Tyler Cowen: belief

Transcript context

…The set of things I’m good at doing — in terms of just coming up with ideas and creating content, I’ve been pretty good throughout my career, and hopefully continue to be, at seeing where the next thing is in media and what are the set of skills that you’re going to need to combine to get there. From blogging, and I think I was reasonably early on in figuring out how to merge a lot of new blogging with traditional journalism skills at the American Prospect. Brought that to the Washington Post and was able to figure out a way to build something out of that there. Saw some things in TV that you could probably do, taking some of the ethos of blogging, and what we were beginning to see, and what the audience was responding to, and taking that to cable news. I have been reasonably good at steering a course through a pretty rapidly changing media landscape. I don’t disagree, but it’s not somehow meta enough for what I’m asking. The Ezra Klein, what’s the thing about the Ezra Klein? I would say your key skill is self-learning. You’ve talked yourself about how as a student in school you were “at best, indifferent,” I think were your words. You’ve learned all these things on your own. You’re a very good self-learner. Maybe that’s the key meta skill that makes this work in the leadership position, or no? Maybe. Constant anxiety would be another possibility. It is a surprise to me that I turned out to be — and I guess you’d actually have to ask my team [laughs] if this is true — a pretty good manager of people. That came reasonably naturally. The thing that I think I’m good at doing as a manager is understanding what the folks working with me are actually doing, and so getting a sense of what they actually need. The way I tend to work with people is by trying to figure out what the project is and what their broad project is. I don’t mean literally what their task is right now, but what is their project at my organization? What are they trying to do over the course of a year? Then figuring out how to support in that. Compared to other people I know — and this is feedback I’ve gotten — I’m pretty good at figuring out how people understand the work they are doing, and then how I can support them in that. The other thing that I think I’m not bad at is having a pretty clear idea that I’m able to communicate of where we’re going. I didn’t think this was going to be a huge issue. I didn’t think a lot about branding when we started Vox. In fact, I thought media brands were probably becoming less important as content disaggregated and moved around socially. It turned out they were getting more important, and that along the way, we were able to define a pretty clear one. Something that I’m pretty good at doing is defining that, and hopefully holding to that, and communicating that. Definitely leadership and CEOing is something [laughs] that I am learning as I’m going along. It might be hard for me to get the perspective to say what I am good at or not good at from a meta level on that.…

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