Lenny Rachitsky: preference

Transcript context

…But it is all substance. So, Lenny, we know the substance behind it. I tried, but I think there's posting on LinkedIn, posting on Twitter. There's like an innate just doing this because I want to get attention when often... And the way I started this is just like things I've learned that I think are useful, I'm just going to put them out there. So just to double click a little bit, I think this is a really powerful point. What actually have you found helps people get over that? Is it someone like you and his corner being like, "You have really great stuff to share, you should actually do it. Don't be as worried as you are, as you think you might be." Is there anything else that works there? Actually what worked for me was I was working with Bos and I talk about our relationship in my book, but we made a contract when I started reporting to him. And Bos, for those of you don't know, is currently the CTO of Meta. At the time he was the head of ads and then our team moved into his team. And so I was reorged into his organization. And as I said we did not have the best relationship before that. And so we made a contract to work together and I had written like, "Here's how I want you to take care of my team. Here's how I want you to support our products." And I wrote them this long, my part of the commitment. Then he wrote back, "Here's what I'm asking of you. I want you to write and publish something every month." I was like, "What are you talking about? Why would you say that?" He said, "You have so much to teach people. Just do it." I said, "I don't really have that much to say." And he's like, "Just trust me on this. You'll figure it out." His advice was write what you repeat. If you say something more than once, just write it down. And then the next time someone asks you, you can just hand them. He has a great blog if you have read it. I just normally thinking that is a weird thing for your new manager to say after you had a lot of conflict together before that. But he took my contract, which was... By the way, he's like, "Oh, do you want to codify this in some way?" I'm like, "No, I just..." But every month from then on, I would literally just write something and it was my promise to him. And I did it faithfully and I published it internally. So I didn't publish it externally for a long time. And then sometimes they would ask me if I want to publish it externally for the company and I would say yes. And so I did it for years. I reported to him for years. And then we switched managers. He moved over to Reality Labs and then I had a new manager and I continued and I continued this. Then I started doing a publicly, and then obviously I wrote a book. Because of him and his encouragement, it got me to a totally different place. And part of it was just the commitment. I now had accountability because I knew he was watching. I'm not actually sure if he was actually watching every month. But I felt the accountability to do this and I've done it every single month since.…

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