Author: Sasha

PTON Stock and the Forever Fallacy

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Peloton stock peaked on December 21, 2020. On that day, the New York Times reported discovery of a new COVID-19 variant (the Delta variant) and we were six months into the pandemic.

What’s going on at that moment, one when people whose JOB it is to value stocks decide that PTON is worth $162 / share?

While the stock market is highly complex, at its essence this chart encapsulates a basic flaw in human reasoning: the mistaken conclusion that what we’re experiencing today is going to last forever.

What else could explain a stock increasing its aggressive valuation 6-fold in just 6 months’ time? Or, in retrospect, a price that was nearly 50 times its present value?

It is human to confuse “now” with “forever.”  This applies to politics (“gas costs more today, I’m going to vote that guy out of office”), climate change (1 in 5 people globally consider it a minor threat), or how we feel on day 5 of a cold.

This tendency of ours strengthens when we encounter challenging conditions: in the midst of a crisis, a hard period at work, or even when we are just feeling stuck, it can be difficult to convince ourselves that this too shall pass.

Figuring out whether you are in a Dip or if it’s something permanent is a skill, to be sure.

But, most of the time, especially with our day to day, now is just now.

It might be great, it might be terrible.

But one thing it is not is “forever.”

You Can’t be Jealous of Just One Thing

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Over the weekend, I listened to the Naval Ravikant interview on The Knowledge Project.

It’s one of their most popular episodes ever, and for good reason. Naval has prodigious knowledge and is a voracious reader and successful entrepreneur. He has spent decades examining and reexamining everything about…everything in his life.

Naval talks a lot about quieting our ego, about reminding ourselves that we are, in the end, insignificant (“we will be totally forgotten in three generations”). Not a brand-new thought, but a helpful reminder.

Think of the countless hours we spend keeping score, the unconscious comparisons that are at the root of so much of our suffering.

To put a finer point on this, Naval has a great riff about jealousy.

If we’re going to be jealous, he argues, it’s meaningless to focus on one thing—a person’s beauty, their wealth, their ease in social situations, or whatever else stands out to us. Any of these attributes is inexorably connected to everything about that person.

So, we either must want to have someone’s entire life, or none of it. There’s nothing in between.

This feels a lot more actionable to me than “don’t be jealous of anyone, ever.”

There’s no life that’s the amalgamation of the “best” bits and pieces that we see around us.

Our strengths connect directly to our vulnerabilities. All of our greatest blessings are intimately connected to the things we love a little less about ourselves or about our lives.

While that other person is great at being themselves, we are the best in the world at being us.

If you’ve made a set of choices in pursuit of longer-term, outward-in goals, the markers of that success won’t be the traditional ones.

Don’t be distracted by the things that are easiest to see and measure in others. These are but one product of a different set of choices than the ones you’ve made.

Keeping on being you.

You’re the world’s best at that.

On Interviewing Well: Treat it Like a Sales Meeting

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A job interview isn’t fundamentally different from a sales meeting—and, in both cases, we need to avoid two traps:

  1. Reinforcing an unequal balance of power (by seeming desperate)
  2. Talking too much and listening too little

Equalize the Balance of Power

I’ve mentioned this before, so I won’t dwell on it: there’s a subtle shift between showing up as:

  • An interviewee—someone who just answers questions well
  • A potential business partner—a meeting in which two people are working to figure out if there’s a fit between the person (attitude/skills), the job, and the organization (culture/need).

The vibe is one of mutual, respectful exploration. The interview is about much more than clearing the basic hurdles—that puts you in the top 5 or 10 group, but it doesn’t get you a job.

Listen More

The trap of any sales meeting is spending too much time talking about yourself and your product, and too little time learning about what your prospect is looking for.

It’s even easier to make this mistake in an interview: to think that if you earnestly answer every question, you’ll have gotten it right.

Instead, hold a mindset of genuine curiosity, and be as thoughtful about asking great questions as you are about giving great answers.

Don’t do this at the expense of answering the questions that have been asked of you. You must convey that you are a compelling candidate, that you are interested, and that you have strong answers to the interviewer’s questions.

Use Preparation to Ask Great Questions

But you also want to engage in meaningful dialogue, and you can do this with great preparation that’s far beyond the superficial glance at the company website. Things like:

  • Using AI to learn about the company’s strategy.
  • Finding articles or talks given by your interviewer.
  • Spending meaningful time on LinkedIn to figure out who you know in common.
  • Developing your own hypothesis about the challenges they are grappling with, and coming with solutions to those challenges.

Everyone is flattered by someone expressing deep, genuine interest in them. Your thoughtful curiosity shines a light on them, and it might even get them to drop their guard and share what’s really going on at the company.

