Lenny Rachitsky: evaluation

Transcript context

…Yes. See, so we're stacking strategies, which is a really good thing to do. So we're pulling in all of the things I've talked about and it really makes for a powerful moment for people and a memorable moment. Because the most important thing is that we're becoming memorable. We are in a conference amongst other scientists and we're actually the one who's being remembered. So that was the band-aid approach. Then there's the way you recommend it was just build a bank of stories. I imagine this is where the Homework for Life framework you recommend comes from. So maybe let's transition talk about that. Because I think that has a lot of benefits beyond even just coming up with a bunch of story ideas. Yeah. It's the most important thing that I teach. Whether or not you're ever going to speak in your life. If you plan on being a hermit and going off into the woods and never speaking to someone again, you should be doing Homework for Life regardless. It's a process I came up with maybe 15 years ago now. Essentially when I began telling stories on stages, I fell in love with it immediately, and I got worried that I was going to run out of stories. I saw a lot of storytellers on stages performing, and they would tell the same 6, 7, 8 stories every time, and I didn't want to be that guy. I wanted to have a brand new story every time I took the stage. So in a fit of panic, I decided to assign myself homework being an elementary school teacher, it's natural for me to have that inclination. So I just decided every day before I go to bed, I'm going to look back on the day and find one moment that would've been worth telling as a story. Even if it wasn't really worth telling, I was going to write it down. Now I don't write the whole thing down. That's crazy. It's not doable. What I do is I took an Excel spreadsheet, two columns, the date, and then I stretched the B column across. And in that B column, essentially the length of the computer screen, that's where I write my story. My goal was I find one new moment per month. 12 new stories per year. That would be amazing. Instead, something far more amazing happens. I discovered that my life is filled with more stories than I will ever have time to tell. And I'm not a unicorn. Thousands of people all over the world are doing the same thing right now and discovering that their lives are filled with stories. Moments like Eileen, which 20 years ago, I would've forgotten that moment within days, and now I've held onto it because it's going to be a Homework for Life moment. So I start writing those moments down, and I discovered that I'm developing a lens for storytelling. I see the moments that I did not see before. In fact, I just did some analysis for my new book. In the first year I did Homework for Life I found 1.8 moments per day. So you can find more than one. Eventually I started recording more than one. So 1.8 moments per day. I now find 7.6 moments per day. It's not because my life is more interesting. It's because I have a better lens and I understand what to look for, what to see, and what is worth remembering. So I've become a person who has an endless number of stories like Boris. Boris does Homework for Life. It's why whenever we meet, he's got three new stories to tell me. And then we work on the stories and then figure out the business applications for them. So it's so important because what we do is we throw our lives away. People say that time flies and it doesn't. What happens is it goes by unaccounted. If you can only remember 89 days of 365 in a year, of course time flies. Because you had 365 and you only remember 89. It's going to feel like it went by quickly.…

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