Lenny Rachitsky: uncertainty

Transcript context

…I mean, so many things. I think the first one is recognizing that we're really early and instead... I actually was pretty intimidated coming to OpenAI, if I'm being honest. I remember interviewing. Oh no, I got to... GPT-4 had recently come out and GPT. I was like, "What is all this stuff?" I was using it and I was using the stuff, but I didn't feel like I had a true understanding of it. And to be honest, I still have so much to learn. So that idea of you are early, we're figuring this out. That I think I would want to hear. And the other thing that I found, and for me, this is more of a personal thing, it's less about AI or anything, but I stepped into a really different role most of my career. I definitely managed before, but never at a scale that's growing so fast and then at a company that is so different that... the role was just every day was something new. And for a long time I felt like I'm kind of bad at this or I don't know what I'm doing. And then I went and talked to friends that had led really large design teams or were in a similar transition as me and they all felt exactly the same or the problems that I had were not unique. And so this is, I guess, more personal advice that it's like, I think at any stage of your career, there's that feeling of imposter syndrome and what am I doing? I don't know how to do this. Finding people you can talk to that are going through the similar things, you'll find that there's usually a lot of shared challenges and struggles and having that, whether it's a mentor or just a buddy that is impartial, out of it, was really helpful to me. And finding that community I think has been helpful. So yeah, so that and then understanding that this is all so new and evolving really quickly. That is extremely helpful to hear. Elena Verna had this really great post. I don't know if you know her. She's head of growth at Lovable right now. She had this great post called Stop the AI Confidence Theater, where she just kind of is like all these people just keep posting all these things they've done with AI and all the ways it's changed their life and it's just the killing it, figure it all out. And really it's very few people, very few of these things are actually that great and working and it's just like, stop. Stop pretending like this is actually, you figured it all out. I tghink it's much better to be humble about it and be like, wow, yeah, I don't know. This changing quickly and I'm just going to embrace it and see where it goes.…

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