You can ask questions like:

Could you tell me more about the division I would be a part of? What’s going well, and what are the challenges?

What would you say this group is best at and what are areas you’re trying to shore up?

Could you describe the culture of this team? Does it differ meaningfully from the overall organizational culture? How?

If I’m really successful in this role, what impact will I have had?

The goal of these questions is to find a jumping off point for conversation, so you have the opportunity to say things like:

  • “It sounds like you’re eager to have this team take more risks. Is that right?” And then share some thoughts of how you’ve seen that happen / helped make that happen in other places.
  • “It sounds like getting a better understanding of customer needs is a real priority. Have you thought about _______.”

Uncover a Real Pain Point They’re Trying to Solve

When you get the interviewer to put a real pain point in front of you, the two of you are suddenly working together to address that issue. This is both a more interesting interaction than the traditional interview, and a dry run of you working together with this person.

Once they’ve gotten a taste of that, they’ll instinctively put you in a different category than all the other candidates: they’ve interviewed everyone else, but they’ve gotten a glimpse of what it’s like to work with you.

And you’ve also gotten to see what it really will feel like to work together, so you’re in a better place to see if this is going to be the right place for you.

Everybody wins.

 

Other posts in this Series:

On Interviewing Well: Introduction

On Interviewing Well: Convey Deep Self-Knowledge (3-3-2)

On Interviewing Well: Owning Your Agenda

On Interviewing Well: Intention

On Interviewing Well: Intention

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Why are you here?

In this interview, I mean, on this day, talking to these people?

If you have taken the time to apply for a job, to get invited for these interviews, to prepare, to spend your time in these conversations, then you must carry a singular purpose: to get this job.

That may seem obvious.

The reality is, it’s easy to lose track of your purpose in the artificial setting that an interview creates. The questions you’re being asked are all over the place. There’s a mutual dance going on of we-are-being-totally-genuine-with-each-other but also…not.

Nearly 30 years ago, in one of my early job interviews to be an Analyst at an investment bank, I was asked what would motivate me to stay past midnight night after night in the midst of a big deal. In a moment of regretful honesty, I replied, “I’m not sure, actually. Can you tell me what motivated you to do that?” Needless to say, I didn’t get the job.

While I don’t think you’ll make this kind of novice mistake, there are lots of smaller ways that you can express doubt and, inadvertently, undermine your candidacy.

Hence the importance of anchoring your intention.

For example, the best public talks I’ve given are the ones where I know who I’m speaking to. Not in a generalized way—I think of an actual person who I’m hoping to connect with or persuade.

Even if I’m extremely well-prepared and I’ve learned (most of) my talk by heart (aside: I never memorize the whole thing), my inflection, the bits that I improvise, my cadence, my presence…it is all impacted by who I’m imagining I’m speaking to.

The cumulative effect of each of these moments being tailored to the right person is a much more effective talk. Everything lands more, and the result is a more powerful, more persuasive story.

It’s the same when you sit down to interview: clarity of intention.

“I am here to get this job. To do that I will convey my strengths as a professional, my maturity, why I am a great colleague, and how I can fit into this team to help it play at a high level.”

Our job is to hold that intention strongly, while also being nimble enough to incorporate the new information that comes at us over the course of the day.

It’s a subtle shift, but it’s one that makes all the difference.

 

 

Other posts in this Series:

On Interviewing Well: Introduction

On Interviewing Well: Convey Deep Self-Knowledge (3-3-2)

On Interviewing Well: Owning Your Agenda

Why I Don’t Have a Five-Year Plan

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I’ve always been amazed, and a bit perplexed, by people who have five- or ten-year plans.

That’s not to say that I don’t have north star objectives: things centered around my values, hopes for my family and loved ones, and a broad set of professional aspirations.

But questions that get down to the next level of detail don’t work for me.

This is because I know what I don’t know about my future possibility set: the things that I can imagine today are a function of who and where I am today, and, if I keep making progress, my today view of what’s possible will be out of date in a year or two years’ time.

My mindset is fueled by the work of Stephen Johnson and the idea of “adjacent possible,” which is the core mental model for creating an innovative culture.  The idea is that the possibility set — for everything from evolution to new ideas — is a function of the frontier of current available biology / best thinking. The things that are adjacent to that frontier are the ideas that are possible today; and as that frontier moves, new ideas are possible tomorrow.

Take the work of 60 Decibels: we have a set of capabilities, positioning in a number of markets, and big plans for what the future holds. But the future paths, while all fitting under a clear strategic umbrella, are many. If I knew for sure which one would be the one we’ll be walking, then I’d be a soothsayer.

