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

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“That's what the brain is seeing. All the brains in the room are like, oh, fight, right? And now what are our objectives? My objective now becomes win. Their objective because they've taken a huge risk of saying, I disagree with everything becomes win. And because they are disagreeing with a lot of stuff that they don't understand, the inevitability is they're about to be annihilated in this room where they have both said we can't talk about this forever and now put all of their chips onto the table to say, I completely disagree instead of I have a question or can we pull that thread or I don't see how these dots connect so that's that on a super tactical level there's things we say that activate the amygdala the combat mode of the brain versus a different choice of phrase which is going to activate the prefrontal cortex which is like hey Lenny you're connecting these”
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 this is like a new habitat. I'm like, in this habitat, do people really hate thought? Do people really consider themselves to be like the police that watch the mean streets of intellectualism for any activity? It's just kind of crazy. But yeah, that's kind of the practical side of this is you got to watch out and you got to be careful. And that's why I say habitat's such a big deal because that's a perfect example of a well-intentioned room with mostly people that are there for the right reasons and the right outcomes, but where this normalness of saying a phrase like that or saying like, I disagree. Same meeting. Person goes, I completely disagree. And I was like, with everything, no, absolutely everything. And I go, so let's look at the meta. You know, the overhead camera of this meeting. This was the initiation of combat.”
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 are resisting knowing X. Now we're going to hit a point where you knowing Y, Z, etc. We've hit a diminishing return. And now I'm improving your decision quality by 1% instead of by 4x. But we haven't established any sensitivity in this room to the diminishing return curve of incremental thought and incremental information.”
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
“There's a new flavor of habitat that you find yourself in with very new rituals. And one of the rituals that I find myself around a lot was the ritual of saying we can't talk about this for the rest of our lives And we would be about six minutes into a meeting when somebody would drop the We Can't Talk About This for the rest of our lives line. And I would look at my watch and be like, I didn't realize that you were terminal. And why are you even in this meeting if you're about to die? Like, because we are, my take on this is we are super far away from the rest of our lives right now. Why are you saying that we can't talk about something for six minutes when the diminishing return of added information in the priming of this meeting, you know, to use that again? You knowing X quadruples your decision quality.”
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, structured and organized That is another contributor in the negative, which is it's objectively great to be a conscientious person. There are so many benefits until we have to waste time productively and then or we have to break order in organization. And then that strength that four days a week or 28 days a month is great for you. On those days where we go and have the off-site and say, like, what if we blew it all up? To your example of like new design, new website, blow it all up, start over again different direction. That's where the conscientiousness is going to be like, why are we doing this? Why are we having this conversation? What's the need? This is inefficient. I could be spending my time doing something else. And sometimes that'll express itself even in meetings of I was in a meeting one time after we were acquired. This is, you know, eight or nine years ago now. And when you're a founder and you get a”
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
“Oh, yeah. So there's a whole bunch of stuff. Well, let me try to make the list simple. Openness is the biggest one Because it is essentially your tolerance of vision and strategy. And the lower that is, the lower you will tolerate the abstract pieces of the puzzle for sure, the outlandish and kind of like purely creative and rules-breaking components of strategy and vision, lack of precedence, those types of things. Now, the other thing to look out for is as your conscientiousness rises, which is essentially your desire to be efficient, effective, busy. you know, not waste time.”
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
“For us to jump in and try so you need to stabilize that is a little misplaced. And your intellect, that's really what you're doing is saying like, how much do people change? I don't really worry too much about how much they change. It's more about how much they can spot with their intellect something that's misfit to the situation and then take what they're motivated to do and what they choose to do and separate them. Right. Like that's the It doesn't matter if we change your motivations. If your choice of behavior and your underlying motivation can be different from each other, that's awesome. Those people are super. And we all know people like that where you're like, I know this person is uncomfortable right now, but they're totally making it work. And I really appreciate that.”
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
“Self awareness is actually kind of the key. And self awareness and self consciousness, the difference here is that self-awareness is simply being intentional with your brain, whereas self-consciousness is being worried about your brain. We don't want people to be worried about their brains and like insecure. We just want you to say, this is a situation in which my brain can work this way. And this is a situation where I want to push myself. So it's like being intentional. And we talked a little bit before this episode about kind of this instinct versus intellect duality in the mind. And essentially, you're just using your intellect to either verify or improve your instinct. You're always going to have instinctive responses about risk and fear and uncertainty and doubt and need for data and all these types of things. But then your intellect can come in and like watch that part of your brain thinking and say, you're super worried about the risk of this, but it's actually pretty low stage.”
