Lenny Rachitsky: belief

Transcript context

…One thing I've learned about myself since that post actually is just the degree to which I am somebody who is inclined to be passionate about things. And that's a, that's a, it's a gift that I'm very lucky to have. And I understand that's not every person. And so like, actually the ads thing is a good example. When Mark told me to go work on ads, I was like, no, I don't want to, I don't think I have a passion for that. I had this idea of myself. I had a very strong identity of myself as this, like, AI infrastructure products guy, and I was working in this space. And nope, I was wrong. I just am a guy who gets excited about things. Once I got into ads, I was like, oh, this is fascinating. It's a three-sided marketplace, and there's all these different... It was like a real... It felt like I was playing chess times in terms of the moves of the other players in the industry. And I was super pumped about that. And then when he wanted me to work on hardware, I was like, no, I'm not. I'm a software guy. I'm a software guy, Mark. No, I love this work. That's such a fascinating space that I've learned so much. So I do think that's right. I do think when I find something I'm passionate about, that's good. What I have learned since then is to give myself the space to understand if I can get passionate about it. Now, there are parts of jobs that I've had before where I just never found the passion. And after six months, I just have to move on. I literally, it's like, I'll either quit, get fired. Like I'm doing bad work. I don't care about the work, you know? And so I do have a self-awareness. It's not that I can get passionate about anything, but I do have a pretty broad palette, it turns out. I think that's a really interesting career lesson of don't assume you won't be excited about something that may come up. Is there anything there that you'd share with folks of just like explore it, give it six months, see if you can get excited about it? Absolutely. So I have a very unusual career arc in some ways, which is like I really almost changed jobs like every six months for a long time. Like, you know, I was working on this integrity stuff with News Feed in the background. Then I was working on News Feed for about a year. Then I worked on site speed and infrastructure and detecting SAVs and issues. And then I worked on boot camp, and then I worked on messaging and groups. I had this really funny thing. I was kind of joking. It was like, for those who are old enough to remember Karate Kid, I felt like I was painting a lot of fences, waxing a lot of cars, and at the end, I knew karate. At the end, I had the payoff because I'd gone through, I'd met a lot of people, and I'd worked in these different areas, and I understood different dynamics. Well, other people who joined in my cohort were getting promoted, but they were like in a single track. Like they just stayed in one place and they got promoted. Whereas I kept moving around and probably at some point early in my career felt like I was moving more slowly relative to my peers. And then when I finally turned the corner, really with the ads appointment, which I did for five years, I went vertical. I just like my career went vertical. And I've kind of since then I've kind of been on that trajectory. Yeah. And so advice I most often give people that this for me, at least the lesson that I take from this is just like, I just was willing to learn aggressively. I would move because I wasn't learning enough. I was bored. And so I wasn't like learning enough new stuff. And it was cool to finally get into the ads job. And likewise, in the job I'm in now is like those jobs. I learned a ton for five years. I never stopped learning in those jobs. You will occasionally find those jobs where they're super deep and you can just keep learning. Meanwhile, A lot of my friends whose careers were on a better trajectory than earlier, they literally got bored of what they were doing, but they didn't have any place to jump to. They'd become domain specialists in a domain that they'd kind of exhausted for themselves. And maybe they even stuck around longer than they wanted to because it was comfortable or because the company wanted them to. And it ended up kind of being a hindrance to them in the middle of their career. And so for me, it's like, don't be jumping new things. Give it six months. If it's not the thing, no problem. Like you just built a ton of new skills. That's going to come in handy. I promise you that. Keep going. And likewise, when you do make that jump, And so early career, optimize for learning, optimize for like, think about a compound interest. Like it's like the first like 10 years of compound interest don't look that impressive. It's like after 10 years, it starts to look good.…

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