Lenny Rachitsky: uncertainty

Transcript context

…I think there's this notion that we will use willpower maybe comes from the fact that some people can, maybe some people are just using willpower or they're on Twitter, they're on Instagram, they're on TikTok, they're on Facebook, they're doing all these things, and they're also functioning just fine, or at least what we see from the outside is just fine. But maybe internally too, it's fine. It just seems that everybody I actually talk to and certainly my personal experiences, all that stuff makes me feel bad and actually undercuts my ability to do the things that are meaningful. The meaningful contributions I can make through my work or through my life, whatever. They're all undermined and undercut by the bad feelings and the distraction that come from all of social media, all of the news and almost all of my email. And so if that's true for anybody, if it's even remotely true for us, we have to just radically rethink what we're doing. This thing, I think we basically are steered toward becoming reaction machines and this notion of, "I'm going to have an empty inbox. I'm going to do every task. I'm going to be a fast responder, I'm going to be in every meeting. I'm going to do that because I want to help other people, and that's the way it works." I think this desire to be helpful is a big driver of it. I think we want to alleviate our stress and other people's stress, and that seems like the right way to do it. It's candy. Some of the stuff is candy and easy. We also see this modeled by people in power, so like CEOs and bosses, it works for them because they're applying their influence through being constantly reactive and being in meetings all the time. That's just how they do what they do. That's how they apply their influence. But even for them, I think it has limits as a way to apply influence. At the bare minimum for the rest of us. And for those of us who again, I think is the vast, vast majority for whom all of these things create problems and we're not able to easily willpower and self-esteem manage all this stuff, if we're a reaction machine, we're not doing meaningful work, no Project A's and we're not really alive as humans. We're just chat bots. So it's worth experimenting if you don't want to live your life out as a chatbot. I think the point you made there around the feeling is just a really important point that even if you feel really productive enough and you're getting things done, is if you're feeling bad, it's still an important thing to focus on. This idea of, are you spending time on things you want to spend time on? You also reminded me of this app I'll mention briefly that I think you guys will love, I don't know if you've heard of this. It's called mailmanhq.com. It shuts off your Gmail for periods of time. So you could say, "Only allow my email through at these times of day." And so instead of email whatever, it's just like you can batch your release of email. That's beautiful. Mailman HQ?…

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