YouSaid · the spoken record

Ada Chen Rekhi

lines on the record: 94
first: 2023-04-16
most recent: 2023-04-16
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

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“Pursuit of sort of glory that I didn't really care about. And instead, you know, my current path at the time was something that if I persisted in it would actually be able to potentially fulfill all of those values.”
2023-04-16 · Lenny's Podcast · How to make better decisions and build a joyful career | Ada Chen Rekhi (Notejoy, LinkedIn, SurveyMonkey) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Really, just a career opportunity. And it was sort of this step where I could do something that was at the time like really high profile and really exciting and felt great, but also involved demanding travel and sort of grueling hours and wasn't in a space that I was excited about, but it looked amazing on my resume. And I was talking to a friend about it, and they actually introduced me to this values exercise to say, like, Ada, go through and fill out this values exercise and apply it to this job. And what I realized at the time after I did it was that my top three values, like the things that I cared about this job, would categorically just fail at because I would be gone all the time.”
2023-04-16 · Lenny's Podcast · How to make better decisions and build a joyful career | Ada Chen Rekhi (Notejoy, LinkedIn, SurveyMonkey) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“What really matters to me, what's really meaningful to me. Only some of the stuff really matters. And so kind of getting very intentional about that and being clear about who your audience is as you navigate your career, I think, you know, it's a terrible outcome to wake up one day and be sort of late career and feel trapped because you have a certain lifestyle or a certain expectation that the people around you that you have to go work this job. But then you look at yourself in the mirror and you're not happy going in there. I think that's a terrible trap that we should all try to avoid as we kind of navigate our career paths and find the thing that's sort of most optimal for us, which is usually a mix of career success, but also meaningfulness and sort of alignment in the work that we're doing with our values.”
2023-04-16 · Lenny's Podcast · How to make better decisions and build a joyful career | Ada Chen Rekhi (Notejoy, LinkedIn, SurveyMonkey) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I have experienced that personally a lot. I think that. It may be sort of a generational thing, or it just may be my background, but having grown up with sort of the Asian tiger parenting. It's very focused on logos, there's certain accomplishments, there's certain achievements like going to an Ivy League school, working at a company that someone's heard of, being able to have a certain title. And at a certain point, you know, I kind of bailed out a bit. And I really started to think about who am I trying to please and optimize for. And that values exercise that I had you do, Lenny, is actually a big piece of that. So I probably took it for the first time over a decade ago at this point. And I looked at those values and I said, well, if I draw straight line from where I am right now and just sort of extend it forward and play the rest of the movie as it plays out given the current plot line, how well does that optimize for those values? Like that's great. You know, my parents might be happy about my resume or other people might look upon me in a certain way because I've managed these achievements. But in my day-to-day life,”
2023-04-16 · Lenny's Podcast · How to make better decisions and build a joyful career | Ada Chen Rekhi (Notejoy, LinkedIn, SurveyMonkey) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Which is great. I'm not going to be able to get this from my company. But now that I have sort of this extra time because I'm so optimized at this job, how am I going to choose to use that time? And it might be around building relationships with some of the key people at the company or learning something new on your own time that you can leverage in another way.”
2023-04-16 · Lenny's Podcast · How to make better decisions and build a joyful career | Ada Chen Rekhi (Notejoy, LinkedIn, SurveyMonkey) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And when you are aware of that learning, I think that's sort of the point at which you have to say, how do I change that? How do I kind of be an agent in my own career and make a difference in that? And it doesn't necessarily mean that the strategy is to quit your job and do something catastrophic and then, you know, go do something else, take a course or sign up for something new. It might actually mean a proactive conversation with your manager. Or the leadership to say, I love what I'm doing here and I would also like to learn a little bit more. And here's what I'm interested in. And then try to find a way to either land the right project. So in my case, it was really growth and subscriptions, right? That experience that I really wanted, or to even, let's say you hit a blank wall there, even take it as a gift of time.”
