Lenny Rachitsky: belief

Transcript context

…So this advice of career optionality, being the ultimate north star for anybody in their professional journey is something that I'm very strong on because a lot of people have the goal of, I don't know, maybe I want to be a VP or I want to become a CEO. Or I don't know, I want to be a manager and I want to people manage. And this becomes their north star and they start working towards it. But a lot of people when they get to their perceived corporate ladder north stars find themselves extremely dissatisfied, depressed even by how terrible that job is. Could people manage your job? I wouldn't wish it on my worst enemy because it's a terrible job if you don't enjoy it and you don't know if you're going to like it until you actually do it. So I think setting a title as your goal, which so many of us have titles as goals, is very wrong way to think about it as opposed to saying, "Hey, my goal professional is actually to have options so I can choose what I want to do. So I can choose what fits my life right now that I can choose what fits my skills and that fits my personality and that makes me happy." And to get career optionality, if that's your goal, you start thinking about your progression a lot differently. You're not starting to think about it of what will get me to the next title. You start thinking about what will can I do next year that will increase my option pool? And that's very different than just getting to a higher title. And if you start thinking about evaluating opportunities or whether you should stay at the company, whether you should move at the company from the lens of does it increase my options if I stay at this company for one more year or does it keep it the same or does it actually potentially decrease? That is the right way to find your ultimate happy place and happy job that brings you energy, that brings you happiness versus just going for a title and then being very disappointed with what that brings along with it. Amazing advice. So important and something I'll add that I think is a balance to what people may be feeling here is like, oh, I'll just bounce around all the best logo companies and create this killer resume. I think you also need to build depth and actual experience that you can tap into if you do any of these things. For example, a lot of people want to jump to like I'm going to be a newsletter person, I'm going to start a podcast, be an advisor before they've done anything real and you have nothing to actually base your advice on and that part is very important. You have to earn your right to unlock optionality and earning that right does usually lie within full-time jobs. That is a universal truth. But then at some point you should start not just looking at full- time jobs as the only option that you have. You should start to think about when can you start unlocking new ones and testing the market on it.…

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