YouSaid · the spoken record

Evan LaPointe

lines on the record: 160
first: 2024-08-11
most recent: 2024-08-11
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“We had some kind of bystanders watching the whole thing happen. I had a meeting with a good friend Rod afterwards where we talked about how that all went. So I love to talk to people and answer questions. And I'm sure people will have plenty of questions that they'd love to dive deeper into. So I'm on Twitter for sure. And then how you can help me? I mean, fortunately for me, I'm in the business of helping other people, whether those are individuals, teams, companies. The most helpful thing to me is you helping yourself. So if you find our content valuable, if you want to have awesome managers or anything like that in this sort of science-based, kind of more efficient approach to getting there would be interesting, then reach out. We don't bite. We're pretty easy to work with, and that would be super fun to have a conversation about what your team needs.”
2024-08-11 · Lenny's Podcast · Improve strategy, influence, and decision-making by understanding your brain | Evan LaPointe (founder of CORE Sciences) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I mean, they can certainly find a lot of the stuff we do on our website, core sciences.com, find a link to that profile you talked about on there, which can be super fun to take and insightful. The newsletter, all the stuff that we do, you can kind of find out there. And then certainly Twitter. I mean, I've always been like really prickly about people that get on Twitter to post only and not to interact. I'm kind of the opposite. I really love people's questions and pushback. And just yesterday, I probably spent way longer than I should have out of my portfolio management approach to time just on a thread where I was talking to this really interesting woman about this debate almost about the probability of people doing things based on their beliefs, which was”
2024-08-11 · Lenny's Podcast · Improve strategy, influence, and decision-making by understanding your brain | Evan LaPointe (founder of CORE Sciences) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I mean, I guess I'm going to have to see what people in the street. Fortunately, I live in Park City, so I don't run across a lot of people in the street who want to yell at people. But if I lived in Chicago or something like that, I would have no doubt somebody would come up and throw something at me.”
2024-08-11 · Lenny's Podcast · Improve strategy, influence, and decision-making by understanding your brain | Evan LaPointe (founder of CORE Sciences) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I look more at the category level of products. I really like products that have great ergonomics. A lot of people underestimate the value of what it feels like to use the product. Are things in the right place at the right time? I just started this newsletter that's kind of like how do you break all of what we do in a bite-sized pieces for people who are super interested in this stuff to get something weekly? And it exposed me to beehive, which is a very well designed newsletter platform, high ergonomics. I don't ever find anything hard to find. I can get things to work the way I want them to work. So just I like that example. And I remember even back to when I was obsessed with finding the perfect backpack to travel with. And then you find these brands where you're going through security and you didn't even know it, but there's a pocket designed for your phone and exactly the place you would want the pocket for your phone to be. And you're just like, that's so great. I love that this team.”
2024-08-11 · Lenny's Podcast · Improve strategy, influence, and decision-making by understanding your brain | Evan LaPointe (founder of CORE Sciences) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Think that's a great field of study. And then again, Robert Green's whole library is super valuable, especially human nature if you're into kind of that. He's a little darker of an author. Certainly kind of doesn't pull punches about human nature. So those are all great books to explore.”
2024-08-11 · Lenny's Podcast · Improve strategy, influence, and decision-making by understanding your brain | Evan LaPointe (founder of CORE Sciences) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Adventure. If you're a real student of the game and you want to go 10,000 leagues under the sea on this stuff, there's a series of books called The Cambridge Fundamentals of Neuroscience. You can find it on Amazon. A lot of them you can just get on your Kindle for a lot cheaper than the library decorating version of it. But that is bonkers. It talks about how your brain applies to intelligence, emotionality, relationships. It's incredible knowledge. If you instead want to keep it more in the experience, you know, the part of the world you experience and can see and not the brain. Thaler wrote a book called Misbehaving. It was kind of the major book about behavioral economics. And again, we spend a lot of time in companies talking about the way people should act instead of the way people do act. And behavioral economics is essentially the version of economics that's about how people do act, not how people should act.”