2023-04-16 · Lenny's Podcast · How to make better decisions and build a joyful career | Ada Chen Rekhi (Notejoy, LinkedIn, SurveyMonkey) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That's what kind of makes the advice really contextual. I really kind of look at it from the lens of learning. What can I learn here? And how am I growing and developing? So there might be an argument for you to stay at a job for a decade, for two decades. If it turns out that every single day you're being really challenged, you're learning new things, you're deriving a lot of meaningful enjoyment out of your work, and you're kind of this happy frog that's hanging out realizing that things are good and the temperature is not rising. But there are also situations where you might encounter just some really hard walls where you don't get along with the thesis of the company, right? Like you don't agree with the direction of the company that you're in. There are fundamental aspects of the role which are limiting to you or you're not learning a lot, frankly. And I think that happens a lot where you're providing a lot of value in doing a good job at a company, but you might not be learning things that kind of stretch you and grow you to achieve your ultimate goal.”
2023-04-16 · Lenny's Podcast · How to make better decisions and build a joyful career | Ada Chen Rekhi (Notejoy, LinkedIn, SurveyMonkey) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Is that it's really easy to be a victim of inertia? It's really easy for all of us to be the frog where there are little things that make us uncomfortable. And we kind of sit with them or we think, you know, gosh, it'll get better. The next manager will get better. I'm always one conversation or one promotion away from kind of getting to that next step. But you really have to be aware of your surroundings. You have to be aware of which way is the direction of the temperature of the water trending.”
2023-04-16 · Lenny's Podcast · How to make better decisions and build a joyful career | Ada Chen Rekhi (Notejoy, LinkedIn, SurveyMonkey) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That's a great question, and it's a really tough one that is kind of contextual on the person that you are. So, one of the things that I like to share is sort of this idea of it's a little gory. Don't be the frog. And so if you are familiar with the story of the frog, it's this idea of boiling the frog. So if you take a frog and you throw it in a pot of boiling water, it'll jump out. But if you take a frog and you put it in a pot, You increase the temperature degree by degree by degree. The frog doesn't notice, and before it knows it, it's boiled alive. And how I apply this to kind of your question to come back and circle back to it.”
2023-04-16 · Lenny's Podcast · How to make better decisions and build a joyful career | Ada Chen Rekhi (Notejoy, LinkedIn, SurveyMonkey) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Of those pieces and work together from a financial planning and analysis stage to all of the optimizations that they did. And it was just such a rare opportunity, but I wouldn't have gotten those opportunities if I just let them promote me or I followed a strategy where I was just focused on trying to get the biggest title. Instead, I was focused on those learnings and those experiences. And ultimately the fact that I was a startup founder, I had big company experience. I had growth experience and I had subs experience and I was a product marketer. That was actually the winning combination that caused SurveyMonkey to send me a LinkedIn inmail, start a conversation, and ultimately bring in as their head of marketing at the age of, I think I was 27 or 28 at the time because their rationale was you have all these experiences that we really need and you don't have the management experience, but we have plenty of that. We're happy to teach that to you.”
