6 elements to decision making - Maximilian Bevan

00:00

A game is a structured form of play. Has key components of games are goals, rules, challenges, and interaction. Games generally involve mental or physical stimulation. Many games help develop practical skills, serve as a form of exercise, or otherwise, perform an educational simulation or psychological role. If you look at that specific definition, you would say that's nearly what work is. Maybe take out, for some it's physical sub-stimulation, some it's mental, depending on what job you have, but work is a game. And we're creating an institutional structure in which we set rules that allow us to say what success looks like, what failure looks like. I see the world that we inhabit, is humans creating games or structures that allow us to decide how to operate in certain situations. That's the foundation for something I say, play the game, change the game, or leave the game.

01:02

If part of your motivation to start Trove was to build a place that you wanted to work in before, where did that first come from?

01:14

It's a really good question. It's one that I've asked myself many times, but I don't really know why I've always wanted to do that. And what I feel I can most likely tie it back to is just having really incredible experiences early in my career that gave me frames of reference for what good and bad looks like, what healthy culture looks like, what toxic culture looks like. And sitting in the space of being a product manager, I started that right out of school, 10 years ago and didn't know what it was, but I had an econ maths background and international affairs. And so this ability to bridge between the super technical and the highly interpersonal was something that really appealed to me. And understanding essentially, as a product manager, how do you understand the many different elements that can create something, external factors, internal factors, timing of what you're working on and building really a story that is meant to turn into a product that people can use at some point. And driving that story forward with the high level vision, but then also the granular specifics.

02:37

And in that type of job, you're essentially, I don't like the comparison of running your own little mini company, but there's a lot of elements to building a product that touch so many parts of the business. So you're working with people from across different areas of the company and you get a lot of exposure. And so I think through that exposure, I started to understand what different work dynamics look like and what I liked and what I didn't like. And I think naturally, over time as a product person doing and building products for other companies, you start to think about, okay, well maybe I can build one as my own company. And as part of that, you realize how important interpersonal dynamics are and how work culture helps you produce better products. And so I think it was a very natural evolution of, I love building products, I would love to try to do it on my own, and I would love to take with me what I found to work and what I found not to work to leave that behind.

03:36

How did you end up in product?

03:37

I was to deciding out of college to join, Teach For America where I was placed in Boston to teach high school maths. And I was deciding between that and the corporate training program at a bank. And I realized as much as teaching is my true passion, it's something that I still care about deeply, I needed to make some money. I needed to take that path and consider certain financial parameters. And I ended up taking the training program at a bank and I fell in love with-

04:15

[crosstalk 00:04:15] That's a big difference, teach or bank.

04:18

Yeah. You really can't draw two different potential life paths. But I didn't fall in love necessarily with the financial side. I studied a lot of that in econ and I felt it's interesting, but it wasn't really a life path for me. But when I spent time with the technology group, I really loved the complexity of things. I love working on what seemingly are intractable problems, getting into the weeds and trying to relay value especially in the banking world, technology is usually a decade behind. So helping bring that forward was a fascinating opportunity. And I was given the opportunity to take on the business intelligence and data science space and it worked out. And from there I never looked back.

05:17

How did when your time at BNY was coming to an end? How did you make that call to then go to American Express? What was the moment where you were, I need to do something different?

05:30

Yeah. It's a great question. And that's when I started to really think. I tend to be a bit overly philosophical. And at that point, that's when I really started to think about other elements of my life and what I was accruing, what I wanted to build into. And one very simple side of it is the fear of not knowing other things. I'm an inherently curious person. I like to learn as much as possible. And I still have plenty I could have learned at BNY, but I felt okay, I've done four and a half years here. I did an internship here.

06:08

What else is out there? How else can I be challenged? How do I make sure that what matters to me at my core, that I've experienced more in different spaces before I make a final decision on where I want to spend 30 years because I could have seen that the people there were wonderful. I'm so lucky that today, starting my company, so many of the people that have been mentors and even investors came from my experience there, because it's such an incredible community of people. But I just knew I needed to try different things.

