Speakers in the public record
Claim mix
belief 7recommendation 4evaluation 4preference 3uncertainty 1
Evidence policy
Every row below preserves an exact excerpt. Identified speakers are linked; unresolved voices are labeled and excluded from people counts.
Claim ledger
The useful parts, with receipts.
19 published records
“Well, the obvious first one is Never Split the Difference. I recommend that book to everybody in the universe. I think if you haven't read it yet, you shouldn't get your driver's license. For those who don't know, it was written by Chris Voss, he was an FBI hostage negotiator. And it explores how to negotiate with people, and not just hostages, but your colleagues, your parents, your wife, like everybody. And there's some very surprising technique in there that is unexpected, not trying to get people to agree with you, but getting them to say no, more often. Instead of saying, "Hey, Lenny, are you willing to do this?" Say, "Hey, Lenny, are you opposed to doing this?" And it's just this reversal. And "I'm giving you the out," is the way he explains it. There's a whole bunch of other technique, but the more of that technique is in a team, the better. The better the team does. That's a no-brainer. The second one I would say, since we've kind of covered this topic a little bit about habitat today. If you enjoy reading books that are sort of root canals, but you're better off because you read them, there's a book called Never... not Never Split the Difference, there's a book called The Person and the Situation. It was written by some researchers, some psychological researchers. And what it explores is the difference between how personality influences your behavior, and how the situation you're in, or like we talked about, the habitat you're in, influences your behavior. And if you're not yet convinced that either of those matters, like, "Oh, it doesn't. I'll do what I do regardless of the habitat, or I'll do what I do regardless of who I am," that book will melt the face off of that existing mental model conclusively. It's really valuable knowledge to understand the mechanics of how the situation influences a person, and how the personality influences the person. And then I guess the last, maybe we'll put a fork in the road of a choose your own adventure. If you're a real student of the game, and you want go 10,000 leagues under the sea on this stuff, there's a series of books called the Cambridge Fundamentals of Neuroscience. You can find it on Amazon. A lot of them, you can just get on your Kindle for a lot cheaper than the library-decorating version of it, but that is bonkers. It talks about how your brain applies to intelligence, emotionality, relationships. It's incredible knowledge. If you instead want to keep it more in the part of the world you experience and can see and not the brain. Thaler wrote a book called Misbehaving. It was kind of the major book about behavioral economics. And again, we spend a lot of time in companies talking about the way people should act, instead of the way people do act. And behavioral economics is essentially the version of economics that's about how people do act, not how people should act. So I think that's a great field of study.”
- Publisher
- Lenny's Podcast
“We actually had, I don't know if you know this, we had the author of that book on the podcast, Matt Dixon, I think his name.”
- Publisher
- Lenny's Podcast
“I think of it like the brain is like a college campus that has different departments in it, and your brain has a science department responsible for open-minded experimentation.”
- Publisher
- Lenny's Podcast
“I think yes, there's the challenge component to it, but I think the underappreciated piece of that methodology is that you're still letting that person see the world, but you've given them new information that is breaking some calcification in their brain challenge.”
- Publisher
- Lenny's Podcast
“I think that's a ludicrous assumption for most meetings, and yet most people are actually shocked to find out that we're not on the same page even though we literally never have been, and as long as you're on day two plus of working together.”
- Publisher
- Lenny's Podcast
“You are being intentional to say, I think the world will create enough failure that adaptation will occur.”
- Publisher
- Lenny's Podcast
“I think, don't bother me beta is for some teams, they need to be told, "No, no, use this time not just to not be interrupted, but to think differently about problems.”
- Publisher
- Lenny's Podcast
“I think the big unlock here for a lot of people is that the reason you are struggling, getting something done, working with someone, being successful at your company, with your manager, with a partner in your team, is they have a very different way of their brain operating, and so they think in a very different way, they react in different ways.”
- Publisher
- Lenny's Podcast
“I think that's really, really important, not just what we're here to do, but how we can think about this best.”
- Publisher
- Lenny's Podcast
“I don't really worry too much about how much they change, it's more about how much they can spot with their intellect something that's misfit to the situation, and then take what they're motivated to do, and what they choose to do, and separate them. It doesn't matter if we change your motivations, if your choice of behavior and your underlying motivation can be different from each other, that's awesome, those people are super.”
- Publisher
- Lenny's Podcast
“Now assuming the relationship is in place, and we'll come back to that and talk about that because a whole very actionable framework to unpack, assuming the relationship is good, I think the starting point for influence is to choose your character and choose your mode.”
- Publisher
- Lenny's Podcast
“Something that comes up a lot on this podcast is the power of leaning into strengths and not feeling like you have to be amazing at everything, and that in this example, I have a low openness, high conscientiousness, I can still be very successful in the role by, in my opinion, leaning into things I'm actually really strong at, say conscientiousness, and I'm also high in agreeableness.”
- Publisher
- Lenny's Podcast
“Well, because moved out of the realm of ideas into the physical world that we can see right in front of us. And that team, because they got stuck in the translation phase instead of the experimentation phase, has a huge disadvantage in the market, and if you're competing head-to-head with one team, this is what I loved about the Figma conversation, that habitat inherently is built for speed because the habitat itself, words are tattooed to your brain that are like, we will not spend time in the translation phase, we will not spend much time.”
- Publisher
- Lenny's Podcast
“Because if I don't know what I like, then I assume everybody else likes what I like, then I'm not going to be a very dynamic chef.”
- Publisher
- Lenny's Podcast
“It's going to be like if we were busking in the park, this is going to be a cool enough mission, vision, values that people throw some change into my guitar case and they buy into it, they gather around. And I think that's just completely the wrong approach because we're hoping to inspire people.”
- Publisher
- Lenny's Podcast
“I don't know if they're neuroscientists, but intuitively, I think a lot of great founders understand humans don't work a certain way, and this whole paradigm of managers seems to be failing a lot.”
- Publisher
- Lenny's Podcast
“You're like a hurricane. So biologically speaking, the biggest bug in our programming as we transfer this to the business context is what makes the most sense in business is the most, if it's a meritocracy, the best people with the best knowledge that we can trust should be in the room and we will fight it with every fiber of our being if they're a terrible experience.”
- Publisher
- Lenny's Podcast
“I love the Einstein quote, " Make things as simple as possible but no simpler," and we've made things way simpler than possible in business by saying this is the right way of doing the whole thing.”
- Publisher
- Lenny's Podcast
“Something that worked really well for me, similar to what you just recommended is having, I had two blocks of time during the week that were two hours or three hours long, where it's just, "Don't bother me, deep work time.”
- Publisher
- Lenny's Podcast