Sam Schillace: preference

Transcript context

…It's funny, it's a choice. I'm not an optimistic person by nature. I'm just not. All the people in my life, if any of them listen to this, they'll just laugh at the idea that I'm a proponent for optimism per se. It's just a conscious choice. I don't think you get very much for being pessimistic necessarily. You definitely don't get a lot for being careless. You can be optimistic to the point of being careless and causing harm, for sure. Maybe a better way to say it is growth mindset, right? You want to look at the possibilities rather than the limitations, and suspend some disbelief and just work on these problems. I just personally feel like I've missed out on more than I've protected myself from. If I sum up both sides of that equation over my career, I wish I had been more open-minded and more optimistic, and more willing to try things, and more focused on possibilities rather than problems. And so I'm just personally choosing to do that, try to do that as a habit. Nothing deeper than that. I just think it's a better place to be, particularly... It's kind of funny. When I came out here, I was pre-med. I dropped out of school. I came out to be a computer scientist with my friend. I didn't think of it that way. I came out to have a job at Ashton-Tate with a friend of mine, and spent 10 years not understanding that I was actually in a career and thinking that it was a temporary thing where I had to go back to med school and get my degree and be a doctor or something boring like that. And so for 35 years of doing this, it hasn't occurred to me that, oh, actually, I'm in this computer industry that's this technical industry that's constantly growing and constantly inventing things and constantly coming up with these new ideas. And actually, the best posture in that world is to be creative and curious and open and optimistic and try things and stuff like that. The other thing I'll say about optimism too is related to doing these disruptive things like G Docs. Going back to this idea of all the good ideas look bad at first. Okay, so that's a first principle. That's a sort of fundamental thing of you're going to constantly be challenged by the really good ideas. So how do you overcome it? Well, one way you can overcome it is you want to be able to try things more easily. So part of that is being more optimistic, so being more willing to try stuff, and part of it is also just making it cheaper to try things. Very early story of G Docs, when I had the idea for Writely, my two co-founders who were both deep domain experts in both app building and word processors were like, "The browser is never going to support this. It's a bad idea. Let's not do this." And they were right and wrong at the same time. They were right that it didn't support even what we have today and wouldn't have supported a full experience, but wrong in that the world was going to change and evolve. ht and wrong at the same time. They were right that it didn't support even what we have today and wouldn't have supported a full experience, but wrong in that the world was going to change and evolve. And we would never have done the first experiment if it had been a long and costly thing to do, right? So the fact that our tools were sharp and I could say, "Let's do this thing." And it only takes a couple of days to get it on its feet and see how it feels, it's kind of a form of optimism, right? If you're super pessimistic, you can be like, "Even that's not worth it. Two days is a waste of time." So there's always a little bit of a leap of faith. And then you want to make those as consumable as possible. You want to be able to try things out quickly and learn things and do these experiments. Now, lots of people have said that before, but I think all those pieces connect for me in this idea of being optimistic and open to trying stuff. Because stuff always is different. You're always wrong about products. That's one of my other rules is you're just always wrong. And so you have to try it. You have to put it in front of people. You have to try it yourself before you'll understand it. No one can really design products in their head completely as far as I can tell. Awesome. There's a few threads I want to follow there. But this is also a tool that I found came up again and again in first-principles thinking, people that are really good at this, is just trying it. There's a lot of just, "Nah, it's not going to work." And exactly as you just described, you often find out you're completely wrong when you actually try it out. And you have this quote, I think in one of your newsletter posts, talking about building Google Docs. You describe it as just fuck around.…

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