06:41

Was there a moment where you knew that or did it just build up over time?

06:45

It was a buildup. I was super fortunate with the promotion cycles there. And I was, wow, okay, I see a path here to some really great things. And that actually scared me more than excited me. I was, wow, I could wake up in 20 years and haven't left. And for some, that's an incredibly exciting path to take. But for me, I just felt like I was just scraping the surface at what I was learning. And what I actually applied for the Amex position on the LinkedIn quick apply. I had completely forgotten I had done it. And then six weeks later, got a phone call while I was at work saying, "Hey, do you want to talk about this job?" And I was, "What job?"

07:33

And it was for the artificial intelligence team that they were spinning up, which was essentially an incubator within the company. And that was a completely different setup to what I was used to. So one, exploring the space of artificial intelligence. And two, working with an incubator that was run by a product person who was a professor of NYU and product management and their post grad programs and had a ton of success in the product space. I'm, wow, this is someone I can really learn from.

08:04

It's mad this came from a quick apply on LinkedIn.

08:06

Yeah. It's truly like how you have to down weight your intention that you're, okay, this is the company, this is the place. It was ultimately the most random of occurrences.

08:22

[crosstalk 00:08:22] I love that.

08:24

Yeah. But during that process, I essentially put together a little framework for myself to understand how I make decisions, and I basically call it the elements of work. And there's essentially input, what is your day to day look like? What's the process? How smooth is it to work out of place? How well have they built an operational cycle within the organization to just make it seamless to work. The second one is output. So the final product that you're working on, do you care about it? Is it something that you use or you're excited by?

09:10

Impact, so the impact scale, whether it's moral, societal or economic. You might have an output that you like, it might be sneakers, but that's not necessarily societal impact. Right. So looking at things from more of a social impact angle. Another element is community and culture. Do you like the people you're working with? Does it work with the space that you want to live in geographically? The next one's learning, are you going to learn a lot? And then the last one's money. And so I have, I think that's six elements that can drive a decision. And my personal opinion is that, although you want a lot of these to click, you're going to make a decision based on one.

09:53

There is one element to that will ultimately be the make or break for making that decision. So for me out of school, I realized like money was actually the driver. I think I would learn and everything, but at the end of the day, I had to decide. And that was the thing that made me decide because I needed to set myself up to make sure I can live and survive and pay off certain bills. That was that decision. The next one for me was learning. I actually really care about taking on this opportunity to learn about more spaces, more elements of the world, meet more people. And so that's what ultimately took me there. And I use this framework with people that I mentor, because it's so hard when you're presented with an opportunity to see it clearly.

10:53

Almost, you have to go through this exercise before you start fielding offers to say, what is it that I really care about? Right? Because when that offer comes in, there's a lot of obfuscation and a lot of muddying of the waters, because your egos being played to, they're talking to you in a certain way, they're offering a certain amount of money, there's certain dynamics that happen through the interview process. And all of a sudden you're thinking about it a lot differently. But you have to go back to, why did I start looking? What is it that I really want that I don't have today?

11:32

And how do I make sure that during that interview process, I learn whether or not they have that. I'm very pointed about. If it's about input, it's a really hard thing to know until you're there. But your question should ultimately be about how do you work? What tools are you using? What's the general, if you care about, efficiency rate on your sprints, whatever it is that you're doing, how can you best interpret and understand how well they've thought through their day to day and how to make things seamless at work. So that's something that I've found to be really helpful when it comes to starting that process, just to looking for a new job.

12:16

It's almost as if your priorities are changing.

12:21

Always.

12:22

And in some ways, the reason why you've got six principles, six elements of your framework is because at different points and at different times, your want to utilize different bits, depending on who you are in that moment?

