about this is, one is there's an enthusiasm of, I disagree with you, but I want you to know I really care about what you think. So there's an energy of like, please tell me what I'm missing. There's also this assumption that a lot of disagreement is rooted in, we just have different information, so tell me what I'm missing. Can you talk a bit about just how to, what you've learned about actually do this well?…

Stored transcript either side of the excerpt. The highlighted words are the published quote; the surrounding text is unedited source, never generated.