2024-08-11 · Lenny's Podcast · Improve strategy, influence, and decision-making by understanding your brain | Evan LaPointe (founder of CORE Sciences) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Habitat today. If you enjoy reading books that are sort of root canals, but you're better off because you read them, there's a book called Never Sweden. There's a book called The Person in the Situation. It was written by some researchers, some psychological researchers. And what it explores is the difference between how personality influences your behavior and how the situation you're in, or like we talked about the habitat you're in influences your behavior. If you're not yet convinced that either of those matters, like, oh, it doesn't, I'll do what I do regardless of the habitat or I'll do what I do regardless of who I am, that book will melt the face off of that existing mental model conclusively. It's really valuable knowledge to understand the mechanics of how the situation influences the person and how the personality influences the person. And then I guess the last, maybe we'll put a fork in the road of a choose your own.”
2024-08-11 · Lenny's Podcast · Improve strategy, influence, and decision-making by understanding your brain | Evan LaPointe (founder of CORE Sciences) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, the obvious first one is never split the difference. I recommend that book to everybody in the universe. I think if you haven't read it yet, you shouldn't get your driver's license. It's just for those who don't know, it was written by Chris Voss. He was an FBI hostage negotiator. And it explores how to negotiate with people and not just hostages, but your colleagues, your parents, your wife, like everybody. And there's some very surprising technique in there that is unexpected. like not trying to get people to agree with you, but getting them to say no more often. Instead of saying, hey, Lenny, are you willing to do this? Say, hey, Lenny, are you opposed to doing this? And it's just this reversal. And I'm giving you the out is the way he explains it. There's a whole bunch of other technique, but the more of that technique is in a team, the better. The better the team does. That's the no-brainer. The second one I would say, since we've kind of covered this topic a little bit about, you know,”
2024-08-11 · Lenny's Podcast · Improve strategy, influence, and decision-making by understanding your brain | Evan LaPointe (founder of CORE Sciences) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Both is it one or the other? And say, like, we're actually trying to raise the floor so that our performance never goes below a certain range. We get faster and smarter as a result, fewer mistakes. Or are we actually trying to uncap a ceiling that we're dealing with right now, especially around things like strategy and vision, if we feel that those conversations always end up feeling like inconceivable arguments, we have a ceiling on our business's performance as a result of that can we raise that ceiling and explore a higher horizon of performance for the business?”
2024-08-11 · Lenny's Podcast · Improve strategy, influence, and decision-making by understanding your brain | Evan LaPointe (founder of CORE Sciences) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I kind of call them pots of ocean to boil instead of oceans to boil. Like, get a few pots of ocean to boil first and focus on that for sure. And definitely make one of those pots if it's a problem area for you. What kind of experience you are? I mean, that's central to everything. Everything else works better in the whole system once you've boiled that pot of the ocean. And then things get easier. And then I guess the only last thing I would add is think of everything we've talked today. It might help to put some language to it as floor risers and ceiling risers because your company has a horizon of performance that you're heading into. And there's a bottom end of that range and a top end of that range. So as you get better at meetings, not only are you like increasing the, you know, you're raising the floor to get rid of bad meetings and waste. And you might be saving a ton of time or converting useless time into useful time, but you also might be raising the ceiling. And I would be really specific with yourself and your team about which outcome are you chasing is...”
2024-08-11 · Lenny's Podcast · Improve strategy, influence, and decision-making by understanding your brain | Evan LaPointe (founder of CORE Sciences) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“No, I don't think we need to. I mean, there's certainly a lot more We could talk about, but I think we don't want to melt any minds. We want people to kind of walk away and be like, I can do that. I can do that. I can do that. So definitely pick, you know, two or three wins.”
2024-08-11 · Lenny's Podcast · Improve strategy, influence, and decision-making by understanding your brain | Evan LaPointe (founder of CORE Sciences) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And other teams might call Gamma Deep Work. And that's probably more appropriate. I think don't bother me beta. Is for some teams they need to be told, no, no, use this team, use this time not just to not be interrupted, but to think differently about problems, to think about, is the architecture even right? Is the, like, is the way we are thinking about this even right? Not just get a lot of stuff done.”
2024-08-11 · Lenny's Podcast · Improve strategy, influence, and decision-making by understanding your brain | Evan LaPointe (founder of CORE Sciences) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, people can use that term in a couple ways. I think a lot of people call deep work don't bother me beta, which could be one.”