12:37

Precisely. The beauty is that we are constantly changing. Our concept of ourself is a very transient function. We're constantly looking at ourselves and being, wow, I'm so different than I was 10 days ago, 100 days ago, 1000 days ago. And so it will always tend to be something different when you hit a juncture or the end of a chapter. And you say, okay, where am I now? This self-assessment process, because when I decided to leave Amex, I was, impact is what matters to me. In college, I started a small charity and it meant a lot to me. And again, that was just not a sustainable route. It wasn't a really successful charity, but we put a lot of love into that for a few years.

13:30

And so I reconnected with that community and I found Simprints, which is based in England and incredible mission, incredible people. And, for me, that was the best way I could say, well, there's a lot of other elements I care about, but being able to work on something that I know will have a positive impact, and how do you use technology that has an explicit purpose to help people, which is a pretty rare construct that excites me. And so you sacrifice other elements or you think you sacrificed other elements, but that's the one that comes to the top.

14:06

And just to quickly fast forward when I decided to leave, input was the most important thing for me. I decided that if starting my own company, I actually can help build the inputs from the ground up from the things I've, I've learned to just build a place that people want to work every day, because we've made things really easy to do and ways to work that make us a bit more effective and more efficient. And so that's kind of the cycle for me, I've already personally hit four of my six elements and I'm 32. So I think it's constantly changing.

14:50

What elements did you not include?

14:52

So the two that I haven't actually hit on yet are community and output. So community culture and output. So it's interesting because I think that community and culture are probably the most important thing to me, it was like on a personal level. And something that, for instance, in England, was incredible. Cambridge is a wonderful place to live. There's so many incredible people. I didn't know anyone when I moved there and I built lifelong friends for my time there. And so community, I felt Cambridge nailed just in general, like the way that the city is set up the way that they've funneled people out of school and kept these different hubs for science and business and families with kids and aging individuals. It's such an incredible a mixture. And you've somehow become friends with people of all different ages.

15:56

That's a little bit of a side tangent, but I think community and culture are paramount. And I have friends that are making decisions that have had to just had kids that [inaudible 00:16:06]. Community is the number one thing I'm going to be making a decision on when I change jobs, because I need to be in a place where there's a good public school system or that we connect with other families that are in the same situation. So I'm not at that point in my life. But I think that, that could be the number one driver. I'm fortunate that I've been able to move around and I've been able to build new communities, but at some point, that will be my number one decision criteria.

16:36

And what about the elements that go outside of those six? Are there any that you wanted to get in, but didn't?

16:44

I don't know. I mean, I think I'm always evolving this framework and I just used it with someone very recently who's considering some changes. And I think they're pretty broad that they encompass a lot, but that they allow for their own personal interpretations.

17:05

The hardest thing to me, it sounds like, is having so many, but with clarity, you said, but you only choose one. Is there ever a time where someone chooses two or three?

17:20

In the way that we've used it, the person who used it recently actually did a different way than I would've expected, which is they actually took as a rubric and they ranked each one of them in terms of what they're experiencing of their current company and what they would like it to be and what's that Delta, which I thought was a really great way to look at it. I would love to see that scenario where a couple go into the final decision making. I think, of course, you can't have one that's amazing and all that are terrible, you ultimately are evaluating all of them. But I think when push comes to shove, you're deciding because there's something in you that's just not where you want it to be. And that's the thing that you're optimizing for. That's the thing that was missing the most.

18:16

And in some respects, like you don't need work to be everything for every to cover off on all the elements, because then it puts a lot of pressure on what work represents for you. So I definitely see it as you need multiple of them to be clicking. You need to evaluate all of them, but just know which one is the one that you really, really want to see go. Whats the one that, if for some reason it was mediocre, that wouldn't be good enough for you. Because it's constantly this, it's a bit of a boomerang effect in a sense. You're constantly throwing yourself out there, but then you're also coming back to your base.