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
“Personally, I'm more concerned with the effect on teams than on people Because if you look at this through the, like, I've been a four time founder and if I look at this through like, how is my company working? How are my teams working? I don't need all the individuals to get to perfect. I need, especially in cases where there's like this translation issue where a team is working on something and some part of that team is saying like, let's stop here and let's stay, let's dwell here. If they can move enough that the team, the effect on the team is now freed up, that's what we really feel as a business. And so to answer your question directly, people can move a lot, especially through the first three rings of that range that we.”
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
“Quickly. Other teams do that really badly, and they just accuse you of, why can't you see this? And it's like, then you get even more stuck.”
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 that may be interesting. And you may kind of venture closer to those other reasons. You may be like, I'm going to stay in my reason bubble within the greater context of this place. So like there's a whole bunch of, you know, business is no different, that you can kind of say, okay, I'm going to push myself and I may get into these kind of places that go beyond my brain's flexibility, like where the elastic band kind of reaches its limits. And then from there, I'll trust people and I'll have people, you know, what I was going to mention about the YC founders is so many of them are so smart that they're really able to efficiently translate what they see beyond where your band stretches into the language you feel comfortable with.”
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're pushing your brain, you know, and I mean, Burning Man's actually a great example because there are a bunch of different reasons you might go. And if you go for one reason, then you're exposed to the other reasons”
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, and it's great. You know, one of the things that's so cool about the YC teams that we work with is they're so sophisticated and it's so smart. So, even though they might run into this roadblock, A, they're going to do exactly what you just said, and they're going to push themselves. You may notice in your profile, the dot that you scored is surrounded by rings that represent how hard it is for you to push yourself to think in different ways, to think beyond kind of the home base way of your brain working. Now at a certain point, your brain breaks and you move into foreign territory. There's a level of, I mean, if you are a very conservative person and somebody's like, let's go to Burning Man, that will break your brain, right? You don't go all the way to the other side of the spectrum. For the record, I've been.”
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 takes my brain, all this abstract and kind of creative, future centric thinking that's not rooted in the concrete is where my brain goes, you know, alarms go off and I'm like, I need something concrete. So if you can give me something concrete, I'm more comfortable. But at this point, I have to maybe move into a lot of trust and like trust may be my alternative to like agreement, 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
“That kind of just were dragging the team into a different language that is much more literal than the more experiential language of the business. So you can kind of see this play out all the time. But I think vulnerability is great because if you are sitting in a meeting, you, Lenny, and you say, this is not my thing. Basically everything you're saying is inconceivable. Now I'm being honest with you. Nobody's going to hate you for being honest. They're actually going to be glad that you are honest about the gap instead of glad that you are super certain that you are the right human to index off of in the decision making process.”
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 that team, because they got stuck in the translation phase instead of the experimentation phase, has a huge disadvantage in the market. And if you're competing head to head with one team, like this is what I loved about, you know, the Figma conversation, that habitat inherently is built for speed because the habitat itself, words are tattooed to your brain that are like, we will not spend time in the translation phase or we will not spend much time. And we see this a lot kind of in the interplay between finance departments, product departments, and things like that, where an overpowered CFO can start asking questions for which there are no answers.”
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're thinking about a competitive market, you know, like most of the people that you interview are in highly competitive markets, the team that spends less time translating satisfactory language before they move, which inevitably they will move. Sometimes they'll move because the market forces them to, right? They spend so much time locked up in the ROI conversation or the justification, the translation conversation that eventually customers start leaving, employees start leaving, and they're like, oh, okay, it's becoming more believable now. Well, because it's moved out of the realm of ideas into the physical world that we can see like right in front of us.”
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
“There's two possibilities for the four seasons. They either have an answer to that question, which satisfies the pragmatic shaped whole, or they have said in their habitat, we don't ask those types of questions because they're a huge waste of time.”
