Lenny Rachitsky: belief

Transcript context

…It's interesting because again, this is looking back, you're like, wait a sec, I didn't plan it this way. There's no way you could plan it, right? I'm going to work for a different billionaire every decade. That's not how it works but they're similar. They're mostly different people, but they're similar in one thing is that they have an irrational view of what the world should look like over the next decade or so. They're very long-term thinkers, very rational in that they'll look and say, "Hey, in 10, 15, 20, 25 years, this is what the world's going to look like." And I'm not good at seeing that vision, but I'm good at trying to move towards that vision 1% a week. And so the melding of the two, I know where I'm good and I'm good at pushing the ball forward. And if they're good at the long-term vision, we can both align to say, "You're good at this thing. I'm good at this thing. Why don't we merge forces?" And so that is something that has resonated with me is like, how do I find these irrational all progress depends on the unreasonable man. How do I pair with these people because I'm altogether too reasonable and there's no way for me to become unreasonable, and so I have to merge with these people. And so that is again, something that I specifically have sought out. And even when I was starting my own company in 2015, I actually sat down and wrote a list of all the unreasonable people that I knew in Toronto, and I went down the list and met every single one of these entrepreneurs to figure out are we API compatible and could I work with them? And I ended up picking one of them and starting a company. That is an amazing story. So first of all, I just love this insight that being aware of this is not a superpower of mine and I'm not going to try to build it. I'm going to find someone to merge with, and connect your APIs together and be the person that builds it, not the person that envisions what to build. I think that's awesome because a lot of people... I need to get good at all these things. I need to become the best at vision and strategy and execution and collaboration and then all these things. And so I think alone, this isn't really interesting instead it's just recognize your strengths and weaknesses and double down on your strengths. Yeah, it sounds funny, but me and you talked about it that a framework I wrote down, which I tweet out, me writing that down changed how I picked jobs forever, right? Because I had this lull after my first job in between where I was trying to figure out why nothing felt as exciting as my first job. And it turns out that it took me to sit down and be like, what do I actually care about? And people can get confused. I get confused all the time, by the way, by things that are not on my framework. So for example, a good one, title, company, money, all these things can confuse you because you could have somebody say recruiter messages you and says, "Hey, by the way, here's a new job and here's the compensation." You're like, "Oh my God, this is exciting." And if you don't have a written down framework of the things you actually care about, it's very hard to be distracted. So very hard not to be distracted. You get distracted by that. So instead, I look at the framework and go, does this align with my framework? Right? Actually to the point of, I actually sent my framework to a recruiter one time and I said, "Hey, this thing," because they kept going back and forth to me and I go, "Hey, this doesn't align with my framework." So it really saves me time from not being distracted, but it also forced me to think about every year I can reevaluate what I'm doing and look at the framework and say, "Is this true to my values?" Now, my wife will say this, that I'm like a robot. When I realize that my framework is being violated, I will resign instantly and I've done that before. So without even having another job or anything, I just go like, oh, my framework is being violated and then resign. There's this thing where I know what I enjoy working on, and that framework helps me find it. And so I encourage everyone, anybody looking for a job I always say, "Write down a framework. You can use mine as inspiration, but figure out what you care about and make sure that what you're working on lines up with that."…

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