Lex Fridman: preference

Transcript context

…It’s just the one thing I really miss is just, even when I hated how people did it, just seeing how other people solved things, it’s really amazing just the raw creative power so many people have, and just being like, oh, wow, I would’ve never done it this way. Crazy, right? Wow, this is awesome. And then you kind of internally process this and you’re like, oh, I now have a new little tool in my tool belt. Because at some point it’s really hard to find a mentor when you’re first, young and you’re just starting out programming. I mean, anyone with a couple years of experience will be not just a little bit better than you, but infinitely better than you. It feels like crazy how much better people are. And so you have to get mentors and you learn from people. And then as you get better, that amount of availability gets really small. And so it’s something that I really do miss is that forced hard problem solving together. I think there’s also a skill to mining the wisdom from other people. I generally try to approach even junior people, young folks. It’s just mentally, at least for me, it works as a hack to assume they’re the smartest person in the world, way smarter than me. And so I take every single word they say as potential wisdom, and that helps me sort of mine for potential wisdom there. Because it’s so easy once you get older to judge, to be like, yeah, okay, okay. I’ve been through that. I remember feeling like that. I remember thinking that. That’s incorrect, whatever. But just kind of assume that I don’t know what the fuck I’m doing, and the other person is this sage. And in that kind of interaction, I think you could actually learn a lot. And my favorite interactions is when we both think that way. So from there, I think that’s a catalyst for a great collaboration and interaction. It just also makes everything much nicer. It really stinks to work with someone that’s combative and negative. I don’t mind combativeness if it’s like I’m trying to figure out what’s best to do right now, versus combativeness just because you’re a negative person and things have to be this one particular way, because if they’re not this one particular way, it’s the end of the world. And that’s actually really hard for me to work with.…

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