Lenny's Podcast: Product | Career | Growth
00:55:30 · Becky Kennedy
[00:55:30] S1: Yeah. And I just saw the show on Broadway called Punch. It's this really interesting story about this guy, true story that it's based on, where essentially he ended up punching someone at a bar, the guy falls and dies, but he ends up getting to know that person's parents after incarceration. And one of the things that comes up, because I think we tell ourselves, people will take advantage, they'll take all the space you give them. I do tend to think about it in a more of an MGI way, where what happened in this show is, these parents, this guy killed their son. And the question they come to him with, because they end up meeting is, "Well, tell us what you're going to do with your life here. What are you going to do with your life now?" And he ends up saying, nobody had ever asked me that question. Nobody had believed in me. Nobody had ever believed I could do anything useful. Changed the course of his life. It's a crazy story. But I think about at work when someone, yeah, whatever it is we think they're getting away with, or kids, sometimes I think kids are asking, "Is there an adult here? Is there an adult here who will help me, who sees that this is my form of acting out and being out of control? And will somebody help me?" And you know why kids act out more? It's not because they're taking advantage of you. It's because they feel that much more dysregulated because they don't feel like there's an adult in the room who's willing to put a container on their shell-less egg to help them come back together and move forward in a better direction.
00:57:06 · Lenny Rachitsky
[00:57:06] S0: I think about just people that don't have parents that are there and always seek someone as their partner that's more, I don't know, that gives them that later. This connects really well with this idea of building resilience long-term versus short-term. And I think about in the work environment, doing the hard thing, you will be better off versus just letting things progress because it's hard for them to do. You think people will not want to hear bad news. Talk about just that kind of lesson and how that might translate.
00:57:30 · Becky Kennedy
[00:57:30] S1: One of the chapters in my book and something that guides our whole parenting philosophy is just codified as resilience over happiness. And I don't know if you hear this, Lenny, but I used to hear this all the time and I couldn't let myself let this small talk moment go. "Don't you just want your kid to be happy? You just want your kid to be happy, right?" And I'd always ruin a perfectly harmless comment. I was like, "No. And then again, we think in extremes, "Oh, you want your kid to be unhappy?" "No, I definitely don't want my kid to be unhappy." But I think if we zoom out, especially in childhood that I think I can make a parallel to work, too, optimizing for happiness in childhood is the quickest way to build anxiety and fragility in adulthood. Hard stop. Because in a kid's early years, what they're really learning is, "What range of experiences am I able to cope with? In how many different situations can I find my capability? Can I feel like I can get something done? Can I get through something? Or do I believe that the only way to feel like myself is to bring every form of discomfort to a zero and only find happiness?" The irony is, in adulthood, the thing that clouds out happiness often is our inability to manage disappointment, jealousy. Those things will always overpower happiness. And so happiness actually comes in adulthood from our ability to manage the widest range of difficult situations. That's what resilience is. It's our ability to handle the widest range of experiences. I'm not talking about toxic, but just disappointment, jealousy, anger, feeling less than. These are just human experiences we have. And unintentionally, something's happened over the generations where we're optimizing for kids' happiness. Our kids will say something like, "I'm the only one in my class who can't read," and we hop in with, "Oh, that's not true," or, "But you're so good at soccer, but you play chess, but you're doing this," as if I can't even tolerate my kids' upset feelings. And I tell parents all the time, our kids can only learn to tolerate the feelings we tolerate in them.
00:59:37 · Becky Kennedy
Nothing scarier to a kid that when they're upset, if I can't tolerate their upset feelings, that makes them doubly upset because it's like, "Oh, I guess this is unmanageable," which leads to adulthood where anything but comfortable and happy and doing a perfect job is actually experienced in your body is even worse, because you spent that many years thinking those feelings were wrong. So what that means is, when our kids are young and they go through hard experiences, those are our best opportunities to wire them for resilience and ironically for happiness later on. Because if I can support my kid, I'm not going to say, "Uh, no big deal," but there's a lot between no big deal and let me call the school to make this all better for you. There's a whole world. That's the world I think we try to live in and good inside where I can help my kids see they're capable of dealing with this. That's going to help them so much more over the years.
01:00:35 · Lenny Rachitsky
[01:00:35] S0: How do you think that translates to work? The way I think about it is just like, it's okay to upset people. You're better off. I think it was Kim Scott from Radical Candor had this great story where she had someone she was working with, he was doing a bad job. She didn't want to upset him. She didn't give him any feedback. Nine months later, he just didn't get any better, so she had to fire him. And he's like, "Why didn't you tell me that I wasn't doing what you wanted me to do? You could have told me somewhere along the way." And to us, it feels like, "I don't want to hurt your feelings." But then it ends up hurting their feelings a lot worse. It's a lot worse for them.
01:01:11 · Becky Kennedy
[01:01:11] S1: I think there's so many parallels. One of the reasons I love talking about childhood is because that's when our brain is wiring. It's when we form the blueprint, or my friend Maile calls it the factory settings, for the rest of our kids' lives. That's the ultimate, is to wire them with the default that works for them. But actually you can think about work relationships the same way, where of course people come, their brain's already wired, they're older, or somewhat. But if you think about it as a building, your first number of months with someone is, you're building the foundation for the whole building, which is the relationship you're going to have. And the earlier you're just optimizing for comfort and happiness, the more fragile your building's going to be. And you're right. Then you get to six months and you're like, "Oh, this person isn't doing so well. I'm going to give them feedback." But in their mind, they're thinking, "I've never gotten a piece of constructively critical feedback since I've been here. So I thought the nature of my relationship in this workplace was one of butterflies and rainbows all the time." That doesn't mean Day One I think you should sit someone down and say like, "Here's everything you're doing wrong." They're like, "I just started my job." There's obviously reasonableness. But yes, when we're thinking about a resilient work culture, we want people who can say, "This is hard and I can do hard things," not, "This is hard, so someone must be at fault and it should be easier." And I don't know anyone who would argue for the second culture. So I think we should ask ourselves, "Well, what am I doing in the nature of my conversations with people that help me build toward that? I'll make it really concrete, because I think so much of dealing with anxiety and struggle, not all of it, but I like a good formula, is this combination of, "I believe you and I believe in you." I think one of the ways we've majorly misunderstood anxiety, whether at any age, is we're doing the I believe you part, but we've forgotten the I believe in you part, and they're both, again, really necessary together, which might sound like this. "Look, I believe you. This is a hard project. You're totally right. And you've never done something like this before.