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, absolutely. I mean, because if you think about these ideas as pegs and holes, right? We're going to take a creativity shaped peg and try to put it through a more pragmatic shaped hole, there's like a translation problem there. And that's a huge burden. Like if the team actually needs to be innovative, it's a huge burden just in terms of time spent on that translation to translate the visionary strategic ideas that are accurate but are inconceivable into ideas that feel believable for those who kind of need that more grounded thing. And of course the most common scenario here is ROI, which is the classic question to ask about any idea. What's the ROI? Well, if the idea is inherently Generating nth order effects instead of first order effects, like what is the ROI of having fresh flowers in the lobby of a four seasons hotel?”
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, like, those are your three options. And when you realize, like, I can be vulnerable, I can attempt to hide it, or I can be on apologetic, those other two options are ruinous compared to vulnerability.”
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
“In a team. Let's say it's a C suite, a leadership team, a founder and co founder, and the rest of leadership team. And we work a lot with YC companies on this here because it's super important. As they hire people, every incremental hire is an increment of psychological diversity. And it changes everything about how these conversations go. So knowing this, okay, what are our options to socialize this knowledge? Vulnerability is the best option. But, you know, like Brene Brown will kind of sell vulnerability for its own sake. Not everybody buys selling vulnerability for its own sake because it's a scary thing. But it gets a little less scary when we consider how much scarier our alternatives are. Like I can pretend to hide this. That's my other option, or I cannot hide it, be a Tasmanian devil, and then be unapologetic.”
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 that's something to really know. And vulnerability is kind of the best approach to this because if you think about your domino too, once you kind of know this stuff, then the question is, how do we socialize this knowledge?”
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
“If we were to kind of do paint by numbers on that, you know, what dominoes do you want to knock down? Know your personality, what you're looking for in the big five model, which we lean into, is openness. If you are low in openness, your brain essentially has abstract creative, intellectual, complex thinking wired to the pain systems of the brain, right? That's like how your wiring is. As soon as things get abstract, not only are you like, I don't like this, you have a much more visceral negative response to these types of ideas. And you are now going into your pain cave, right? While somebody else in the room may have all that abstract creative exploratory thinking wired to their reward systems.”
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
“Thinking and dialogue that happens inside of businesses directly activates people's inconceivable. Without any self-awareness that that is a personal problem, not a objective problem. And I think that's like, it's a really, really important thing for companies and individuals to invest in themselves to kind of say, do I have the capacity to recognize the situation that I find inconceivable, but that could be totally wrong? And then we can avoid the months potentially of arguing. That sit between us in experimentation. So, I think that's the starting point for that.”
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 debate about the value of design sits in the strategy and vision. Like, how do we know there's an ROI to a better design here? Well, if you could disprove that instead of proving it, because the last million people who asked this question proved it, if you could disprove it, you'd probably win a Nobel Prize for being the first human to disprove something that is ironclad. We're done. We're done with this debate. So that, I think, is what we have to recognize in ourselves. Big part of self-awareness is where are like unbelievable threshold begins, where our believable threshold ends. And then the inconceivable is like, get out of my office level stuff. And a lot of the vision 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
“And this is why minds struggle with strategy and with vision every mind based on like personality we talked about earlier, that line of demarcation between believed, you know, we all have different lived experience. So the more experience you have, the more believed you have. And then the believable and then the unbelievable, but yet conceivable, like these lines shift a lot from person to person. So an idea that totally makes sense to Uri, he's probably been in a thousand meetings where other people are like, that'll never work. Even though obviously science knows, for example, it totally will. One of the great benefits of science and culinary school is let's not reinvent ideas that are already proven. So we already know that certain things activate people's purposeful state and the full brain that seeks comprehension, seeks deeper problem solving, seeks human connection. Those are known things. And the same thing as 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
“These are the things that seem to be far fetched. And most of going back to the Canva conversation, the conversation with Uri, right, that you had. Most of the things that are totally believed by these leaders are unbelievable to most other leaders. Like, we don't need managers. That's, I don't believe it. So there's like now we've shifted the mind from inbuilt kind of tailwind to inbuilt headwind.”
