Lenny Rachitsky: uncertainty

Transcript context

…Yeah, so there's this Chinese idiom that my mom used to say, it's a [foreign language 01:50:24] which the translation is "A frog at the bottom of a well". And the story is like there's a frog at the bottom of the well. He looks up every night and he sees the world and he imagines he knows everything about the world. And then one day a bird comes along and describes all the things that he sees, the ocean, the mountains, and the frog realizes that what he sees is just such a limited part of the world and the bird asks, "Do you want to come join me?" And kind of see the rest of it. And so frog goes along. And so for me, I came from a pretty modest childhood. My parents, we didn't have a whole lot and I think it would've been very easy to kind of have a very narrow lens on the world and be like, "Oh, this is what it is." But my mom never allowed me to do that. She always pulled me to dream much bigger to say, "Hey, the world is vast. It's your opportunity to seize it. You have to go out there, don't have a narrow view of what's possible. Always dream bigger." And so for me, that's always carried through and every time I feel like I'm thinking too little or too small, I try to zoom out and remind myself that there's much more out there to go after. That is so good and so important and so valuable in today's world where so much more is possible. Just like, most of what limits people it feels like now is just, I don't know what idea I have. I don't know what to do. Now you could get things done so much quicker and so much more is possible. So that's such valuable thinking. Okay, final question. You help people present better. Your tools basically help people become better presenters. What's one tip you've learned or one tip you teach people to become better presenters that might be helpful to listeners? Yeah, I mean, I'll go back to the consumer advertising concept, which is one idea at a time, this notion of you give them one egg, someone can catch it, give them too many eggs, they're going to drop it. So don't try to throw too many concepts all at once. Keep it simple. People will appreciate it. And so with every sort of presentation, break it down into the core concepts, try to make sure you're covering one at a time. And I think once you sort of see a through line there, then it becomes easy for it to package up into something that feels more cohesive.…

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