Imagine, then, the paths we could take, all representing big possibilities, and then roll the tape forward two years: one or two of those paths is going to be successful, success will breed investment into new capabilities, which will create more success and more opportunities.

Something that looks like this (and yes, more than one branch from today could survive until tomorrow, that’s just harder to draw):

As I imagine that extending out for two or three years, it’s not a useful exercise to imagine the perfect mix of products, or markets, or offerings that we “ideally” will have—exactly because we are faced with so much opportunity.

I can see the big, long term goals, and I can make the best strategic choices with the information I have today. I can integrate that new information quickly, adapt and adjust. But I cannot see further than the distance my headlights shine.

Strong ideas, loosely held.

What to Do When Your Commitment Wavers

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Henry Ford famously quipped that, if he had asked them, people would have said what they wanted was a faster horse.

It’s easy to see how this insight applies to new products.

It is more profound to note that it also applies to social change.

Social change is the act of building a car that nearly everyone cannot see.

Worse, they have a vested interest in a faster horse—after all, change involves loss.

For the instigator of that change, the person at the center of that storm, believing in that vision for years is no small feat.

Day after day, week after week, month after month, year after year…fighting for a vision that few can see, when change comes slowly, and feedback loops are imperfect.

(Because, unlike with a product, we don’t even have a traditional market sending back reliable signals).

It is human to doubt your own vision from time to time.

Indeed, when we are building things that might take a generation to come to pass, it’s a miracle we don’t doubt our vision every day.

Don’t be too hard on yourself if there are days when your confidence flags.

Days when you think, “the doubters may be right after all.”

Days when you wonder if people ever really will want that car that you’re so painstakingly building—aren’t they awfully happy with their horses?

I’ve found two things to help me on these sorts of days:

First, I turn to my own tribe of true believers: folks who remind me of what’s possible, why it matters so much, and how far we’ve come. Whether it’s the way they smile, their infectious enthusiasm, or the hard road they’ve walked, we all have people who can shine a light on us and help us remember the things we might have temporarily forgotten.

Second, I return to the clearest, simplest version of that change I’m trying to create, a story so powerful that has a logic of its own, is trivial to remember, and is easy for others to share.

Our story at 60 Decibels is that it’s crazy to think that you can create meaningful, lasting social change if you never listen to the people involved in that change.

What’s yours?

Supporting Your Team

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So often we are confused by what it means to lead a team.

We think it is about fiery big speeches, painting a picture of the future, rallying the troops to scale that next mountain.

And yes, there are those days and those moments.

We all need to be reminded of our “why” and see ourselves in the great deeds of others, so we can push to new places.

But most days, what matters more is deeply paying attention to people, and turning that attention into actions that further their success.

Noticing what they said, and what they didn’t say, to learn what they need.

Being available for a task that might seem small but that we know is significant.

Anticipating an issue they may not have seen coming, and helping them head it off at the pass.

Continuing to think about them after they’re out of the room, and, later, saying things like, “You know that hard thing we talked about? Can I help you with it?”

Lending a hand to take their 75% chance of success and turn it to 100%—even and especially if doing so doesn’t make “sense” according to your and their job description.

People feel supported when they feel noticed, when they see you devote time and energy to their success when you’re apart, and when you take actions that make them shine.

Talk, in the end, is cheap…and actions, well, there’s a reason they speak so loudly.

On Interviewing Well: Owning Your Agenda

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We are at our most effective when we have a clear sense of purpose.

Heading into a job interview, that sense of purpose is captured in three sentences:

This is what I want them to know about me.

This is the work I’ve done that will convey why I’ll be a great member of their team.

This is what I want to learn about them.

It’s easy to get unmoored in interviews: it’s an artificial situation and we can revert to the person we were years or decades ago—when we had our first interviews—instead of the more intentional, confident person we are today.

The most important thing to remember is: the dutiful question-answerer is not the person who gets the job.

The person who gets the job is someone who comes in with executive presence that is communicated through a clear sense of purpose. That purpose is manifested by conveying a clear body of work that shows why you’re the right person for this job.

This is a delicate rebalance of the power dynamic that typically prevails.

As you walk into the room, the interviewer has all the power: you’re one of hundreds of candidates aiming to “win the bake-off.”

But if you enter with strong presence and clear intent, and you focus on communicating your relevant body of work, that balance starts to shift towards one in which two people are having a conversation to discover if working together will meet both of your goals.

Of course, you’re walking a fine line here. While you want to come in with a clear purpose, you can also push too far. If you communicate that all that’s going on for you is evaluating them, you’ll probably come across as arrogant and get passed over.