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 come up with your own words for that, but that's kind of like a starting point, which is if somebody says something you've already experienced, it's something that is believed to your brain, right? So if we said we should implement an OKR framework and you've experienced it in a prior workplace or you've read all about Google doing it, then you're going to be like, yeah, we should. It would clean up a lot of junk around here. And, okay, great. So your brain's kind of already in a yes. If it's believable, maybe you're reading Harvard Business Review and you're kind of reading about things that your business has never done that you've never done. But there's all this evidence that it works and it makes sense to you mechanically. So you're kind of like, okay, yeah, I find that believable. And now we're kind of leaning toward yes or we're still in the yes bucket. Now we get into kind of these like unbelievable yet maybe conceivable.”
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 with strategy and vision because I think it's nice to be better at strategy and vision before you start influencing people. So, what you'll encounter in life in your mind is ideas are swirling, whether you're generating those ideas or other people are, is your brain is going to sort those ideas into believed, believable. Kind of conceivable and inconceivable.”
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
“In very notably, the principles that apply. I think that's really, really important, not just like what we're here to do, but like. How we can think about this best. And you can even have a debate about the principles. And it's way better to have a debate about the principles than it is to have a debate about the tactics that are rooted in the fact that you have super misaligned principles So, if somebody's trying to make the decision with speed in mind and another person is trying to make the decision with accuracy in mind. It is completely inevitable that they're about to have a cat fight in the meeting. And it's not resolvable until they come back and revisit the fact that deeper down, we are approaching this in a completely different mentality with completely different objectives.”
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 that's a super Of like obvious thing that people can do, but that people very rarely do in priming. And I'm happy to generate like a list, you know, so we don't have to talk through everything, but it maybe make some little PDFs or something that people can download that say, here's what great priming looks like. And then when you move to the decision making, here's what great decision making looks like. And that way you can have like a little bit of a guide. And again, do your own math, what science knows, what we're doing in this meeting. We're skipping a bunch of steps. That's growing the probability of dysfunction or things going wrong. And let's shrink that probability instead of growing it.”
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
“Amazon does it like in an arduous process, right? They're kind of known for that. But that's wisdom to know like we need priming. They're wise enough to realize that the need for it. They make that a very robust execution. It doesn't have to be that robust. So skipping priming is pretty bad. Other meetings get the priming and the decision making backwards. So we start to open the meeting. You've heard of like diamond shaped thinking. Let's open the meeting with kind of expansionary thought and let's end the second half of the meeting with convergence. Well, we start the meeting instead with convergence, realize that we can't reconcile the various party in the room, their needs for convergence. And then you might hear in the middle of a meeting like, well, let's start over again and remember why we're all here. And we do the priming in the second half of the meeting just in time for the meeting to end.”
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
“Okay, this is here, like this meeting is about the generation of options or creative problem solving or very tactical problem solving or efficiency seeking or like what is the category of conversation we are about to have what are some of the basic principles that should apply i mean are we are we honoring sacred cows or are we eating sacred cows in this meeting like what is the what is the mode mentality, the priming like how can we all kind of say this is the mindset that in the ultimate purpose that applies to the meeting and you can write that and you can read that in under three minutes so it's not some arduous process”
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 as long as you're on day two plus of working together. So it's a crazy thing that we don't do priming. And priming can be simple. It can even be done in the invite. I mean, one of the things that's crazy about Outlook and Google is you can put a very terrible, useless meeting into Outlook. And it will never look at it and be like, this is probably useless, just like you can go into like Trello and put the dumbest project in the company's history into Trello. It will ingest anything you put into it without any discernment as to its value. Now imagine we're going to have to do this ourselves for now until like a better calendar comes out. But imagine if Outlook or Google Calendar or Cron, which now is part of Notion, would just be like, you know, like, what is the point of this meeting? And you could say,”
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
“Design of meetings like treat meetings like a product and you know, treat them like workflows that should be organized and use intentionally. But a lot of it is inside the meeting. Like what's the, what's the tactic? So here's something super tactical, which is meetings generally speaking are a combination of priming and decision making. Like if you look at meetings through the lens of like the phases that they are. And a lot of meetings kind of skip the priming step altogether. They launch directly into decision making. It would be safe to skip the priming step if we began the meeting under the assumption that everybody here is under this, you know, on the same page has the same information. And generally speaking intends for the same outcome. I think that's ludicrous assumption for most meetings. And yet most people are actually shocked to find out that we're not on the same page, even though we literally never have been.”
