Lenny Rachitsky: belief

Transcript context

…Thank you Lenny of Lenny's Podcast. I knew what to expect, but it's fun to see the first name and the podcast all line up. I really appreciate you asking. So I wanted to start with a quote that I found from you that I think gives a little perspective into how you think and how you approach the world. So here's the quote. "Very frequently I would do poorly on tests in school and then the professor would say very reasonably, 'Hey, I think you should bump down a level to the previous semester's pace,'" and you said, "I actually know that, that's why I'm in this class. I want to be in the class that I'm potentially the worst at." This isn't how most people think. This isn't how most people operate. Usually people want to get good grades, they want to be at the top of their class. Clearly you have a different approach and a different mindset. Where did this come from for you and how did this shape the way you think about product and the work that you do? Some of it was just the fact that I wasn't particularly good at the class and had to rationalize it for myself in some form. So in retrospect that sounds highfalutin, but at the time I just wasn't particularly good at the classes I was in. But I think it comes from growing up. I went to a pretty hippy-dippy K through 12 school in Baltimore, Maryland where we were really asked to think about why we were in school and to pick any of the courses that were of interest to us outside of AP programs or grades or any particular requirements. You really got to choose your own path. And I recall one particular class in high school, which was somewhat a science class, but it was called the History of Science, and we actually walked through and studied all of the, at the time, best understood ways the world worked in science, but then later were turned out to be wrong, right? In the 1500s we believed X, Y, and Z. In the 1600s we believed A, B and C. just very confidently. In 1500s we thought something and then the 1600s we thought something very different. And so this class was quite impactful on me where we spent an entire year studying things that are not true. It was fascinating. That particular teacher employed another trick on us during that class, which was it took the tuition fee of our school and divided it by the number of hours and wrote the cost on a ticket and then handed us in the beginning of the year. Tickets for every single one of the classes and he would stand at the door and you would have to give him a ticket at the end of the class that he thought it was worth it. And just like that practice of deep intellectual understanding of how people evaluated something at the time and choosing for yourself to spend the time on it by just the physical act of handing that ticket to the teacher. That really clicked for me. And so when I got to college and it was a real college university, people are coming from often quite more rigorous backgrounds of things that were true. I was a bit unprepared and I remember actually taking a microeconomics class that was quite advanced and had a close friend and we studied exactly the same information. We sat and looked at the same cheat sheets, we practiced the same quizzes, we read the same books, and he got the top grade in the class and I got the bottom and that's from where that quote came from where the professor said, I think you should bump, potentially bump down. I was like, "I already know that stuff. I'm interested in this topic. I'm going to try to improve, but look just because I'm significantly worse than the other kids in the class that has little to do with if I should leave." And he was particularly cool with it.…

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