Lenny Rachitsky: belief

Transcript context

…I have a lot of folks in my broader space who obviously have used it. So I never personally have myself, but I find there's various ways. The transcendent mindset is this feeling of being part of something much, much, much larger than yourself and losing your ego in this thing. There's different ways of doing it. Some people will find it in hiking and being out in the wilderness alone. Some people find it being at a concert and thousands of people perfectly in sync to this thing. Some people find it in religious experience. Some people find it using psychedelics and others to help get there. But a lot of it, it's that same just being willing to be in awe. There's so many times that people feel the feeling of awe or wonder or curiosity is treated as a not very serious or childlike thing. And I just don't get that because that is how you are open to disconfirming evidence. It's how you see beyond the current limits of what you... Your ego gets hurt when you get disconfirming evidence. You don't want to hear it. And so you'll construct the world around yourself to not get that disconfirming evidence. But disconfirming evidence is what makes systems strong. It's what makes you strong. And so how do you put yourself in the situation to get that information and really receive it? And part of it is just coming in terms of the fact of early in my career, someone called me kooky a bit. Oh, man. I must be embarrassed. I'm like, "Okay, fine. Yeah, I'm kooky, whatever." I'm totally at peace with the idea that some people track me as kooky and not particularly serious. I think people who watch the work that I do and the indirect impact it has realize that I'm doing something that is working even if they don't fully understand how it works. To start to close our conversation, I want to throw out one more seed that might land with someone in the right time. You have this concept of the adjacent possible, which I think is a really powerful concept. And it's basically argues that a lot of people jump to big bold ideas, and instead the better approach is think about what's a constraint you have and lean into the constraints and use that as a guide. Can you just talk about this and how this might inform how people think about product and strategy? Sure, yeah. The frame is the adjacent possible, which is I believe comes from design thinking. I've found it from designers in my life who are the ones who would just speak to it. And the adjacent possible is a set of actions that you do, that you can do. They are right in front of you that if you do them, they would work, almost certainly work. And in the tech industry in particular, we default assume that the adjacent possible is like this and then flying leap to something. And in reality, the adjacent possible is quite small. It's within arm's reach. And people will say, "Oh, you're being nihilist. You're limiting your potential. You're saying don't do big things." But when you recognize that your adjacent possible is relatively small, you realize that you actually have full agency to pick within the subset that is within your reach, and your actions matter because you take an action and now the world reconfigures and now you get a next set of actions and it's based partially on the action you just took. And so if you slice this thing up and you have a coherent worldview and you have a principled approach, you can arc to wildly different outcomes than look like they were possible while at each point, each individual action is safe and reasonable. And so you can combine both of these things. I think so many times we try to jump and we jump to the end state of the thing. And actually you don't need to make that decision. If you can slice up your decisions into smaller and smaller decisions, I'm like, "This next step definitely makes sense." It will almost certainly pay for itself or the very least won't be too expensive. And then it might allow these other things to happen and you take it. And if those other things don't happen, okay, don't take another step on that path. That's fine. Go in other directions for a while. If it does, then take another step and another and another and another. And this allows you to get rid of a lot of the risk and still be exposed to all the upside. And so the risk comes from trying to jump too far ahead in an unknown environment.…

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