2024-08-11 · Lenny's Podcast · Improve strategy, influence, and decision-making by understanding your brain | Evan LaPointe (founder of CORE Sciences) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Just find half a day if you can, maybe, but like maybe less than half a day, a couple hours to be in gamma once a week. And you'll kind of feel it out from there. But the reason the rule of thumb of 25 is out there is 25 is kind of the risk point because most people will be like, we're not even spending 5%. Or the perfectionist team might be like, we're 50. So if you're far away from that rule of thumb, that's a pretty good indicator. It's a good time to audit yourself.”
2024-08-11 · Lenny's Podcast · Improve strategy, influence, and decision-making by understanding your brain | Evan LaPointe (founder of CORE Sciences) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Nice little black hole effect where a lot of distractions happen a new home because you actually said we're going to distinctly do stuff. You're saying yes, but not now to a lot of distractions. But yeah, I think that's the ideal cadence. And that for some teams, it needs to be, you know, maybe a half a day or a full day. You'll figure it out based on your own business. But what per quarter is a necessary amount of time for us to break beta and go into deep thinking analysis mode? How healthy is our operation? How smarter are we being? Are we delivering value? What needs to be reevaluated from the market's experience, the customer's experience, the team's experience? Let's look at these different views of the business and make some prioritized decisions about we're going to make specific improvements this quarter for these areas. And then even once a week, maybe.”
2024-08-11 · Lenny's Podcast · Improve strategy, influence, and decision-making by understanding your brain | Evan LaPointe (founder of CORE Sciences) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I think that probably is overabundance in all honesty. But if you think about it through like the lens of a quarter, if you're going to be on a set of cadences, and this is probably the tactical advice, it's like, look at your cadences and say at the quarter level, that's probably the right level of fidelity for most people to look at their calendars in terms of like what big stuff should we be doing because six months is usually too long to do anything big. too much has happened in the world year is definitely too long to wait for a cadence to kind of kick in so quarterly is really good and what's nice is when we when we cluster our gamma time on this quarterly cadence we can take a lot of the stuff that would be what we call calendar invaders you know these random conversations that come up out of nowhere and we can be like well we're getting ready to have an off-site this quarter's off-site in two weeks can this idea wait until then to be processed so you kind of get this”
2024-08-11 · Lenny's Podcast · Improve strategy, influence, and decision-making by understanding your brain | Evan LaPointe (founder of CORE Sciences) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And if you can get the team to have off sites that are gamma focused, everybody scatter and be alone and do this stuff that are gamma and alpha focused, that are productive and you bring ideas back, you're just simply going to generate thinking and outcomes that you wouldn't otherwise. And it may be that 10% is right for you. It may be that 30% is right for you, depending on how dynamic your market and customer base are. But just to ask yourself the question, like challenge yourself with the question.”
2024-08-11 · Lenny's Podcast · Improve strategy, influence, and decision-making by understanding your brain | Evan LaPointe (founder of CORE Sciences) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“available through your particular subscription. And the same thing applies to Gamma. The habitat basically needs to establish that gamma is a viable channel for a lot of work and there's permission to go into it. You can certainly overdo it. That's why I say 25%. You don't need to spend half a year, three quarters a year in gamma. It bonkers how smart you can be if you spend three or four hours in an afternoon in that deep focused state. You'll just do stuff you never.”
2024-08-11 · Lenny's Podcast · Improve strategy, influence, and decision-making by understanding your brain | Evan LaPointe (founder of CORE Sciences) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The same thing for gamma when you hear phrases like we can't talk about this for the rest of our lives, that is the gamma, the gamma prevention team kicking the door down and saying we're here to get you back into beta. You know, everybody, you know, put your hands behind your backs sort of a thing. And that's where the habitat and the focus kind of matters because you will not ever get a gamma idea from a beta mind. You will never get an alpha idea from a beta mind. So if your business needs some breakthrough daydreaming interesting ideas in order to create adjacencies, to build new products, to seek new markets, to better fulfill the role you're playing within this market, then team has to have permission to enter that intellectual focus state or that you're turning that channel off. You're like taking that off of the programming.”
