Lenny's Podcast: Product | Career | Growth
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.
01:03:14 · Becky Kennedy
It makes sense," that's such a good phrase, "It makes sense you're nervous about it." Or something I say to my kids that I should say more at work. "I'd be nervous if you weren't nervous. You have a big task. I'd be nervous if you weren't nervous. Of course you're nervous. That makes total sense. I'd feel the same way. And the reason we think you can take on this project is because we know you can figure this out. By the way, I'm here to answer questions and help you along the way, but I just want to make sure you hear that from me. Yes, this is hard and I also know you can work through this. And the way you're going to feel at the end, you're going to feel so proud of yourself. And I don't want to take away the project from you, because I kind of think I'm taking away that feeling. And that's going to be the feeling that propels you to do all the other amazing things you want to do here. And let's work toward that." And that's actually, Lenny, something I used to say to my kids when they were your kids' age. I just distinctly remember this time one of my kids was whining about this puzzle, and he's like, "Do it for me. Finish it for me. You have to do it." And of course, the easiest thing to shut down the tantrum is like, "Fine, here's how you do it." But it was the day I had a little more bandwidth. And I heard myself sing something that, I don't know, it felt like healing to me, too. Honestly, I said, "Look, you're right, this is a hard puzzle. It makes sense you're frustrated. All of us feel frustrated when we want to do something and haven't figured it out yet. You're feeling this moment right. Take a break, take a breath, but I want to tell you why I'm not going to do this for you. There's no better feeling in the world than watching yourself work on something and make progress on something and maybe even complete something that you originally didn't think you could do. There's literally no better feeling than that, and I will not take that feeling away from you." And I think in the workplace, and definitely in parenting, we should be mindful of how often we take feelings of capability away from our kid. And I take that very seriously, because I feel very passionate about building a world where kids become adults who feel capable. And I think we can do that in these small moments more often.
01:05:20 · Lenny Rachitsky
[01:05:20] S0: As you share these stories and examples, I'm just like, "I wish I had Dr Becky in my ear constantly giving me advice as I'm doing this stuff." And we'll talk about how people sort of can get that. But I'm actually really happy you talked about this I believe you Lesson. I was going to bring it up. That was right next on my notes. Because I've used it with my wife, actually, and it is so good and so effective. And this is why I love your advice is that it works not just for kids, it works for adults. Just like, "I believe you. I believe you feel this, even though I don't know why and I wouldn't feel that way, but just I believe you." I like this, this makes sense piece. I haven't thought about that. And then the I believe in you, that's interesting because I did talk about, the way I remember phrasing this, this was a moment I really remember just like, "You're smart, you'll figure this out." And then she just went back to me and she's like, "Wait. What did you just do there?" That felt really good.