19:12

And so you're learning, but then you're, actually, today I thought this, tomorrow I thought this, and now I'm back at square one. I actually thought I cared about input a lot, but I've now experienced that. And I'm back to where I started with thinking culture was the number one. And so you essentially have this home base and you're slinging yourself out in these different directions. And then you're modifying your original stance on what really matters about work. What does work have to satiate and what can other parts of your life satiate? So you definitely don't want to focus only on one. But I do think at the end of the day, push comes the shove. You're saying, this is the thing I'm missing, this is the thing I need to see work better.

20:02

Practically, what are those boomerangs? When you throw them out and they come back, what are they? What are you doing? Because sometimes someone throws a boomerang and it's, quit a job, go somewhere completely different. And then two weeks later, it's, crap, I really wish I'd thrown a slightly smaller boomerang here.

20:21

Totally. Yeah. That's a great transition to this other framework that I use when it comes to just day to day operations. And it's like the gaming framework. And the way I put it with my teams are, you always have an option. The way that we've essentially created... Let me just explain to you. I'll just share with you the description of a game because I've written this down, it's, a game is a structured form of play. Has key components of games are goals, rules, challenges, and interaction. Games generally involve mental or physical stimulation. Many games help develop practical skills, serves form of exercise, or otherwise, perform an educational simulation or psychological role. If you look at that specific definition, you would say, that's nearly what work is. Maybe take out, for some it's physical sub-stimulation, some it's mental, depending on what job you have. But work is a game and we're creating an institutional structure in which we set rules that allow us to say what success looks like, what failure looks like. It's a stimulation process that has interactions.

21:40

And so I see the world that we inhabit is humans creating games or structures that allow us to decide how to operate in certain situations. And so that's kind of the foundation for something I say, play the game, change the game or leave the game. And so what's really important is to make sure that whenever you're in a situation, you decide, what's the best mode of operation for me personally? And so deciding to leave a company is saying, I'm going to leave the game. That's me saying, it's time to leave this company and move on to another challenge. But sometimes that's not the best way for you to approach the situation. And so this happens a lot when it comes to people at work who are feeling like they're in a rut, they're in a situation where they might feel powerless or not empowered in the context in which they're operating.

22:45

And you sometimes, I'm sure you're familiar with starting a company, they will feel like, okay, I can't do this, I can't do that. Or feeling like they don't have control over the outcome. But what I often look at in that situation is you can either do the disagreeing commit. You can play the game and say, this is not the problem I want to change. I'm going to put everything I have in to it to help this move forward. I'm not going to be an encumbrance. I'm going to decide to really just help it. It's not what I would do. It's not the way I would do it. I don't love the person who's running this particular task force or whatever, but it's worth playing the game, it's not a big enough problem for me.

23:28

Or you say to yourself, actually right now, this is something I want to change. I care enough about it and it's bothering me enough. It's high priority enough that I'm going to help change it. And I'm going to take a positive approach to moving this in the right direction. And so often, when there's situations where someone's unhappy with something, but they're not changing it, they're actually inflating how bad something is because they actually haven't prioritized it high enough in their mind to change it. Or to say, I actually want to remove myself from this task force or I want to change my project that I'm working on. And so I think it's making sure that your team knows that they are in positions to ask to change the game, if they want. If they're, hey, I see some issues here. I really think I can contribute to that change. Let me get involved. Or they say, this is too overwhelming for me. Do I have an option to step out of this?

24:31

And often, the answer is yes, right? Like you don't want people to be doing stuff that will not benefit the group that are trying to get it done and won't benefit them. And then the final is sometimes it's, okay, we need to exhaust our feelings of frustration, but then move on with it and say, okay, I'm ready to help move this forward and I'm going to play the game. And so I think you can look at that microscopically at a task level. And you can look at that a little bit more macroscopically when you're deciding to change jobs. You don't want to leave a job just because one thing's bothering. You have to exercise, what are your different ways of putting yourself in an empowered situation to decide, am I reacting to something that I actually have control over making better? Or is this truly the time for me to move on?