2024-08-11 · Lenny's Podcast · Improve strategy, influence, and decision-making by understanding your brain | Evan LaPointe (founder of CORE Sciences) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And you can do this in the middle of a day, certain companies, it's easier than others. But if you can push away from your desk and just go sit in a park or something for 10 minutes, 20 minutes and calm your brain down, like listen, something cool will probably happen in your brain. I can't guarantee that, but you have to experiment with it to find out like how it works for you.”
2024-08-11 · Lenny's Podcast · Improve strategy, influence, and decision-making by understanding your brain | Evan LaPointe (founder of CORE Sciences) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Happens in alpha reward, it's when you kind of have these breakthroughs of how to get a deal, how to win something like it's useful, it's daydreaming, but your brain is like primed to daydream in a certain way, whether it's about anxiety or anger or whether it's about rewards you care about. If it's purpose, this is where from a vision perspective, a possibilities product perspective, you're going to have all sorts of crazy cool ideas pop into your mind if you've primed your brain to be in purposeful and then you daydream.”
2024-08-11 · Lenny's Podcast · Improve strategy, influence, and decision-making by understanding your brain | Evan LaPointe (founder of CORE Sciences) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Is probably not generating anywhere near the ideal outcomes. And if we could instead shift to the purposeful column by answering that brain's craving for why with an answer that explains it's not about you, it's not about us. It's about other people are counting on us to get this upright. Does that matter to you? Because for most people, they're like, yeah, that's actually really cool. I can have an impact on like real stuff happening in other people's lives and in the world outside of me so that that activates, now all of a sudden we can say, okay, let's look at alpha across the top row. Alpha safety is when you get in the shower and all of your anxieties, worries, et cetera, come out of nowhere out of the attic of your mind.”
2024-08-11 · Lenny's Podcast · Improve strategy, influence, and decision-making by understanding your brain | Evan LaPointe (founder of CORE Sciences) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And most of the companies out there, most of the teams out there are primarily, all their programming comes from safety beta and reward beta. How can I be busy to get rewards ROI, customers, deals, whatever, even promotions, self-more, self-centered kind of rewards. And beta safety, which would be how can I be busy optics, manage my reputation, avoid risk, that sort of stuff. So we spend the crisis is basically realizing spending too much time in those two out of our nine available boxes.”
2024-08-11 · Lenny's Podcast · Improve strategy, influence, and decision-making by understanding your brain | Evan LaPointe (founder of CORE Sciences) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Is spent in gamma and alpha, you're probably a lot better off than the teams who spend less than 25% of their year thinking deep and being in this more daydreaming mode. So what I wanted to circle back on is how could we possibly daydream productively? That's preposterous. And this is where you can build in your mind, and I do have another PDF for this if people want to see it, but you can build in your mind a three by three grid where we have the safety system, reward, and purpose system in columns. We have alpha, beta, and gamma in rows, and we basically have a list of nine channels that the brain can activate to generate different types of thinking.”
2024-08-11 · Lenny's Podcast · Improve strategy, influence, and decision-making by understanding your brain | Evan LaPointe (founder of CORE Sciences) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“This locomotive that keeps on going irrespective of what's going on around it, it's that heads down form of conscientious beta that feels like now's not the time, let's stay focused, let's stay focused, et cetera. So we don't want to get rid of beta. We got a lot of work to do. But let's put a rule of thumb out there for people to explore because it's going to be subjective to every team and every company. But as a rule of thumb, if 25% of your year is”
2024-08-11 · Lenny's Podcast · Improve strategy, influence, and decision-making by understanding your brain | Evan LaPointe (founder of CORE Sciences) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Existing process or structure or framework in your mind to get something done, you're going to utilize those things to get something done. Gamma is where we go, I would normally do it this way. I can see why that's not the right way. I need to make something new. I need to break my framework and build a brand new one right now to do something. So we generally spend too much time in data and work. And that's both a judgment call because I certainly have my own opinion about data. I call it the conscientiousness crisis, which is conscientiousness wants beta, openness wants gamma. Kind of think of tying these pieces together. And it's not that conscientiousness is like inherently a crisis, but when you meet teams that haven't done any innovation, haven't rethought the market, have become insensitive to changes in the environment around them, have become insensitive to their own employee problems and are still just kind of like.”
