Lenny Rachitsky: belief

Transcript context

…That's actually such a profound point and I wish somebody had told me that earlier in my career because early in my career, I would get all this advice like, "Oh, Sriram is too loud and too boisterous." And the thing is, nobody I know has ever become successful by trying to fix their weaknesses, it's just impossible. The only way you succeed is one, you might need to mitigate some of them, especially if they're really, really holding you back. But you have to lean into your strengths, which is a weird thing because I think when we do performance feedback, it's feedback and so much time we are like, "Well, these are all the good things and then let's talk about the ways you know can improve." It's almost the flip time and I think if you're doing performance feedback, you'll be like, "Well, these are things you're really good at, let's make you even much better at that. Let's make you fly faster, run harder, close the deal, write better code." Oh yeah, and some people are mad at you for these things. You should watch it and maybe fix some if it's really bad, but that's not what's going to pull you ahead. It's the superpowers that's going to really pull you ahead, so let's focus on that. Yeah. The way I think about that is the weaknesses can't be liabilities, you can't just get on stage and melt and explode, but you don't have to be amazing. As long as you can email really well, write documents really well, communicate in other ways if that's a strength. One last trick while we're on this topic, I was just reading Hunter Walk's blog and he shared a cool trick for imposter syndrome where you just have to ask yourself, "Am I so good at pretending that people don't see what's actually happening? Am I actually that good to being this imposter? Probably not, the people can tell," and it's really unlikely you're actually an imposter. Also, by the way, the reality is and this a cliche is people are just not thinking about you.…

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