Lenny Rachitsky: uncertainty

Transcript context

…It might be a coffee shop where you don't find out what the wifi password is and there's just this amazing, amazing feeling. Maybe it's just you go to a park where there's no wifi, just whatever it might be, finding a place where you can't, you just can't get that stuff. Leave your phone at home if you can't bear to delete all the apps. It's so great. It's so great. And then you're not fighting the battle. A lot of this stuff, there's a visualization I think of where I've got the highlight in front of me. It's right there. This thing I can see that I want to do, but it's like five feet away or 10 feet away, and right next to me just kind of vibrating are all of the... You can imagine all the app logos, they're just kind of vibrating right around my head. They're right there and touching any one of them, it's like they're little pieces of candy. It's all going to feel good. There's this really good meal, five to 10 feet away is this great sandwich, but these little pieces of candy are right in my face and it's going to be hard to resist just popping a little Sour Patch Kid or Laffy Taffy in my mouth, but if I could push them away, if I can just push them far enough away so that there is far away or farther away than the sandwich, I'm going to eat the sandwich. And Mike, if that's what you do basically with these barriers to these distractions, then you can get into laser mode and it's easy. You want to. Once there's space, you'll want to do the thing that's most important. It's just it's hard because the candy is right in our face. Such a good metaphor. You also have this metaphor of Odysseus sailing past the sirens. If folks know that story where there was a siren, I don't know, cliff thing where he's just sailing. I know well, in eighth grade I played Odysseus in school play, so I can tell you all about it.…

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