2024-08-11 · Lenny's Podcast · Improve strategy, influence, and decision-making by understanding your brain | Evan LaPointe (founder of CORE Sciences) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Stream of stuff we could do and get done. And then gamma is your brain's intense focus. So if you're learning something really complicated, you're learning thermodynamics in college or something like that. And you're just like, wow, this is not easy and you have to really push your brain to grapple with these concepts, connect the dots. I even remember certain things. That's gamma. And we feel that sometimes it worked, that here's a problem, a complex issue that we could tackle in beta by slapping duct tape on it, or we could tackle in gamma by reverse engineering and going deep. And that's where we start to connect the dots that we talked about earlier that focus in reverse engineering are related. That in beta, you have no intention to learn anything new to get something done, to think more deeply to get something done, to reconsider an”
2024-08-11 · Lenny's Podcast · Improve strategy, influence, and decision-making by understanding your brain | Evan LaPointe (founder of CORE Sciences) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And it unpacks them. He goes, Oh, that's an interesting idea. It comes out of nowhere. It can be driving, gardening, car washing, cycling, whatever. As long as there's not too much cognitive load, then you can be daydreaming. And I'll come back to this in a second because there's a big permission problem at the Habitat level for some of these focus levels. Beta is productivity mode. So if anybody, you've ever seen somebody with a poster on their back wall that says, get shit done, that's basically just a poster that says beta on it. Like, I love beta. And answer emails, have meetings, write code. And there are some gamma code, you know, deeper thinking scenarios where you're writing code, delivering presentations, making presentations like so much of our workday is beta. And it's just, I mean, some of us have an infinite amount of demand for beta work. There's just a never-ending.”
2024-08-11 · Lenny's Podcast · Improve strategy, influence, and decision-making by understanding your brain | Evan LaPointe (founder of CORE Sciences) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Easy metaphor is if you're in your house at night and everything's quiet, you hear things that you don't hear during the daytime. And that's what alpha is like in the brain. Your brain is actually working subconsciously a lot. But when you're busy, which is beta, your brain is too noisy to hear any of those little creaks and pops in the house. But when you're an alpha, you hear stuff. So the most common setting for alpha for most people is the shower. So it unlocks this mystery of like, why do I have all these ideas in the shower? Well, it's because your brain is an alpha. It hears these little creaks and pops inside of the attic.”
2024-08-11 · Lenny's Podcast · Improve strategy, influence, and decision-making by understanding your brain | Evan LaPointe (founder of CORE Sciences) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I mean, isn't this the question? Because this is where it all ends, right? First things first, let's look at the neuroscience that we have available to us, which is the study of focus is. Either is or is tightly associated with the study of what's called brain waves. That's becoming a lot more popular. We're seeing it like even in athletes, like professional golfers or studying how their brain waves are focused on the golf shot and which mode to put the brain into to play golf at the highest level. Same thing applies to work. There's a bunch of different kind of bands of brain waves. Most of them actually are when you're asleep. So your REM cycles, your deep sleep cycles, you're kind of like drowsy cycles. Those are brain waves, right? You can feel your brain turning off. You can feel your brain turning on when you dream. But when you're awake, there's really three primary modes that your brain is in. The nerdy side of this, kind of the nerdy language is alpha beta and gamma. Those are the distinct ranges of brain activity. And they basically represent how focused your brain is. So alpha is quite simply daydreaming, right? So your brain is very quiet and empty.”
2024-08-11 · Lenny's Podcast · Improve strategy, influence, and decision-making by understanding your brain | Evan LaPointe (founder of CORE Sciences) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You really don't need a mission statement, you need to understand the role you play, and people need to have some response, some physiological like, I get it to my actions impact people. And if they don't have a response, you should go find a human who does for sure.”