But clarity about why you are here and fidelity to those goals will infuse all your responses with additional crispness. You will convey the points you need to get across even in the face of a barrage of surprising questions. And you’ll be more likely to stay grounded throughout this grueling process.

In summary:

Their agenda is: to assess me and find the best candidate for the job.

My agenda is: to clearly convey who I am, why I’m here, and what I bring to the table; to understand who they are and whether they’re the right place for me.

Attitude matters as much as what you say in any job interview.

 

Other posts in this Series:

On Interviewing Well: Introduction

On Interviewing Well: Convey Deep Self-Knowledge (3-3-2)

Use AI to do Just One Job

~ Sasha ~ 1 Comment

Are you curious about AI but still a bit skeptical?  Then this post is for you.

First, a test: Have you found at least one important task that you can now do better or faster thanks to AI?

Yes! Hooray.

No? Keep reading.

To put the “no” into context, you are, in effect, making an active choice not to use a major productivity enhancer. It’s like insisting to do your calculations by hand instead of Excel, or writing by hand instead of using Word or Google docs.

If that choice is essential to your creative process, then I encourage you to stick with it.

But there is definitely somewhere that you should be using AI.

If you’re not using AI, you may have read about it or tried ChatGPT, but it’s not part of your daily workflow.

The road from here to there is short, just follow these steps:

  1. Pick a task that you do often, that you understand well, and for which you are a good judge of what good quality looks like.
  2. Log in to one of the new AI models. I would suggest you pick ChatGPT-4 (free) or Claude 3 Opus (I pay $20/month for this).
  3. Play around for 1-2 hours, working to get the AI to help you do your chosen task.

A mindset shift around AI might help, and what helped me the most was this How Should I Be Using AI Right Now podcast by Ezra Klein.

My takeaways from the podcast were:

  • Anthropomorphize the AI. Think of it like a person you’re working with, not like a computer. More specifically, think of the AI like an intern who’s a couple of years out of college who is very capable but who needs (and is open to) a lot of feedback.
  • Tell the AI who it is / who you want it to be. Meaning, give it a personality. Tell it to be Steve Jobs, or tell it the characteristics of your college advisor or best friend or editor. When you tell the AI what personality to have, it responds with the right tone and syntax and, more surprisingly, you are changing the quality of the responses.
  • Give the AI examples of what ‘good’ looks like. Share examples of the work product that meets the standard you want the AI to hit. Better yet, share 10 of those. I find copy/pasting text the easiest way to do this. Explain what each example is and how representative it is of the generalized output you’d like to see. The more you can share, the better.
  • Give the AI tons of feedback on its output. This is where the “helpful intern” mindset helps. The AI needs to be told what to do, so tell it! Here are some examples from when I was playing with teaching the AI to write a good follow-up email from a sales call. (aside: the AI is reading what I write to decide how it will write. So I’m intentional about writing like I write.)
    • “It’s pretty good. The opening is a bit generic and I’m always trying to avoid more general statements, so please tone that down a bit and stick to specifics.”
    • “You’re getting there. Let’s leave that as a placeholder for now. It’s a good start for the more standard emails that I write. But sometimes I’m more open ended.”
    • “OK a few things – avoid unnecessary modifiers like “truly believe” and try to avoid repeating words (you used “believe” twice at the start of two paragraphs).”
    • “This sentence is terrible ‘Bringing together diverse perspectives and expertise will be critical in unlocking innovative solutions.’ It is a statement full of platitudes. Avoid writing like this always.”
    • “Yup. Better. But this sentence is still full of platitudes. ‘and have been impressed by the insights and leadership you’ve brought to the space.’ What would be better is either to delete it or to find something relevant to refer to that is more specific. Also on the prior example, ‘exciting opportunity’ is breathy and doesn’t need the word ‘exciting.’ Don’t be afraid to be direct and not too flowery.”
    • It finally produced something decent, so I wrote, ‘Good. This works as a point of reference, stylistically.’ I named that style so I could refer back to it in the future.

I expect you’re getting the feel for this…I gave more feedback on various iterations, either at the general level (“that is waaaay too wordy. Try again but cut 80% of the words”) or much more specific (“This sentence is terrible, the whole second half of it is a word salad that adds no value.”). Again, the mindset of “I’m talking to an intern” really helped me stick with it here.

After about an hour of this back-and-forth, the AI was giving me what I wanted at a high standard, and this standard got me an 80% first draft that will save me tons of time.

In addition, working on a real task—one that is important, and where I have domain expertise—helps me learn about what the AI can and cannot do well.

