Lenny Rachitsky: belief

Transcript context

…small university my dad taught at, and we just ran wild. It was on the estate of widow of Dodge Motor, founder of Dodge Motor, so we had a couple hundred acres of swamp and fields to go run around in. We did hair-raisingly, dangerous things that my parents never knew about, and really explored and had fun. I think if you put all those pieces together, I think there's much less of an ability and willingness and skillset around experimenting to the point of failure, making a fool of yourself, having bad ideas. I send stupid emails to Satya at Microsoft all the time where I'm just like, "I don't know what the hell he thinks of me at this point." Because I send him all these goofy ideas. I think he actually gets it and he's like, he likes it, because I don't think people usually do that for him. But I'm just like, "Man, this is..." Then I'll send him an email a week later. I'm like, "Yeah, that was a dumb idea. Sorry about that. I've decided that wasn't a very good one." But I think you cannot dance if you can't... If you're afraid to embarrass yourself. You cannot succeed if you're afraid to fail. That's just how it is. You have to have that sense of play. You have to have that sense of, it's okay if this doesn't work, I'll iterate on it. I have this personal motto, which is, from error comes virtue. Because I'm a maker, I make stuff. And I fuck it up all the time. I have poor motor skills, so I make mistakes constantly, and then I just figure out how to make the mistake into a virtue somehow. So I think it's a really good skill to have. The saying I took on this year and I really, really like it as my... I never had a personal motto before. I think it might be my personal motto, it's like, virtue from error. Amazing. On this topic of failing. I think a lot of people hear this advice and they're like, "Yeah, okay, I need to fail more. " It's hard to do. And oftentimes your performance at a company is negatively impacted. And it feels like for you it was just, you've done it enough times where fine, okay, it's going to be fine. I launch this thing, no one cares. I email Satya this thing, he ignores it or he doesn't. It's going to be okay. Is that maybe the key to this or is there anything else that you've done to allow you to be okay with failure? I feel like you can have a linear return on your effort if you manage things in a linear way, which is I think that tightly managing, okay, nothing's going to be surprising, I'm going to be within this boundary, I'm going to slowly accrete value, I'm going to play this game, whatever. I think you can have a nice linear, boring return to your career and you'll climb the ladder, it takes 30 years or whatever. I don't have the patience for that. And I think the way you get extraordinary returns is you do extraordinary things, right? You have to take bigger risks, and have more interesting shots to have this kind of extraordinary result in your career. I feel like I always tell people, I think... I mean, I pitch this because I've observed myself and thought about what has been successful in my career. It's not a thing everybody can do. I'm just kind of like this. I never really fully grew up. I'm kind of this weirdo. I still feel... I'm 57 now, and I feel like I'm about 17. I'm still very immature and like to mess around with stuff and play with things. So not everybody can do it. But I think there's, at the end of the day, the reason you get ahead in your career is you had a lot of impact. And the reason you had a lot of impact was because you picked something that you're good at that you did with a lot of intensity that wound up having impact, right? And so I think the good at part of it is hard too. We tend to undervalue the things we're good at. We tend to think work has to be unpleasant. And so if something is easy and fun, we don't tend to think it's very valuable. So I think lots of people gravitate in this direction of, let's go do unpleasant things and grind our way through the career, because that's the way to make it. But the reality is, you should go do the thing that you feel guilty to get paid for, if there's a thing like that, and do the hell out of it, right? Do it as hard as you can. If you get pleasure from doing something that people want to pay you for, do it the best you can do it, as hard as you can do it. And if that's messing around and playing around with cool ideas, do the hell out of that. Work doesn't necessarily have to be hard. It often is, but it doesn't have to be. And the best case is that it isn't. The most impact you'll ever have is where you're in that mode where you're just in the flow and doing your thing and you're happy to do it and you can't quite believe they pay you and you don't understand how you're getting away with this, but it's super cool anyways, right? I think that's the career thing that makes sense to me. At least that's what I've done. Who knows? It's all luck sometimes, so it's hard to replicate these. Everybody has a different path.…

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