2024-08-11 · Lenny's Podcast · Improve strategy, influence, and decision-making by understanding your brain | Evan LaPointe (founder of CORE Sciences) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think it's easier for people to conceptualize the importance of their work if they understand we are playing a role, not fulfilling a mission. And like role implies obligation. There's no obligation in mission unless you kind of like feel the inspiration so powerfully. And these differences are subtle, but neurologically, it's different, right? If I tell your brain, here are the people counting on you to get this right, Lenny. Your brain activates a region called the anterior insular cortex, which starts to think about other people in the context of the solution you're creating. And if I say we are here to change people's lives through this in a more general sense, your prefrontal cortex will still activate to solve the problem, but your anterior insular cortex will not to more deeply consider the humans affected by the problem. So you're adding to the toolkit of what the brain will bring to the table to generate solutions. And if you activate more good regions of the brain, you get better solutions. So I lean into this personally. I'm like,”
2024-08-11 · Lenny's Podcast · Improve strategy, influence, and decision-making by understanding your brain | Evan LaPointe (founder of CORE Sciences) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I think it's an alternative to mission. I tried, and I don't want to stomp all over mission, vision values because I think they can work, but.”
2024-08-11 · Lenny's Podcast · Improve strategy, influence, and decision-making by understanding your brain | Evan LaPointe (founder of CORE Sciences) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“To the square one is ask yourself when's the last time our team had a conversation about why we're even doing any of this, what value it produces, who is affected by our decisions And if that hasn't happened in a while, that's not good.”
2024-08-11 · Lenny's Podcast · Improve strategy, influence, and decision-making by understanding your brain | Evan LaPointe (founder of CORE Sciences) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“All these minds that work with you why we're even doing this, that's the starting point is make sure everybody knows why and that why is a shared why across the team and not just the Simon Synic big picture why I mean very specific why that you know for my team when we build training materials when we look at it through that lens of if we get this right this is what happens to teams and companies and products and their customers like there's a through line It's a big deal. And that's why we can't do it this way or that's why we should get more obsessed with quality and why we should get more interdependent as a team and stop doing things that are just our own ideas but say, hey Lenny, I'm thinking about doing it this way. Is there anything you'd add before I hit go? And then you'd be like, oh, I think it would be 10% better if you did it this way. And then now our product is 10% better. So that's kind of.”
2024-08-11 · Lenny's Podcast · Improve strategy, influence, and decision-making by understanding your brain | Evan LaPointe (founder of CORE Sciences) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Here's the specific bad things that will happen. You could be giving them a why in terms of reward because, oh, if you do this, you get this. Or if we do this, we get this. But you could also be giving them a purposeful answer to why, which is not a form of negligence, which is to say, because our work actually matters. Like there are people out there waiting on us to ship this product to improve their situation. And they also want us to get it right at the same time. So biased to impact through that lens, we do need to ship this. It needs to happen, and it needs to be right, or at least right enough, in its first version. If you have been negligent, and we all have at times, right? This is, I'm not trying to judge, but I'm trying to convict, right? To build some conviction, to build some commitment. If you have been negligent in answering”
2024-08-11 · Lenny's Podcast · Improve strategy, influence, and decision-making by understanding your brain | Evan LaPointe (founder of CORE Sciences) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, the brain craves an answer to the question why am I doing this? And not only are there things we should start doing, but I like to kind of deepen the commitment in people's minds to what we should start doing by kind of thinking of it is we should start doing things that we've been negligent in doing, right? Not just, oh, this would be even better, but like we're actually causing some habitat problems by being negligent in certain things. So the primary thing that people are negligent in is answering the question, why should I do this to their team? And saying you should do this because it's your job is a form of negligence, right? Like you're not actually answering that question in any useful way because I could also answer that in the safety way, which I sort of just did by saying it's your job. I'm implying that there's a consequence. But I could be like, because if you don't.”
2024-08-11 · Lenny's Podcast · Improve strategy, influence, and decision-making by understanding your brain | Evan LaPointe (founder of CORE Sciences) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Do not build a habitat on the roots of inspiration. It doesn't work. It can work, right? If you do a super inspiring stuff and you're super inspiring people, then you probably have the artistic ability to pull that off. But even then, you'd still be better off if you would do it through logical deduction instead of inspiration.”