25:20

I need to play the game, change the game or leave the game. And you defined what that game was. Well, what it wasn't was almost ourselves. It felt like actually what you are saying is we need to focus on something that's greater than ourselves in order to do or achieve what we want in ourselves. It's striking that, playing the game, changing the game or leaving the game, all of that is like nothing to do with you. It's all to do with the circumstances that you find yourself in and the work that you're doing that exists outside of you.

26:01

I think the game is very much about the group and the institution that you're within. But I think your decisions are based on who you are, where your personal relationship with that game is. And that's why when you're making these decisions, it's truly coming from a place of where do you want to operate? Because that's where I think, if you decide to not contextualize, then you could be involved in the game because it's what you're told you have to do. But the goal with that is actually to empower the self to say, you do have a decision here. You, as a person can say that this game, this company isn't for me. And that is something you should feel like really positive, about to say, I've come to this conclusion that personally, this is not the place for me. I have these other endeavors that I want to take on and help people do that.

27:15

I've been fortunate enough to have a lot of different type of people, I've had on my teams over the years. And I've had one where, what we were doing wasn't the perfect place for them. And we tried different ways to help them find their stride. But ultimately, it was about making sure that they were fulfilling their own personal goals and then helping them get there. It's like, okay, that's fine. You've gone through this process of discovery and what it is that you like, what it is you don't like, and how we can help you make sure that the next journey for you is the right one or closer to the right one. That's also what I think someone who's managing people can ultimately provide. So I do think at the end of the day, it really is about the individual and it's their interpretation of how they want to play along or change it or move to something else.

28:19

[inaudible 00:28:19] lets go back 200, 300 years ago, maybe even 100 years ago, the change in work from then to now is that we have an abundance of choice. Our meritocracy gives us the chance for our talents to rise to the top, rather than taking on the work of our parents or our community or our location. When you were speaking about the discovery that that person was going through, it strikes me that is the challenge that we all face is this abundance of choice causes this overload. And the discovery is so difficult. How did you go about helping that individual on their own discovery?

29:07

One thing that we had done from the early days was we build out personal development plans. And so it's a fairly personal template that we go through together to understand what makes them tick, what are the things that they love to do? What are things they don't love to do? What's their concept of success in their own personal journey? Because it doesn't have to go to really personal things, but it's enough to understand the operation of an individual, which for everyone is quite different. And even if they're playing the same role, even if they're all product managers, per se, they actually might have very different starting points and places that they want to end up in. So part of that is sure that when a company evolves, sometimes a company has to evolve as an institution in a way that doesn't perfectly fit all of the styles of individuals that you have in the company.

30:12

And so when you look at that, you say, okay, well, actually, this personality set might be really well suited for this type of role within the organization that's not product two years from now. Because maybe we moved a little bit more of a service oriented business, and that kind of changes the dynamics of how the product team is built out. And so with that in that situation, we look at, how do we provide other opportunities within the organization? And are we still staying true to who you are? I've seen that at Amex, I've seen at Simprints, and it's just about making sure that you have a close enough understanding of this individual and checking in on whether we can continue to essentially marry the evolution of the company with the evolution of the self.

31:04

And that's a fairly nuanced thing that it really does have to be pushed down through an organization so that there's a closer touch and pulse to how that relates to every individual within the company. And yeah, I remember being involved in some of these conversations about how our company could evolve and change and trying to understand how that affects everyone. And it's really hard because, yeah, markets change and COVID happens and pandemics can occur. And so you're feeding in this information to understand what survival looks like for an organization. And then you look at what survival or thriving looks like for the people in the company. That's an incredibly difficult dynamic to align.

32:01

Is there a difference between the evolution of the self at work and the evolution of the self outside of work?

