Lenny's Podcast: Product | Career | Growth
01:38:25 · Lenny Rachitsky
[01:38:25] S0: What I love about this is a lot of people have these times in their career where they're like, "It's all over. I failed in such a big way and my reputation's screwed and people were counting on me and now they see I'm an imposter. I never knew what I was doing. And after all, now they finally see." And just seeing that, and this was three years, I'm looking at your LinkedIn, you had seven employees, something like that, and then it's like masterclass, Mercury, Anthropic. I think it's inspiring to hear a story like that to know that you can have a big failure like that and things can work out. That is not the end. Okay. So at 2023, I was going to go on pat leave because my wife's pregnant and I was just like, "Wait, what do I do with the newsletter? I need to take some time off. That would be really nice to take a month or two off." And so my plan was, "Okay, I'm going to do a bunch of guest posts where people line up." I put out a call for guest posts, people apply, I pick a few and then I kind of slot them in ahead of time so I could take time off. So I put out this call, "Hey, who wants to write a guest post for my newsletter?" I got 500 plus applications. One of those applications was from you and the pitch was essentially how a traumatic brain injury made me a better product manager. And I still remember reading the first draft you sent me and I was just like, "Holy shit, this story is incredible." It's just like you feel such feelings and it was just so tactically interesting and useful like, "Oh wow, this is actually going to make me a better product manager." Share the story of the brain injury that you went through and just the journey that you went on there because this is going to blow people's minds.
01:40:04 · Amol Avasare
[01:40:04] S1: It was the toughest time in my life. It made shutting down a company being like, "Oh, that was nothing actually." Just funny how perspective works that way. Back in early 2022, I had a traumatic brain injury. So I'd done MMA for many years. I'd done Muay Thai, which is a type of martial arts for many years, never had a problem. And it's just one of the things that happens, the wrong session. It's just a normal day of sparring, nothing crazy. You get the wrong hit to the head in the wrong way, and my whole life changed. And basically I spent nine months. I was off work for nine months. The first couple of months were brutal. It took me roughly half a year till I was comfortable walking again. It was very, very difficult. The first two, three months beyond just showering and going to the bathroom, my wife did everything for me, including texting my friends. I would listen to music for maybe 20 seconds and feel like I needed to vomit. I couldn't look at screens at all. And it was a very, very long recovery. It was not clear to me that I would ever work again for a while actually. And it was like we'd even discussed my wife, what would we do in that case, et cetera. And we had to think even on those levels. And through a lot of pushing and really working through myself, and you have to just slowly increase your tolerance to things. It's a brutal process, but you need to slowly expose yourself to different things and just get better and better at each little thing, actively work on that, don't push it too far, otherwise you have a big setback. It basically got to the point then where over nine months and then that it returned to work and then it slowly got better. And the part, Lenny, you don't know is in mid-2023, we posted that newsletter and a month later I got re-injured actually.
01:41:59 · Lenny Rachitsky
[01:41:59] S0: Oh, wow.
01:42:00 · Amol Avasare
[01:42:00] S1: And when you have a brain injury, until you're 100% healed, your risk of another concussion or a brain injury is elevated. When you're 100% healed, your risk falls down to that of a non-concussed population. But until that time, and even if you're like 95% healed, you're not 100% healed. And it was just an innocuous sort of in everyday life getting off a plane, a bag sort of hit me on the head type thing. And I was off work for two months when I... One month into joining Mercury, one month in, I'm like, "Sorry guys, I need to peace out for three months." And then it was a very, very long recovery from that. And I'm actually still not 100% healed. So I'm mostly good, but I have times when I have dizziness and headaches and other things that I need to work around. Overall, I feel like it's one of the best things that could have happened to me, and I think that keeping that mindset helps. And there's a point when you can take that too far when that view is detached from reality, but I think it's just made me so much better and more effective as a person. A lot of the same habits, I don't drink alcohol, I don't drink caffeine, I have to do a bunch of these things for my physical health. I just have to do them. So I keep doing them. I take breaks. This is a really big one. You might think even in a place like Anthropic, how do you survive in this way? It's like even on the craziest days, Lenny, between the start of the day and lunch and between lunch and the end of the day, I take a short break. Even on the craziest days with model launches, et cetera, I'm lucky we have a meditation area in the office that I'll go to. And then the whole side of things around meditation that I talked about in that post, I think both you and I have done a retreat at Spirit Rock and doing a meditation retreat changed my life. And it's something that I do at least once a year now. I have one coming up relatively soon as well. And just I think all of that has helped with better managing the physical side of it because this job is very taxing, and then emotionally having a little bit of space to what happens. So you have sort of awareness on one side, you have the reality on the other side. And reality's crazy here, man. Reality's insane. There's so much happening every day. There's so much noise, it's mind-blowing.
01:44:15 · Amol Avasare, Lenny Rachitsky
And so that relationship between awareness and reality, that's where you have choice that you sort of learn from deep meditation on how to shift that and apply your choice there. I think that that is the thing that has helped me significantly with just keeping a more level head. I think a lot of staying in this game in this level of intensity is just keep your head, just don't lose your head in the crazy times. And I think all of that that I've gone through has helped me do this without resorting to unhealthy coping mechanisms. [01:44:47] S0: Wow. Amol, you're such an inspiration in so many ways. There's so many reasons that you would not have been successful and things would not have worked out. And there's so many lessons to learn from just the stories you've shared in the journey you've been on to help people overcome challenges they're having. If you can come back from an insane... Was it like a kick to the head? Is that what happened? [01:45:11] S1: It was a kick to the head. That's correct. Yes. [01:45:13] S0: Just feeling like you may not be able to listen to music to just leading growth at the fastest growing company in history. There's also just a lesson here of constraints. Again, you mentioned this idea of just the power of constraints. You're forced to take breaks, you're forced to go meditate in a way that's really helpful and it's a lesson for us all. This is actually really good for us all.
01:45:36 · Amol Avasare
[01:45:36] S1: Yeah. I think that freedom through constraints is one of the big takeaways I've had during that time. Because if you have these constraints, you're forced to adapt and it creates, gives you in a business setting, you have to focus more in a personal setting. And if the constraint is, "I can't do anything and I'm injured. I don't know what's going to happen. I don't know. I'm going to get better," you have two choices. You're like, one, are you just going to resist and fight with reality and really suffer from that, or are you going to accept the situation and not let that affect you emotionally? And it's not to say I did everything, man. I was like, every single thing I could do, diet, I was like, "I'm on it. Every action I can take, I'm on it." But then you have a choice of, are you going to let the impact of that define your happiness or not? And I think that that's the thing when the impacts maybe are not coming, you have to then adapt to, "Okay, what do I want my happiness to be?" And one of the meditation teachers said that true freedom in life is learning how to be content when you don't get what you want. And it's not to say you shouldn't do something when you don't get what you want, but I think that that takeaway of just can you be content and not have your happiness rely on getting something. It's a challenge. I'm not perfect at it, but I think it's probably one of the biggest takeaways from that whole thing.