2023-04-16 · Lenny's Podcast · How to make better decisions and build a joyful career | Ada Chen Rekhi (Notejoy, LinkedIn, SurveyMonkey) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“My manager, this when I first came in I'm here to learn to be a better founder. So there were a lot of things when I started connected which I didn't know how to do very well. I didn't understand growth. I was, you know, fair to middling at pricing. I really didn't understand how to build a subscriptions business and how to price it. And so if I can make my LinkedIn experiences match to that, that would be a huge win for me, independent of promotion or compensation or a whole bunch of those things because the plan afterward is actually to go off and start another company. And so I managed to get into this great role leading gross marketing for LinkedIn, working with their growth team from 100 million to 200 million members, read every experiment brief that I could, spent a lot of time with the team really understanding their process, and then shifted into the subscription side where I worked on LinkedIn subscriptions and ran their sales subscriptions business at scale through the online channel and kind of saw how”
2023-04-16 · Lenny's Podcast · How to make better decisions and build a joyful career | Ada Chen Rekhi (Notejoy, LinkedIn, SurveyMonkey) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, it's a beautiful product. Much more beautiful than what we built at the time And, you know, it was such a great learning experience to discover what it was like to be a founder of a company and an entrepreneur. And my personal learning out of all of those things was really just that I was continuously optimizing, you know, that I loved marketing. I loved being a founder. I really like small teams. There are pros and cons to sort of this corporate life where maybe things are really slow-paced, but the scale is really important. And so that was really what carried me through a lot of my early career. And after Connected was acquired by LinkedIn, I kind of moved into this exploit mode. So I was at LinkedIn for a period of time while I was investing. And I really wanted to be intentional about the time that I spent there in terms of how I wanted to exploit it. So unlike a traditional path where you're really focused on trying to get the biggest title, a big team, set yourself up to kind of run a big org, my role at LinkedIn was really explicit. I even told”
2023-04-16 · Lenny's Podcast · How to make better decisions and build a joyful career | Ada Chen Rekhi (Notejoy, LinkedIn, SurveyMonkey) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Suspicion that not only did I want to try something smaller, but I also wanted to try marketing. And so I moved to this Series A startup where I had to sample my desk on the first day called Mochi Media. And I was in a marketing role at a startup and had this great run there over three years where I learned all kinds of things and even tried product at some point. And what I learned from that experience was then I love marketing. Games is pretty fun. And, you know, being in a smaller team was really dynamic. And it was this choice on do I exploit and sort of go deeper into the industry or do I explore more? I was 23 at the time, so I decided I have so little to lose, let me continue exploring. And my big thesis was, let me try being a founder. And so then I founded connected and connected was this personal CRM that's a little bit like clay, if you've seen clay now recently in terms of how do you do a better job of managing and building your professional and personal network.”
2023-04-16 · Lenny's Podcast · How to make better decisions and build a joyful career | Ada Chen Rekhi (Notejoy, LinkedIn, SurveyMonkey) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Exploit and exploit if you're familiar with it from growth background is really just around what mode you're in. You're either in a mode of explore where you have a bunch of unknowns and you're testing to see whether or not you like it, how well it works, whether or not it fits for you, or you're exploiting where you actually have found something that's really rich and really deep, and then you're just trying to get more. And when I think about Explore and Exploit, for early career, it's all about exploration. You really haven't experienced that much. But you're doing it with a thesis. You're doing it kind of with that growth mindset where you have a hypothesis. So coming out of school, my first job was at Microsoft. I was at AdCenter. The big thing I learned from the 367 days that I was there was that corporate life at that point in my career was just a little bit too slow-paced for me. And I was really hungry to go do something else. But I also learned quite a lot about marketing and advertising. And I had this.”
2023-04-16 · Lenny's Podcast · How to make better decisions and build a joyful career | Ada Chen Rekhi (Notejoy, LinkedIn, SurveyMonkey) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“My earlier career was pretty wild, so I had a really fast run over the course of seven years. I went from my first job, which was basically this entry-level sales job at Microsoft, working on Microsoft Ad Center to SVP of marketing at SurveyMonkey, leading a global team. And when I reflect back on what worked across my early career, it really kind of comes down in a nutshell to this career concept of explore and exploit. Which actually sounds kind of dark now that I'm saying it out loud.”
2023-04-16 · Lenny's Podcast · How to make better decisions and build a joyful career | Ada Chen Rekhi (Notejoy, LinkedIn, SurveyMonkey) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I think you could definitely use that process to force yourself to make a stack ring and to be really clear. And also change it. It's yours, right? So change it over time as it suits you.”