32:08

I think that in some ways, when I look at the elements at play, it's not always. Sometimes it's yin and yang, it's not necessarily that I'm looking for, let's say, smoother process in my personal life, or community in both personal and professional. And so sometimes I feel like at least the way I'm looking at the way of building my company and building Trove is to ensure that people have the opportunity to live the life that speaks to them at a passion level. Because I don't think work should be nine to five. I think a lot of us agree on that. I think a lot of us have, this isn't a new concept that people don't all operate amazing from nine to five straight for eight hours, especially in the technology world.

33:11

I know many engineers that love to work from 11 to three. You're getting changes on Atlassian at 3:30 in the morning. That is the reality of the differences in everyone. And so I think, making sure that it's not necessarily a choice between the two, the self at work and the self at home. But it's an accommodation of both because what becomes a problem for many people is that choice. You're saying, I'm sacrificing my home life but I'm providing for my family. And there's a lot of traditional industries where that dynamic is much harder to break into, right? There's a lot of intransigence in how those institutions work. And I think COVID weirdly helped that a little bit from the work from home culture, but lawyers, or other specialties have pretty rigid structures.

34:14

You have a child, you're back to work the next day. And these are essentially sacrifices that institutions are asking the individual to make personally. But I think that, obviously, we all agree that the Holy Grail here is incorporating the personal and the professional self as an operation system that is driven by the individual. So for me, I think that there's about four hours of overlap that makes sense, maybe at most, within a working day for a team to be able to touch base. But I don't think it's more than that because, one, I don't think people are productive for more than six hours a day. We can say we work for 14 hours today, but I don't think more than six of those are really productive hours. And so when we start to stretch from there, I think it's a lack of prioritization. It's a desire to be plugged in, but maybe not using that as effectively as possible.

35:23

And so I think that when I'm making a decision now about Trove, it's ultimately figuring out how my personal and professional self can both be fed and creating that flexible work architecture so that people can find it. And a whole lot concept behind Trove is embracing your hobbies, embracing your passions, embracing what it is that makes you, who you are and sharing that with people and sharing that with communities. And so if we don't give of people the space to be who they like to be, and explore their quirks or indulge in the things that they like to indulge in, we're losing who that person is. We're not getting the best from them because the way that they recharge or the way that they release is being hamstrung into this one hour period on a Wednesday evening where they can do that. And that's not a great feeling.

36:29

[inaudible 00:36:29] downsides?

36:31

Yeah, I think so. I think the downsides are just that amount of flexibility that it creates the difficulty in building a cohesive culture.

36:42

But for the individual, are there any downsides to them?

36:45

To them like being able to have that flexibility or?

36:52

Yeah. To have their working self and to have their own self so closely aligned.

36:58

Yeah. I guess though that we wouldn't want it to be like a decision where someone's saying they have to, I guess, make them one and the same, how some people say work life balance shouldn't be a thing. It should just be life balance and it's work and life. When I suggest this ability to have the time and space to do you, that's not necessarily saying that they should be one and the same. It's saying that, if you do want to have these separations between work and personal self, then you can do that. Then you can find the times do that. If you're a more fluid person that wants to interweave your personal and work, that is a decision that an individual has to make. But yeah, I definitely would not see the ideal situation as to force people into this decision between, I need to incorporate my work and my personal life together.

38:08

What tools have you used to better understand yourself in those moments? And when you've made decisions that have been really important, how have you both assessed the outside, the opportunity that you got in front of you? But then how have you assessed really, truly what you want? What tools have you used to understand yourself in those moments?

38:36

One thing I love is the Enneagram. I'm not sure. Are you familiar with the Enneagram?

38:41

No.

38:42

It's a phenomenal framework test, essentially, that has a lot of nuance. It's similar to the Myers Briggs, but it's quite a lot more detailed. My leadership exec coach had introduced this to me a few years ago and it's incredibly illuminating. I hate being put in a box. I take these 150 question tests and I'm, this is silly, [crosstalk 00:39:09], I'm different. Yeah. And then the results come I'm, "Wow! This couldn't be more me." So it was a really enlightening process that my coach has been doing this.

39:26

Benneagram?