2024-08-11 · Lenny's Podcast · Improve strategy, influence, and decision-making by understanding your brain | Evan LaPointe (founder of CORE Sciences) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“What state does that put the other human? And a lot of people, particularly I'll pick on myself with the low politeness, will spend years thinking, I'm giving honest feedback quickly, this is efficient. And you're like, how is it efficient when it takes people six months instead of six minutes to act on your feedback because they just don't like you so much? And you have this appeal problem that keeps you out of all the rooms that like you're not actually your utility, which your politeness is a utility transfer mechanism, but we don't want you in the room. So you're not a business benefit in this case. So that's kind of the starting point. That's ground zero of habitat is.”
2024-08-11 · Lenny's Podcast · Improve strategy, influence, and decision-making by understanding your brain | Evan LaPointe (founder of CORE Sciences) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Value for them, I'm not done. I need to finish the job until it produces value for them. Quality standards are baked into this. That, again, is implied. Would Warby Parker be happy? Would I be happy that Warby Parker exists if they shipped me something that's a two out of ten in quality? No. So we can't make things that are two out of 10. And everybody has a belief. There are plenty of people that probably interview at Warby Parker that think two out of 10 is perfectly fine. Just get it to them. And like, no, we need an antibody to that belief. We have decision making intelligence, which everybody believes like we should go fast, break stuff, or we should be super slow and get everything right and wherever in between. That's a fun one to talk about. And then finally, you have a teaming dynamic belief, which is essentially every single human's belief of what is acceptable treatment of other human beings.”
2024-08-11 · Lenny's Podcast · Improve strategy, influence, and decision-making by understanding your brain | Evan LaPointe (founder of CORE Sciences) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And then you can still use that exact same vocabulary when you go sell it to them. This is how it makes you faster, smarter, more efficient, save costs. So it's like really logical deduction. And if people think that we should do something, build a product that doesn't create value, now instead of being inspiring, we can be logical. We don't build things that produce no value. That is not a priority until we can turn it into something that does produce value. So you're turning culture into something highly usable and getting away from performative culture into logical deductive culture. And I think that's really, really the key for most people is to say let's understand why the world's glad we exist. That's why we have a TAM. That's why we have customers. And what does that imply about our standards for ourselves when we execute and value creation, even down to the email? If I send some wonky email reply to somebody's question and it doesn't produce”
2024-08-11 · Lenny's Podcast · Improve strategy, influence, and decision-making by understanding your brain | Evan LaPointe (founder of CORE Sciences) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But if you understand the role you play in the world and you understand the value you produce in terms of time savings, cost savings, upside, whatever it is that you do, then you can say we should have a bias to impact, not a bias to action. We shouldn't just do stuff. We should have an effect that has the result of value creation. Like we should save people time. And now when you're a product team, looking at this and you're saying, oh, here's a cool new idea, Lenny. Let's do this. You can now use that as a habitat level permission to be like, oh, how does that produce value for people? How does that make people go faster, save time, get smarter, do something they couldn't do otherwise?”
2024-08-11 · Lenny's Podcast · Improve strategy, influence, and decision-making by understanding your brain | Evan LaPointe (founder of CORE Sciences) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“At the team level, at the company level, that could be a really big deal. So we know that. And we say, okay, well, gosh, that implies so much. There's so much we got to do now. What value does that produce? And then I could say, okay, once we understand the definition of value, which comes out of our role, now we can change the definition of done. So, a lot of teams talk about bias to action and hamsters have bias to action. They get up out of their straw and they turn that wheel as hard as they possibly can and they go absolutely nowhere.”
2024-08-11 · Lenny's Podcast · Improve strategy, influence, and decision-making by understanding your brain | Evan LaPointe (founder of CORE Sciences) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That's pretty compelling. Why is the world glad Warby Parker exists? Because before you used to choose between looking dumb and it being cheap and looking cool and it being expensive and now you can look cool and it's cheap like that's the world's really glad we exist. Now that's true. I don't need you to be inspired to believe that that is true. And now everything that we're going to think about for the rest of our beliefs we're going to deduce from that. So we're just going to use logic to build our culture, not inspiration. So this next thing we need to figure out is how can we understand the specific value that's created when we play this role in the world? We save people money, we save people time, we open up markets. We help people explore possibilities and potential they couldn't tap into otherwise, right, et cetera. So what's the role of core? Like people are glad we exist because we tap into potential they had no access to before, right?”