2023-04-16 · Lenny's Podcast · How to make better decisions and build a joyful career | Ada Chen Rekhi (Notejoy, LinkedIn, SurveyMonkey) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And it's really self aware of you too, I think, to cut it off because you start realizing that you're doing this course and it's not giving you energy or it's not quite the right thing. It's really hard to say no to things.”
2023-04-16 · Lenny's Podcast · How to make better decisions and build a joyful career | Ada Chen Rekhi (Notejoy, LinkedIn, SurveyMonkey) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Knowledge and growth on my own terms, and things like independence and autonomy have started to creep up over time, especially once I started a family. And it became very clear to me that sometimes the external Depending on what scorecard you actually use, I would actually be less happy with some of those outcomes. And so I think values are sort of this really nice, useful tool to think about how do you make better decisions again to maximize for your own alignment with life.”
2023-04-16 · Lenny's Podcast · How to make better decisions and build a joyful career | Ada Chen Rekhi (Notejoy, LinkedIn, SurveyMonkey) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, on the values exercise, I think what you've done a really good job of is just really delineating here are some examples of choices that you have to make. And I think that there are some points in our lives where like writing a book, it just seems really obvious. It's good for your career. It's sort of the next level in terms of where you go from the community, the newsletter, the podcast, and sort of getting to that next level. But where I think there is value is these lists of values can help ground us from those obvious decisions. And so in my life, to kind of share a mini example of this, there have been a lot of cases where the next obvious step for me might be to go be an executive at a big company and to kind of go chase the dream and continue on sort of the latter climb of my career. And as I've examined my own personal values, a big piece of it has really been around prioritizing relationships and really pursuing”
2023-04-16 · Lenny's Podcast · How to make better decisions and build a joyful career | Ada Chen Rekhi (Notejoy, LinkedIn, SurveyMonkey) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You go into that word list, you might actually just find that some of these opportunities like writing a book, at some point it doesn't feel like an adventure.”
2023-04-16 · Lenny's Podcast · How to make better decisions and build a joyful career | Ada Chen Rekhi (Notejoy, LinkedIn, SurveyMonkey) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“If you think about a recent decision that you've had to make or a decision that you're facing, Coming up. Can you share what that decision might be? And then let's try to apply the values to it to kind of think about if you were living up to these values, what choice would you make and maybe some of the pressures you might feel to choose otherwise?”
2023-04-16 · Lenny's Podcast · How to make better decisions and build a joyful career | Ada Chen Rekhi (Notejoy, LinkedIn, SurveyMonkey) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I love it. What a great list of values. And what stands out to me from that list to Lenny is, you know, this idea of achievement or status or success, like a lot of the things that we talk about publicly, right? Like what your LinkedIn feed might look like don't actually show up in your values. And it must reflect in some of the choices that you've made in your life.”
2023-04-16 · Lenny's Podcast · How to make better decisions and build a joyful career | Ada Chen Rekhi (Notejoy, LinkedIn, SurveyMonkey) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That often we feel really pressured by. And so it's this great way to look back and see how well do decisions or how well do my situations in life align with my values”
2023-04-16 · Lenny's Podcast · How to make better decisions and build a joyful career | Ada Chen Rekhi (Notejoy, LinkedIn, SurveyMonkey) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, so the homework that I gave you is similar homework that I give to everyone that I work with in coaching. And it's this values exercise. It's this 10 to 15 minute exercise where you're presented with a list of words that might encompass potential values. And it's pretty lightweight. You just go down the list and you pick out all the words that resonate with you. And then we filter them down into groups of values. And then we filter them down into a stack rank and sort of a list. And the output on the end is basically three to five sentences that cover what are the values, stack rank that are important to you right now in your personal and professional life. And what I really like is it's sort of like this internal scorecard of what really matters to you in your decision making process as opposed to the external scorecard of status, money, wealth, how other people perceive you.”