39:26

Enneagram, E-N-N-E-A.

39:26

Enneagram.

39:26

Yeah.

39:28

Okay.

39:31

She's been doing this for 30 years. It's not something she created, but she's been using it. And she's seen how effective it's been with individuals and with relationships. And it allows you to just be honest with yourself, where do you operate from at a baseline? What's your inherent intrinsic reaction to things? How do you see and view the world? And then it's about how aware you are of your base reaction and your base fears. And so for me, that's been huge just as a tool. And I couldn't recommend it enough, but there's other things.

40:13

I think having a coach, having a therapist, having your family, you have to understand, who's willing to hear you out for who you are and not trying to impose a specific outcome on you. And not to be contradictory, but sometimes, you know you have people in your life who really understand you. And sometimes them imposing an opinion on you is actually a thing that you need to hear now or what you want to hear. And so I've always leaned into these interpersonal relationships, friends that understand me in different ways, friends that I know won't give an opinion, they'll just ask me questions, others that will give me an opinion. And I know what kind of line of thinking their opinion will be, but they'll explain it in a really valuable way for me to understand it better.

41:08

But then you have to come into yourself and say, what's the right thing that makes me feel comfortable? What do you think will make me feel alive? Yeah, I think people make decisions based on different things. And when I took the job at Simprints and moving my life, my decision was based on regret. I didn't want to regret not making a decision that felt really true to me, but there were easier ways out. So I'm a pretty risk averse person. But through that process, I just realized, wow, yeah, there's a lot of unknowns. I hate unknowns. I love uncovering unknowns and understanding the world and really being able to evaluate things. But this one was a step outside of that, but I ultimately move forward because I didn't want to regret not doing something that felt really authentically me. I was, wow! This is super cool. I connect with the people. I connected the mission. Yeah, there's all these logistical elements that are really scary, but I had to put those aside and I'm glad I did.

42:22

How do you know when your motivations aren't being affected by the world around you? How do when you are being motivated by something that's intrinsic and how can you tell when maybe something external seeping into your mindset or your own identity and belief system when you're making those decisions?

42:49

That's a really good question. I wish I had a really good answer. Let's see, I just want to think about this for a second. I really love frameworks, but I don't think there's a good one for this. My personal take on understanding the difference between external and position and internal, like revelation is like the process of documenting these thoughts so that you can literally look at what you're saying, because the mind is a busy place. And so in real time, it's great for brainstorming, but it's not great for comprehension. You sort of by writing things down allows you to metastasize, is this something that I am genuinely believing? Or is this a narrative that I've heard? But as soon as you have to write things down, it feels so much more permanent.

43:51

And you're, "Okay, I'm writing that I like this". And I'm, your hand starts to shake. So that process for me, of classically writing down lists and coming back to them, especially, of course, you look at the index of reversibility and if it's not a reversible decision, you should spend more time making that decision. And therefore, you write these things down and you have to come back to them over and over again. That to me is super important. And the other one thing that I would say is besides writing down and reflecting and asking all the right people is... There's this quote that I really love. It's from Rian Johnson movie, Bloom Brothers, and he's awesome. He's done a lot of amazing movies and I just love his writing.

44:52

And there's no such thing as an unwritten life, just a badly written one. And it's great because it's essentially bringing home the fact that, at every chapter, you're constantly writing your story. You're constantly making decisions. Let's put free will aside for a second and just say, you're still at the end of the day, deciding A or B. And when you're beginning a chapter, you're ending a chapter, you have these moments to reflect, to say, what do I want my life to look like? What's the step that I want to take some level of ownership over? And I remember there's this really ridiculous acceptance speech by, Matthew McConaughey, years ago. He's talking about the 10 years later self. I don't know if you remember that, but- [Crosstalk 00:45:51].