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 list of what science knows and what business does, like everything's in there. Culture's in there, meetings are in there, goals are in there, deadlines are in there, team dynamics, you know, all this stuff is in there. So we'll probably just pick a few things out of that very long list. Meetings are a good one. You know, meetings, I forget what the statistic is, but it's some insane 12 figure amount of, no, not 12, nine-figure. No, 12 figure, hundreds of billions, right? Amount of waste is caught in meetings. I mean, we spend gazillions of dollars on waste of time and meetings. And for us, like in our programs, the average delta is between 10 and 20%. So people save anywhere from a full half of a day to a full day per week of work as a result of just cleaning up the way they're using meetings. And some of that is just the”
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, like, there's a whole list of stuff. I mean, from very deep to very tactical of things we can do differently that reduce the gap between what you're doing and what science knows and the dysfunction just shrinks and shrinks and shrinks as you do those things.”
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 you have a really good ability to load that one branch of this imaginative tree, this one hypothesis into a simulation and then explore what the world looks like with this in place? And if you look at this coaching thing at it's going on at Canva instead of managing, like you load that in the simulator and you're like, boy, this looks pretty nice. This is a higher performance thing. Like we've advocacy instead of regulation, we have growth. There's like a whole bunch of aspects that are inherent in that approach where science, and if you ask a neuroscientist, would that work better? They'd be like, oh, hell yeah, that work way better because it activates this in the brain, it reduces cortisol. It does all these things that science knows work much better.”
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 loved that idea because when we talk about imagination as a part of ability, we talk about imagination's capacity to generate alternatives for you. Like that's its purpose. It's not just to doodle in the margins in the middle of boring meetings. That's part of it. It's a side benefit. But when you look at imagination's purpose, if you have a great imagination, you always have a lot of choices in life. Like Mickey Mouse was a choice. It was like a new alternative way to send messages through a talking mouse. That's okay. That's interesting. But the other part of the hypothesis generation engine that we focus a lot on is it's not just the ability to generate choices and hypotheses, but it's also the ability to kind of load them into your Oculus headset and walk around a world in which that choice already has been executed. Like that's kind of akin to vision in a sense that”
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
“Emission statements seem to fail a lot. So you look at this science knows business does as a lens to examine yourself through. And stuff that fails very often is kind of worth a look. And when you look at like, okay, do we really want managers? Because that seems to fail a lot. Or is there something that is there a paradigm that works better for human beings, that activates more human potential? And they hit the nail on the head. So if you kind of do the math of Canva, what science knows versus what Canva does, whether they know they're doing it scientifically right or not, the math equals zero. Like there's no difference between what science knows and what business does in that case. And also the Figma conversation, I loved the phrase from that conversation. Imagination is a hypothesis generation engine, I think is what the world.”
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
“Oh, say more about that. I mean, so you think about the even in the Canva context of like coaches instead of managers. Like that is a you're looking at so I love this. Let me back up for just a second. There's a great question. I think Dan Pink has summarized the problem better than anybody when he said there's a mismatch between what science knows and what business does. And in that gap, it kind of says like, well, what is it that business is doing that science knows better? And you can kind of almost look at this as an equation of science knows minus what your business does equals dysfunction, right? Like that's a pretty crystal clear thing. So if you take this like managers versus coaches, they're taking intuitively, I think. I don't know if they're neuroscientists, but like intuitively, I think a lot of great founders understand humans don't work a certain way. And this whole paradigm of managers seems to be failing a lot. And this whole paradigm, like mantra, like fail faster seems to be failing a lot.”
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
“Dry, devoid of life, kind of devoid of places, productive ways to grapple, right? And that's where a lot of teams and companies sit today, especially like more established teams. They've either lost their way in the habitat and haven't really set the scene for good kind of thinking and interaction. Or they just never had that to begin with. And some of the stuff, like when you've talked to a couple other people in the past, you know, your conversation, the Canva conversation, the Figma conversation both come to mind as like it is super obvious the energy that has gone into the habitat to predispose people to high function.”
