Lenny Rachitsky: recommendation

Transcript context

…I stopped making long term plans, because three years ago you would've asked me what I wanted to do, and I was like, "I want to be, I don't know, a manager of managers." And then I became one. And then [inaudible 00:51:01] what is my dream? I would've been like, "It's a stretch, but maybe I want to be a site lead." And I didn't become one per se, but I never thought of writing a newsletter, or now writing a successful newsletter. So I'm going with the flow. I'm seeing this less, by the way, as a newsletter or creator, or creator economy as people like to see it. I see this as a business, and I'm trying to put on that business hat. I'm building a one-person business. I want to make it sustainable, I want to make it successful, and I find that this thinking really helps me detach as well. I can actually enjoy my weekends as opposed to thinking, "I need to write this, or I need to write that." So I also want to make it work for me. And I'm not married to the idea of, it always needs to be a newsletter, et cetera. Right now it is, but where I see us going is, I'll keep building the business, I'll keep playing to my strength, which is I love talking with people, I love writing [inaudible 00:51:56] I love software engineering. So this is a great format, but over time it might shift. So I'm keeping my options open. And what I've learned from this journey is, you need to create time for that spark to come. So one of my goals for next few years is to not spend 50 hours a week on a newsletter, which I'm doing right now, but spend 20, and then maybe take a few weeks off and have that spark come. Because the reality is, this newsletter only came because I gave myself six months of unpaid... I'm not going for work, I didn't ask for any LinkedIn emails. And the idea came and the inspiration came and the motivation came. There's a lot of similarities with my approach. I don't think too far long term. I have no idea what's going to happen. I just take it to... I see where pull is coming from, and if it feels like an interesting opportunity and something that I'd be excited to work on, I explore it, like the podcast for example. And on that point, I will say, once you find that you can spend maybe 20 hours on a newsletter, I guarantee you'll find more work to fill that gap, because that's what I've been doing. Yeah. And one last thing to touch on, you said something really important [inaudible 00:53:06] pull, and I want to double down on that. One of the biggest, best things about doing what we do when you're in charge of your time is, you can double down on pulls. So [inaudible 00:53:18] Uber, like I said, my plan was, I'll write this book for six months. Two months in, I just put a draft [inaudible 00:53:24] a really long blog post about mobile engineering, and I got a ton of messages, a lot. I usually used to get like three or four messages on Twitter per day. I got 20 in an hour, people saying, "Can I read the draft?" And I was like, that's interesting. I just felt this pull, of this huge interest of people caring about this. It was this really long blog post about mobile engineering at scale, and someone suggested on a private message, "You could probably turn this into a ebook." And I was like, that's a good idea, because it's a really long blog post. So I said, "It's going to be an ebook, and it'll be pay what you want." And then people started to buy it. And I was like, that's interesting. So I didn't have much else to do, so I was able to double down. I said, for the next two months, I'm going to write this book, because it seems there's an interest in it. And [inaudible 00:54:07] I turned it into a book that was free for two months, but I got sponsorship. The point was, I was able to double down on this pull. And same thing with the newsletter. So we're going to talk about how I got the first few thousand subscribers, but the point was, I was able to double down on something that I felt like, this is super interesting, I never expected that people would care about building a large mobile app, more than a few hundred people. Turns out they do. Thousands do.…

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