2024-08-11 · Lenny's Podcast · Improve strategy, influence, and decision-making by understanding your brain | Evan LaPointe (founder of CORE Sciences) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Who is glad we exist? Why are they glad we exist? And that's shifting our mission into something that we call your role, the role you play in the world around you. Who is glad you exist? Why are they glad you exist? And that is a fact. That is not an inspiring idea. That is like, okay, we work with this company that does AI-based optical character recognition document ingestion, et cetera. Why is the world glad that they exist? Well, because we get 95% of the documents scanned in into structured data that normally people have to transfer by hand.”
2024-08-11 · Lenny's Podcast · Improve strategy, influence, and decision-making by understanding your brain | Evan LaPointe (founder of CORE Sciences) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“An inspiring vision, and it's going to be performed well enough. Like it's going to be like if we were busking in the park, this is going to be a cool enough mission vision values that people throw some change into my guitar case and they buy into it, like they gather around. What I think, and I think that's just completely the wrong approach because we're hoping to inspire people. We're hoping to be artistically talented enough to pull that off. The other approach is to be deductive, logically deductive, which is centrally speaking, there is hopefully a market out there that's glad our company exists.”
2024-08-11 · Lenny's Podcast · Improve strategy, influence, and decision-making by understanding your brain | Evan LaPointe (founder of CORE Sciences) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Talk about like this mission, vision, values, culture stuff that comes later. Let some stuff happen with the business that comes later. They're right to say that if that's the paradigm you're going to use because it's not going to work either way. So you might as well do it later. But if you're going to do it the right way and investigate human beliefs and what, like we talked about priming, for example, culture is just the macro priming of the entire business, of what your central belief systems are, and then the permission that forms from those belief systems. So if you've done that really well, you should do that right at the very beginning. Like in what way should we approach this company building this, working together, et cetera? Like that would be really, really helpful to get right from day one. And the belief system that people have, there are two approaches to changing people's beliefs. Mission vision values is what we call a performative approach, meaning I'm going to come up with some expression of an inspiring mission, inspiring values.”
2024-08-11 · Lenny's Podcast · Improve strategy, influence, and decision-making by understanding your brain | Evan LaPointe (founder of CORE Sciences) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Let's start at the start here. So, in the difference between what science knows and business does, Let's kind of zero in on the fact that the way most companies approach culture has a very shaky track record. Like if mission vision values was an airline, you would not allow any family to fly on that airline because it does not arrive at most of its intended destinations. So that is just a super important starting point because I'm going to kill a sacred cow here while we talk about this. And I don't want anybody to feel like I'm trying to be mean or anything. It's just, it's worth looking at stuff that doesn't work and wondering if there's something that could work a lot better. So if we look at habitat and culture, it's really about what people believe. It's what people believe is acceptable, permissible, productive. And the biggest flaw in people's approach to culture. And interestingly enough, even at YC,”
2024-08-11 · Lenny's Podcast · Improve strategy, influence, and decision-making by understanding your brain | Evan LaPointe (founder of CORE Sciences) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You are performing at a much lower level than if harming each other was extremely ineffective, right? And that's up to you as a leader, as a manager, et cetera. And then, of course, skill is what it is. Like it's your ability to convert your intents into outcomes.”
2024-08-11 · Lenny's Podcast · Improve strategy, influence, and decision-making by understanding your brain | Evan LaPointe (founder of CORE Sciences) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And the reason that he's correct, like he used the phrase this is how the world always has been, it's how it is and it's how it always will be, right? Well, it's how the normal dysfunctional world always has been, is and will be. And if you want people in your organization to rise on merit and for influence to work to generate better decision making, make better products, have a better company, move move faster, et cetera. You need to create a habitat where what Jeffrey's observed about the normal dysfunctional world largely doesn't work within your habitat. So if it's effective for people to harm each other in your habitat,”
2024-08-11 · Lenny's Podcast · Improve strategy, influence, and decision-making by understanding your brain | Evan LaPointe (founder of CORE Sciences) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source