2023-04-16 · Lenny's Podcast · How to make better decisions and build a joyful career | Ada Chen Rekhi (Notejoy, LinkedIn, SurveyMonkey) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, I think there were two topics on the list. The first one was it was just, you know, how do you onboard and hire and sort of bring people onto the team? And, you know, the feedback I got there was like, there are just so many people who have done this. I'm sure you have some interesting concepts, but I personally wouldn't be that interested in hearing it. And that was really useful to me. And then the other one was actually just about being a woman in Silicon Valley and the experience of that. And I actually had someone write, and you probably read this, Lenny. No, stay far away from this. There's no winning on this topic.”
2023-04-16 · Lenny's Podcast · How to make better decisions and build a joyful career | Ada Chen Rekhi (Notejoy, LinkedIn, SurveyMonkey) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Right, right. Yes, that is the big caveat. Don't do what people tell you to do. Take it as an input. And, you know, look for the hard feedback. Look for things that you strongly disagree with or are surprises to you because, you know, to me, I think these loops are more about Looking around the corner and seeing if there's anything you missed in terms of the integrity of your decision making process.”
2023-04-16 · Lenny's Podcast · How to make better decisions and build a joyful career | Ada Chen Rekhi (Notejoy, LinkedIn, SurveyMonkey) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Totally. Yep. I think this is really based off of the marketing concept of customer advisory councils. And so when I was working in marketing and product at a startup, one of the things we would always have is a group of our top customers on DM, basically. And if we had really interesting product conflicts, we would actually just go ping a couple of them and ask them, hey, we're debating this. Do you mind just like giving us your quick thoughts and telling us why? And then being able to as a marketer come back to the product conversation and say, here is the literal voice of the customer. And four or five different verbatims and what people think about this really enabled me as a marketer to have a seat at the table. And the insight and the helpfulness of that was really something I wanted to bring to my personal life as well.”
2023-04-16 · Lenny's Podcast · How to make better decisions and build a joyful career | Ada Chen Rekhi (Notejoy, LinkedIn, SurveyMonkey) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I usually reserve it for bigger things, so probably quarterly or anything where I'm having a big debate and I'm feeling really indecisive.”
2023-04-16 · Lenny's Podcast · How to make better decisions and build a joyful career | Ada Chen Rekhi (Notejoy, LinkedIn, SurveyMonkey) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, for example, I picked you because I really trust you to be a sound source of truthful advice and give me some feedback.”
2023-04-16 · Lenny's Podcast · How to make better decisions and build a joyful career | Ada Chen Rekhi (Notejoy, LinkedIn, SurveyMonkey) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, definitely. I mean, one of the things that I always try to do is I try to explain to people in my ask. Here's why I picked”
2023-04-16 · Lenny's Podcast · How to make better decisions and build a joyful career | Ada Chen Rekhi (Notejoy, LinkedIn, SurveyMonkey) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But if you're thinking about 18, like, you know, you were so far from your peak. And so it kind of dragged us both up in terms of what our set point was to make a decision like that. But we wouldn't have figured that out without a curiosity loop because it's just, it's too much work to kind of dig through papers or research or whatever else to try to come to a good decision on it.”
2023-04-16 · Lenny's Podcast · How to make better decisions and build a joyful career | Ada Chen Rekhi (Notejoy, LinkedIn, SurveyMonkey) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And I was saying, Oh, well, you know, maybe 25, and we're at this impasse. And we actually just started to tell each other, why don't we in our day-to-day conversations with folks that we trust in our family, people that we think are smart, that have kids, ask people what their perspective is on it. And one thing was really telling. No one out of everyone we asked said 18. And so that really like dragged my partner up. And then the other thing that was really interesting was that we learned a little bit about executive function and the research around it. And so executive function, which is your ability to make decisions and plans and be thoughtful, peaks at the age of 30. And it's all downhill from there. So bad news for people like me that are older. Yeah, exactly.”