45:53

Yeah, exactly. He did it in his very characteristically parable way. But it's like, I'm so focused on who am I in 10 years? Not who other people want me to be. What is a better Matthew McConaughey look like in 10 years? And so even when you're just writing a chapter of a new thing, you say, okay, well, let's say I take this job in England, let's say I start my own company, what happens from that? What am I writing into my story that is both exciting, compelling, a learning process, the downsides. And when you start to just put together the different variations of those outcomes of this story, you start to feel like, okay, there's some parameterization here.

46:51

You can't control outcomes. You can't control what the future looks like. But you can at least start to understand, even if worst case scenario of me starting a company, what does that look like? I've gone through that. And hopefully, it's not worse than the worst case scenario that I drew up. But at the end of the day, it was a helpful enough exercise to say, I felt comfortable with that huge band of outcomes, because this is something that I took the front foot on. And it's going to be part of something that is going to mean a lot to me, as I look at myself in the future to say that this is something I've gone through successfully or not. So yeah, remembering it's not an unwritten life that you have.

47:41

And what books have you read that have helped you find your best work that stick in your mind the most?

47:49

It's funny. So Trove, my company, it's a big part of the way it started was because I had a book blog back in the day. And I found my friend and I like the concept of sharing recommendations and things that really mattered to you is really hard in social today. And blogging was expensive and cumbersome and all that stuff. And so, one of my, obviously, starting points with my new company and my profiles, I have all the books that I love and the things I'm reading and all that. And I have it here in front of me. I'm a very non-traditionalist when it comes to what I would say, what books inspire me, none of them are actually business books or tech books or anything like that. They're more like history books.

48:43

So to me, history is a great way to understand the human condition, based on ideas of interdependency and jealousy and ego and how we make decisions. And so we've seen a lot of these things play out. Yes, we evolve and the information we have, but we still have the desire to compete, we still have the desire of to want more. We still have jealousy. We still have our ego. We have all of these elements and they've been around for a very, very long time. And so, to me, how I like to look at it is what books have just put a Thunderbolt through me. And it's not just a specific thing that I learned from it, but this has changed the way I see the world.

49:37

And so, one of those is, "A Peace To End All Peace" by David Fromkin. And it's about World War I, the construction of the Middle East, as a result of World War I, how that's played into the dynamics that we're aware of today. I think that's absolutely fascinating. Another one is "American Nations" by Colin Woodard. And essentially, I think, it's 11, maybe it's seven. I think it's 11 nations that comprise the United States. So the different migration patterns to America in the 16 and 1700s and looking at how cultures manifested in these different regions. And it's much more nuanced than east west, north, south. And it helps us understand why we are where we are and what are the things that we can learn from?

50:37

And these books have influenced you because they gave you that bolt rather than specifically about work?

50:44

Yeah, exactly. They're super much more. Yeah. They're not the most helpful when it comes to the work self. The one book I would say that I've had everyone on my team ever read is called, "The Most Beautiful Homes In The World," by this guy, Witold Rybczynski. And it's pretty hard to get hands of. It's not like a really widely published book, but it's essentially a guy who decided to build his own house. And hence, the most beautiful house in the world, because it was his house. And he steeps himself in the history of architecture, in the process of building and the dynamics of ecological, environmental, practical components of building a home and the idea of having a plan and how that plan changes throughout. It's this most philosophical, personal journey that this guy takes, but roots it in so many beautiful reference points.

51:54

And to me, it's like the ultimate product management book, that's not a product management book because your job is to build. An architect is building, but not build yourself. You're working with all these different components and it's about the changes that occur. It's about anchoring yourself, but also not anchoring yourself. And to me, it's an incredible book. I always get the raised eyebrow when I give a copy to a teammate, but they have always liked it. So I'd say, that's the one more relevant book I can say is worth picking up.

52:32

Max, I've loved that conversation, man.

52:36

This is fun. Yeah. This is great.

52:37

Yeah.

52:38

You probe me in a lot of cool ways. It's made me think a lot deeper, too.

52:42

That's been great. Thank you so much. Really enjoyed it.