Lenny Rachitsky: belief

Transcript context

…ne to sit back in conversations and let things happen, or am I prone to take over? Am I prone to go to intellectual abstract thinking and try to deconstruct ideas or am I prone to stay very pragmatic? If you don't know who you are and you think that the universe resembles you, then you're going to get super lost in that broader spectrum. I think the big five, I mean there's a bunch of models. You have Myers-Briggs, disk, etc. They're just all imperfect ways of measuring personality, but also, useful despite the fact that they're imperfect and especially useful if you take a growth mentality instead of a justification mentality to reading them. If you say, "okay, I'm low in politeness, I'm super direct." Your justification mentality of that would be like, "Yeah, damn right. I'm awesome that everybody knows what I really mean and how I really feel.' Versus the growth thing, which is like, well, maybe there are situations where I can try a little harder than 0% to phrase things in a way that if we work backwards from the outcome, we want to choose our actions right now, would these actions so direct actually increase or reduce the probability of that outcome? That's when we become more dynamic chefs, more dynamic people. Personality is a broad spectrum and self-awareness is the starting point for the whole thing. The big five model gives you a really good list of attributes to scan yourself through, and then you should be making a game plan for how to do that. Then you can turn your attention to the network of humans you're a part of and say, "Okay, well in what ways, because I'm me, am I so different than these other minds?" How can we create a mesh mentality where thought shifts among the group to fit most naturally? In product work, especially, whether you're a founder, entrepreneur, thinking about product at that level and your team at that level, or you're in the thick of product work pushing your mind and other people's minds to get this right, then you're going to benefit a lot from understanding these traits and these differences. I think the big unlock here for a lot of people is that the reason you are struggling, getting something done, working with someone, being successful at your company, with your manager, with a partner in your team, is they have a very different way of their brain operating, and so they think in a very different way, they react in different ways. You may think the entire world thinks the way you do, but they don't, and these tests help you see that. To make this super concrete for people, are there a couple of examples or wins you often find that you can share of just ways to use this to become better in your job, say this week? Whether with meetings or convincing someone of something, anything along these lines? I think one more layer would be helpful to this, especially if you're a leader or a manager, which is the business world isn't just hand-to-hand combat between a bunch of individuals on the blank matrix loading screen. You're actually in a habitat as a company and your team is like a habitat. I think of companies and teams, almost like little terrariums that we're inside of, and is this terrarium set up with sand and a heat lamp and we're a bunch of frogs, like we're going to turn into frog bacon, simply because we're in this habitat? A lot of it is you want to actually create a habitat or an environment that's predisposed to high-functioning thinking and high-functioning interaction between people. Because if the habitat is working against all of you to begin with, then all the hand-to-hand combat that's going to show up is actually largely a function of you just being in this heat lamp, dry, devoid of life, devoid of productive ways to grapple. That's where a lot of teams and companies sit today, especially more established teams. They've either lost their way in the habitat and haven't really set the scene for good, kind of thinking and interaction, or they just never had that to begin with. Some of this stuff, like when you've talked to a couple of other people in the past, your conversation, the Canva conversation, the Figma conversation both come to mind as like it is super obvious the energy that has gone into the habitat to predispose people to high function.…

Stored transcript either side of the excerpt. The highlighted words are the published quote; the surrounding text is unedited source, never generated.