Lenny's Podcast: Product | Career | Growth
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.
01:46:50 · Lenny Rachitsky, Amol Avasare
[01:46:50] S0: Incredible. And we'll link to the post of folks who want to read this. Before we get to a very exciting lightning round, is there anything else you wanted to share, or should we just jump right in? [01:46:58] S1: I think we can jump into it. [01:46:59] S0: Oh, we covered a lot of ground. Okay, here we go. I've got five questions for you. First question, what are two or three books you recommend most to other people?
01:46:59 · Lenny Rachitsky, Amol Avasare
[01:46:59] S0: Oh, we covered a lot of ground. Okay, here we go. I've got five questions for you. First question, what are two or three books you recommend most to other people? [01:47:09] S1: It probably ties to a lot of what I just talked about. I think a lot about meditation and my emotional state. What I spend most of my time thinking and reading and researching and working on outside of work. So my recommendations very related to that. The first is a book called Joy of Living by a Buddhist monk. His name's Yongey Mingyur Rinpoche. It's just really about how you can start to think about your life experience in a different way and have tactics of what to do to kind of change just how you think about things. This is one where I've recommended to people. Yeah, I've recommended to a lot of people and they've really, really enjoyed it. I think another one is Awareness by Anthony de Mello, which is a kind of similar thing but from a different angle. Those two I consistently recommend to people. And then the third one is more relevant to product in many ways is Thinking In Bets by Annie Duke. I think just being able to break down a situation when someone's like, "I don't know, it'll get done in time. Okay. Can you put a number to that? What percentage or likelihood is it?" Those types of things, I think, are just so tactically helpful in product. [01:48:20] S0: Favorite recent movie or TV show?
01:48:20 · Lenny Rachitsky, Amol Avasare
[01:48:20] S0: Favorite recent movie or TV show? [01:48:22] S1: I think movie is probably Marty Supreme. It's one of the only ones I watched recently. I thought it was great. I thought it was just insane. Absolutely insane movie. It was ridiculous, but I loved it. TV show, I have not watched TV in a while. I think it's probably the Olympics would be the one, if that counts. [01:48:38] S0: Is there a product that you love just like, I don't know, when you discovered recently or just one you have in your life that's like, "Oh, this is very cool. People might want to know about it"? [01:48:45] S1: Yeah. So this is a funny one. I was in Japan last week and I was sleeping in this hotel and I just really loved the pillow that I had in this hotel. It was very random. I just at times had neck and upper trap pain and sometimes I've been frustrated with my pillow because I sometimes sleep facing up, sometimes sideways and the height's not quite right. And I was just like, "This pillow is just great." And basically this pillow is full of beads. And so you can naturally shift the height of the pillow while you're sleeping even unconsciously without thinking. And so I looked at the tag. I was like, "What is this?" I ordered it to [inaudible 01:49:26] Amazon Japan, and I bought it back with me on the plane. And so I have the name here. It's called the Maruhachi Shinsui Maruhatchi Pro pillow, and you can only get it in Japan, but they're shipped to the US, no affiliation. And I think that has changed my life in the last week.