Lenny Rachitsky: belief

Transcript context

…The middle way is typically the right way. And it's hard to find the middle way because these are conflicting ideas. The guardrails or the posts you just set. One side is like, we're just going to go on the other side as we're too maybe almost unsure. And you have to somehow, once you do have that debate, you have to then confidently walk down that path. And again, this is conflicting. I just said, be humble enough to listen to what's going on. But then once that decision is made, the decisive... In our values, that first value, the speed value, which is specifically the wording is move fast, move safe. That's specifically the wording. We assess our managers on adherence to those values. Literally, we compensate and promote against those values. They're not just abstract values. So the behavior we're actually looking at under speed is decisiveness. So we're setting up a system that is looking at these conflicting kind of things. One is be open and the other one's make decisions quickly and you have to hold those intention. This is why you as the co-founder or founder of the company get paid the big bucks. You got to do that. You have to know when to bluff and when to hold them and when to fold them, as I say. So at some point, and that point comes sometimes faster than you think, you will not get any more information and you have to make a decision. So you're walking this very, very thin line. Your point about emotions was extremely interesting, and I want to make sure people don't take away the wrong takeaway here. So what I actually found really helpful, which I think is aligned with what you were suggesting is taking emotions out of it. The way I've used this in my work is when you have to make a hard decision, pretend nobody's feelings would be hurt and emotions are not involved. What would you do if nobody cared? If they're like, "Totally great." So what would you do in that world? And then that tells you, okay, that's actually the right thing to do. And then it's, okay, how do I help people feel okay about this? How do I deal with the downsides of this path? Yeah, I think that's the obvious version of it. I think maybe another version of thinking is it's an emotion is, let's take another route. You, as the leader or as the engineer who is getting a direction, you already have some preset view that this is my idea. That's an emotional construct and it's around ownership and feeling of ownership. So yeah, I really fall into that category of the more... So even maybe most fundamentally, what is an emotion? An emotion is these set of reactions that a framework that's been imparted in your brain through life experiences. And those life experiences might not actually may have not been optimized for you to make a decision in a product review. And so the more you can pull that away, a good heuristic would be the same decision being made by multiple people in the company gets the same result. So you're removing a little bit of that almost like filter. You can almost think of that emotion as a filter. So I like to have the raw image come through, the raw decision come through so we can consistently classify it again and again, not to get too abstract, but I don't know if that makes sense.…

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