2023-04-16 · Lenny's Podcast · How to make better decisions and build a joyful career | Ada Chen Rekhi (Notejoy, LinkedIn, SurveyMonkey) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yep, that's the approach. One thing I want to note is that it's actually really useful for personal things as well. So we framed it in this professional context of I'm trying to change a job. But one example that I have is when we had our daughter, who's now three years old, One of the debates that my partner and I were having was how do we actually stead up our estate planning in terms of if, God forbid, something happened to both of us? How should she inherit the state? And, you know, my partner was basically saying 18 years old, she gets everything fully unlocked.”
2023-04-16 · Lenny's Podcast · How to make better decisions and build a joyful career | Ada Chen Rekhi (Notejoy, LinkedIn, SurveyMonkey) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I would try to optimize for getting at least three or four responses. And it kind of just depends on the nature of the loop. And then you think about what is your response rate. So if you're emailing really busy people, maybe you would assume that you don't know very well. Maybe you would assume that you only get half of people to respond. And if you're emailing people, you know really well, and it's really lightweight, like yes or no, and here's why, then you might just send out a handful.”
2023-04-16 · Lenny's Podcast · How to make better decisions and build a joyful career | Ada Chen Rekhi (Notejoy, LinkedIn, SurveyMonkey) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The reminder that I would have for all of you is that it feels really good to help someone. It feels really good to be heard and give input, and a big piece of that is if someone comes to you and they said, you gave me this advice, it changed my life. You know, maybe it's not at that level. But it really affected my decision. Here's how it turned out. Thank you so much. That feels so good, especially if you only spent a few minutes giving them the input that enabled them to make a better decision.”
2023-04-16 · Lenny's Podcast · How to make better decisions and build a joyful career | Ada Chen Rekhi (Notejoy, LinkedIn, SurveyMonkey) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And some people went above and beyond and scrolled through and gave me feedback on every single topic. And some of them just said, here are my top two and here's one I think you should avoid. I wanted to design it in a way where if you're a busy founder, you're a busy product person, which is sort of the list that I chose for this curiosity loop, you would be able to sort of sit down on your couch at the end of the night, read the sort of interesting email, and tap out a quick reply and sort of give me that answer because the risk that you're running is either you're getting poor answers or you're getting a really low response rate because you've given them way too much cognitive load in terms of answering it. And then finally, to kind of close the loop, I think a big piece of it is processing that information and then thinking them for it. So a big misconception that people have when they're really getting into this work of asking for advice or input from other people in the community is often that it's really one-sided, right? I'm asking you for help and you're getting nothing out of it.”
2023-04-16 · Lenny's Podcast · How to make better decisions and build a joyful career | Ada Chen Rekhi (Notejoy, LinkedIn, SurveyMonkey) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And then after that, you know, you really want to ask the question, and this touches on sort of what you said about how do you make it really lightweight. Ask the question in a way that really gets you a useful, constructive answer, but doesn't put too much weight on people. And so what I usually like to do is just make it very lightweight. So in your case, I said, here are nine topics. Can you pick your top two and tell me why you like them?”
2023-04-16 · Lenny's Podcast · How to make better decisions and build a joyful career | Ada Chen Rekhi (Notejoy, LinkedIn, SurveyMonkey) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The next piece is really around how do you curate who you ask? And I think there are two dimensions of this. The first one is the obvious one, which is a subject matter expert who really knows. Something about the topic at hand. So maybe a web dev themselves, right, for my example question. Another one, and this dimension I think is really important, is someone who knows you really well. Can provide insight on how well that works for you.”
