Kevin Yien: belief

Transcript context

…Oh, my God. I'm just distraught and I sulk away. I'm very sad. I study hard. I do the next math test, I get 100% yes. All right, dad's approval, here we come. I come flying back, I put the test in his hands, he stares down his nose at it, looks at me, "Where's my other 3%?" I'm so confused. I'm like, "I got 100 out of 100. I have no clue what you're talking about." He just looks me down the eye and goes, "Who said a hundred is the most you can get?" At that age, I literally had no clue what he was talking about. And he had to reframe it for me in the moment around like, "Well, was there extra credit? Can you just write your own problems to challenge yourself more? Could you have given yourself another test? And maybe the teacher won't give you credit, but you give yourself credit for doing additional work. " I think I carry that theme forward where there's this weird transition we all go through from childhood to adulthood where we no longer receive homework, we're responsible for defining the work that we do. And when you do that, if all you do is the minimum of what defined the 100% of what your job requires, you'll never grow. And so it's up to you to actually find what is the additional 3%? There's always three more percent. So that's my dad's lesson. Kevin, you're blowing my mind. There's so many great stories, you're just full of them. And I feel like this lesson also applies really well to product and building product and founding companies.…

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