And the impact of that is huge. It’s like crossing a threshold as I imagine the amount of leverage each of the 120 people on my team could have if this becomes part of their workflow. What if each person could have a “very helpful and eager intern” at their beck and call? Imagine the impact of that, and add to it the operational stack that we can hack to pieces with the aid of this technology.

I hope this is the post that nudges you to take another shot at this, and that, in a weeks’ time, you’ll have played with and succeeded at getting AI to do SOMETHING meaningfully helpful in your professional or personal life.

If you need more ideas of where to start, here they are:

  • Writing your professional bio
  • Creating meeting summaries
  • Writing follow-up emails from sales calls
  • Resume screening to avoid bias
  • Creating a negotiation training module
  • Helping you prioritize your to do list
  • Summarize this data set
  • etc. etc.

Don’t forget: the assisted here is the point.

I generated that list with help from AI.

It gave me two lists of 10 ideas. All of them were too wordy. I liked 5 of the ideas, and I made those 5 better, added links, and I added two of my own

Voila.

(p.s. more On Interviewing Well posts are in the queue. Stay tuned.)

On Interviewing Well: Convey Deep Self Knowledge (3-3-2)

~ Sasha ~ 1 Comment

What is the person interviewing you trying to accomplish?

We know what they are doing: posing a series of questions with the ostensible goal of figuring out who you are, what your strengths and weaknesses are, and how well you’ll fit culturally within their organization.

Knowing that, you have a choice.

Your first option is to play their game and answer every question as well as you can. When you do this, you are, bit by bit, handing them puzzle pieces that make up the picture of who you are. Your hope is that those pieces are accurate and complete enough that the picture they paint is a reasonable representation of you and of you in this job.

Unfortunately, this approach is flawed. First, it assumes the interviewer will ask enough questions, and the right ones, so they’ll end up with a good-enough set of “you” puzzle pieces—that’s leaving a lot up to chance. Worse, you’re setting yourself up to be compared in a like-to-like way with everyone else who answered that same set of questions.

Here’s a second option, inspired by the most creative interviewing I’ve ever seen. The interviewer had a list of 40 traits (e.g., data analysis, public speaking, sales, making new connections, coding), and she told the interviewee that she’d be reading down that list. She asked the interviewee to to rate their abilities on each trait on a 1 to 10 scale. She would go through the list quickly—the whole thing probably took two minutes—and then discuss.

So much is happening here. The interviewee quickly figures out there’s no gaming this system: they can’t credibly say they’re great at everything, so they are likely giving a more accurate picture. Plus, so much information comes across about the candidate beyond each individual answer: are they a tough or kind self-grader? How quickly do they answer on some traits (I’m confident about this) vs. others? How consistent are the answers? What does the overall picture look like? And how do they react to this surprising exercise?

Since most interviewers won’t take this approach, your option is to take it for them with the 3-3-2 approach.

With this approach, you are going to describe eight things about yourself:

Three that you’re solid at

Two that are weaknesses of yours—things that, if they’re core to this job, mean that this job isn’t right for you

And three things that are your superpowers

For example:

“Three things that I’m good at and would be a core part of any job I’d do well: managing large teams, handling stress/complexity, and selling.

On the other hand, two things that I’m really not great at are: creating PPTs to present my ideas; and living and dying by getting the last decimal point right. I’m good at details, but if that’s my whole job I’ll go insane.

And my three superpowers are: strategic thinking (figuring out the way forward from a bunch of complex options), coaching, and building community.

I’d be happy to give you examples of any of these if that would be helpful.”

You have to be really honest here—no “the thing I’m worst at is having high standards.” You’re intentionally stepping outside of the interview game and telling the interviewer what she really wants to know.

What’s powerful about this is the clarity and confidence you demonstrate by giving someone all the pieces to your puzzle. You’re saying “this is me, the whole story, both the good and the bad. If that’s a fit for what you’re looking for, great. And if it isn’t, that’s fine too.”

Of course, you can adjust as you see fit: how deep are you going to go with what you share? How long a list?

What matters most is that it’s genuine: you’re communicating that you’ve reflected deeply on yourself. You’re saying that you understand this is a matching game, not a “pick the best candidate” game. And you’re giving yourself the chance to say, without bragging, “out of everything you might be looking for, these are the areas where I really shine.”

This approach consciously rejects the cat-and-mouse game of interviewer question and answer. It demonstrates the kind of self-knowledge that itself will distinguish you from the pack.

Most of all, it’s breaking the mold, doing something memorable that says “I’m an open book, this is the information we both need to proceed. Let’s have that conversation.”

Other posts in this Series:

On Interviewing Well: Introduction