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 think one more layer would be helpful to this, especially if you're a leader or manager. Which is the business world is just hand to hand combat between a bunch of individuals on the blank matrix loading screen, right? Like you're actually in a habitat as a company and your team is like a habitat. I think of companies and teams almost like little terrariums that were inside of. And is this terrarium set up with sand and a heat lamp? And we're a bunch of frogs. And like we're going to turn into frog bacon simply because we're in this habitat. So a lot of it is you want to actually create a habitat or an environment that's kind of predisposed to high functioning thinking and high functioning interaction between people. Because if it's if the habitat's working against all of you to begin with, then all the hand-to-hand combat that's going to show up is actually largely a function of you just being in this heat land.”
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
“In the thick of product work, pushing your mind and other people's minds to get this right, then you're going to benefit a lot from understanding these traits and these differences.”
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
“If we work backwards from the outcome we want to choose our actions right now, would these actions so direct actually increase or reduce the probability of that outcome? And that's when we become like more dynamic chefs, more dynamic people. But yeah, personality is a broad spectrum and self-awareness is like the starting point for the whole thing, the big five model gives you a really good list of attributes to kind of scan yourself through. And then you should be making a game plan for how to do that. And then you can turn your attention to the network of humans you're a part of and say, okay, well, in what ways because I'm me am I so different than these other minds? And how can we kind of create a mesh mentality where thought shifts among the group to fit most naturally? And in product work especially, whether you're a founder, entrepreneur, kind of thinking about product at that level and your team at that level, or 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
“Ways of measuring personality, but just also useful despite the fact that they're imperfect. And especially useful if you kind of take a growth mentality instead of a justification mentality to reading them. Like if you say, okay, I'm low in politeness. I'm super direct, your justification mentality of that would be like, yeah, damn right. Like I'm. Versus the growth thing, which is like, well, maybe there are situations where I can try a little harder than 0% to phrase things in a way that”
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, self awareness is a really important step, not just of culinary school, but like for everybody. And you sit somewhere on a spectrum. Your brain has these pathways and these kind of like traffic cops directing traffic in your mind. So you have to start with square one with yourself and understand, am I prone to try to say things politely and so that the received well, or am I prone to be super blunt and direct and maybe even mean and harsh? Am I prone to like sit back in conversations and let things happen? Or am I prone to take over? Am I prone to go to like intellectual abstract thinking and try to kind of like deconstruct ideas or am I prone to stay very pragmatic? And if you don't know who you are and you think that like the universe resembles you, then you're going to get super lost in that broader spectrum. So I think the big five, I mean, there's a bunch of models. You have Myers, Briggs, Disc, et cetera. They're just all imperfect.”
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
“One of the things that's really important for us, Chef, is to actually understand what are my preferences, what do I like to eat. Because if I don't know what I like, then I assume everybody else likes what I like, then I'm not going to be a very dynamic chef. I'm going to be like, everybody likes lots of salt and acidity in their dishes. And then you're going to go to Germany and open a restaurant and be like, that is absolutely not. You know, in this cuisine.”
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 here's why that doesn't work consistently across different types of people. So I know you took our profile, our big five base profile. And that's just one tool out of many that can help a person understand where on these various spectrum of personality traits and motivations they sit. We often use the metaphor of in our training of like culinary school that we're more culinary school for human performance instead of cooking class. And that helps people kind of conceptualize that I'm used to going to cooking classes in my training. Like here's how to do a one-on-one. Here's how to offer feedback. Here's a framework for generating product ideas through to like prioritization and backlog. But we're kind of like, well, what's going on beneath the surface? What are the underlying principles and forces at work that all that kind of comes to all the stuff that comes to life on the surface really originates from? And in this culinary school metaphor,”
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
“Maybe one of the worst pieces of propaganda that people walk around with in their minds is the phrase we're more similar than we are different. And my theory on why we walk around with that phrase or why we're told that phrase, if we zoom in on the situations where we hear that, is that we have this theory. It's easier to get along with people that are like us. So if we fantasize that this person is like me, then I might get along with them better. When in fact we should probably be building the muscle that we have the capacity to get along with people that are extremely different than we are. And that fourth piece that we talk about in our in like our coursework, you know, when we train managers, for example, is personality. So we talk about your brain systems, your brain focus, your brain's ability, which sort of paints the picture that humans might be similar to each other and we can activate these things kind of like unilaterally. But then we have to drop this bomb at the end, which 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