2023-04-16 · Lenny's Podcast · How to make better decisions and build a joyful career | Ada Chen Rekhi (Notejoy, LinkedIn, SurveyMonkey) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And it's just such a poorly formed question because it's really vague. It's not specific. It puts a lot of cognitive load on other people. And the kind of output that you're going to get from it is probably going to be similarly bad. You know, garbage in, garbage out. A better example of a question might be something like, hey, you know me. I'm a marketer. I've been thinking about doing this web dev thing. So my plan is to quit my job, do a web dev boot camp, and then go find a job elsewhere. Do you think that's a good idea? And there's just so much rich data to actually explore with that. First, you know, are you suited to being a developer? Are we web devoted? What's the state of the economy in the hiring market right now for junior web developers? And that's an example of maybe a question.”
2023-04-16 · Lenny's Podcast · How to make better decisions and build a joyful career | Ada Chen Rekhi (Notejoy, LinkedIn, SurveyMonkey) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, the first piece of a curiosity loop is really just thinking about asking a good question. In the time when I was working at SurveyMonkey in the past, I had this opportunity to spend a lot of time with the survey researchers. And we really talked a lot about what makes the question good. And so in this case, a question's good if it's specific, if it solicits rationale and it's not biased, right? You don't want to start a question with, here's what I think because people have this tendency to want to please you or to agree with you. And so a good example, well, let me start with a bad example of a question. A bad example of a question is What should I do with my career next?”
2023-04-16 · Lenny's Podcast · How to make better decisions and build a joyful career | Ada Chen Rekhi (Notejoy, LinkedIn, SurveyMonkey) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And it's not bad because it's not well intentioned, but it's bad because it's not contextual. So when someone tells you to quit your job and chase your dreams, or they tell you to sit tight and grind through and build some experience before you go off and go start the company that you've always been thinking about starting, which piece of advice do you actually take, right? And a lot of it kind of depends on your situation, what you're considering, what skills and experience you actually have. And Curiosity Loops actually are this way of really thinking about how do you make your advice contextual. So I'll break it down a bit in terms of how I think about structuring it.”
2023-04-16 · Lenny's Podcast · How to make better decisions and build a joyful career | Ada Chen Rekhi (Notejoy, LinkedIn, SurveyMonkey) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think that there are sort of heavyweight and lightweight ways to use this. So the heavyweight way was sort of what I just exemplified by saying I sent an email and I made a dock and on the other side I had all of this really interesting and rich data. The lightweight way to do this is really just sort of make it your ongoing theme of what you're curious about as you interact with people. And so maybe it's this thing where every single day as you talk to people, if you have sort of a social topic, you might just bring up the same question over and over again and start looking for are there any differences or surprises in what people are telling you. And, you know, one of the big reasons why I think curiosity loops are really useful is that it really fights the fact that there's a lot of bad advice out there.”
2023-04-16 · Lenny's Podcast · How to make better decisions and build a joyful career | Ada Chen Rekhi (Notejoy, LinkedIn, SurveyMonkey) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Curiosity loop is essentially going to a whole bunch of people, in this case I sent out an email very quickly to about 10 or 11 people and asking them, hey, here are nine topics for Lenny's podcast. What are two or three of the topics that resonate with you and why? And I got back such an incredible amount of information for about 20 minutes of work. And I don't normally do this, but I actually showed you some of the anonymized feedback from people, really just talking about what resonated and what didn't. And so I came out of it just so much smarter and curiosity loops are kind of my method of doing so.”
2023-04-16 · Lenny's Podcast · How to make better decisions and build a joyful career | Ada Chen Rekhi (Notejoy, LinkedIn, SurveyMonkey) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You know, it's a terrible outcome to wake up one day and be sort of late career and feel trapped because you have a certain lifestyle or a certain expectation that the people around you that you have to go work this job. But then you look at yourself in the mirror and you're not happy going in there. I think that's a terrible trap that we should all try to avoid as we kind of navigate our career paths and find the thing that's sort of most optimal for us, which is usually a mix of career success, but also meaningfulness and sort of alignment in the work that we're doing with our values.”
2023-04-16 · Lenny's Podcast · How to make better decisions and build a joyful career | Ada Chen Rekhi (Notejoy, LinkedIn, SurveyMonkey) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source