Ada Chen Rekhi: prediction

Transcript context

…I think that there are heavyweight and lightweight ways to use this. So the heavyweight way was what I just exemplified by saying, I sent an email and I made a doc. And on the other side, I had all of this really interesting and rich data. The lightweight way to do this is really just make it your ongoing theme of what you're curious about as you interact with people. So maybe it's this thing where every single day as you talk to people, if you have a social topic, you might just bring up the same question over and over again and start looking for are there any differences or surprises in what people are telling you? One of the big reasons why I think curiosity loops are really useful is that it really fights the fact that there's a lot of bad advice out there. And it's not bad because it's not well-intentioned, but it's bad because it's not contextual. So when someone tells you to quit your job and chase your dreams, or they tell you to sit tight and grind through and build some experience before you go off and go start the company that you've always been thinking about starting, which piece of advice do you actually take? Right? A lot of it depends on your situation, what you're considering, what skills and experience you actually have, and curiosity loops actually are this way of really thinking about how do you make your advice contextual. So I'll break it down a bit in terms of how I think about structuring it. So the first piece of a curiosity loop is really just thinking about asking a good question. In the time when I was working at SurveyMonkey in the past, I had this opportunity to spend a lot of time with the survey researchers, and we really talked a lot about what makes a question good. So in this case, a question's good if it's specific, if it solicits rationale, and it's not biased. You don't want to start a question with, here's what I think because people have this tendency to want to please you or to agree with you. So a good example... Well, let me start with a bad example of a question. A bad example of a question is, what should I do with my career next? It's just such a poorly formed question because it's really vague, it's not specific. It puts a lot of cognitive load on other people, and the output that you're going to get from it is probably going to be similarly bad. Garbage in, garbage out. A better example of a question might be something like, "Hey, you know me. I'm a marketer. I've been thinking about doing this webdev thing. So my plan is to quit my job, do a webdev bootcamp and then go find a job elsewhere. Do you think that's a good idea?" There's just so much rich data to actually explore with that. First, are you suited to being a developer? Are webdev boot camps effective? What's the state of the economy in the hiring market right now for junior web developers? And that's an example of maybe a question that's a little bit more specific and gives people something to anchor on. So that's the first piece. n the hiring market right now for junior web developers? And that's an example of maybe a question that's a little bit more specific and gives people something to anchor on. So that's the first piece. The next piece is really around how do you curate who you ask? I think there are two dimensions of this. The first one is the obvious one, which is a subject matter expert who really knows something about the topic at hand. So maybe a webdev themselves, for my example question. Another one, and this dimension I think is really important, is someone who knows you really well and can provide insight on how well does that work for you. And then after that, you really want to ask the question. And this touches on what you said about how do you make it really lightweight? Ask the question in a way that really gets you a useful constructive answer, but doesn't put too much weight on people. So what I usually like to do is just make it very lightweight. So in your case, I said, "Here are nine topics. Can you pick your top two and tell me why you like them?" Some people went above and beyond and scrolled through and gave me feedback on every single topic. Some of them just said, "Here are my top two, and here's one I think you should avoid." I wanted to design it in a way where if you're a busy founder, you're a busy product person, which is the list that I chose for this curiosity loop, you would be able to sit down on your couch at the end of the night, read this interesting email and tap out a quick reply and give me that answer. Because the risk that you're running is either you're getting poor answers or you're getting a really low response rate because you've given them way too much cognitive load in terms of answering it. And then finally, to close the loop, I think a big piece of it is processing that information and then thanking them for it. So a big misconception that people have when they're really getting into this work of asking for advice or input from other people in the community is often that it's really one-sided. I'm asking you for help and you're getting nothing out of it. The reminder that I would have for all of you is that it feels really good to help someone. It feels really good to be heard and give input. And a big piece of that is, if someone comes to you and they said, "You gave me this advice, it changed my life. Maybe it's not at that level, but it really affected my decision and here's how it turned out. Thank you so much." That feels so good, especially if you only spent a few minutes giving them the input that enabled them to make a better decision. So to summarize, I wrote these pieces down. The concept broadly is if you want advice on a decision you're trying to make, pick some friends and this is... I guess I'll go through the four things you just mentioned. And part two is actually pick the right friends. But one is just, come up with a question that's specific. As in just like, what should I do with my life? But more, should I take the specific role at the specific company? Figure out the people that know you well and maybe have some context on this decision. How many people do you usually email for this sort of thing? What's a number?…

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