Becoming a bigger ball - Máté Gulyás

00:00

Everything is built one step at a time. And if you can somehow materialize those small steps, then you don't feel the need to always rush.

00:12

I know that an excellent mindset, whatever that means, is often developed through a series of choices that we make about our working life. And I would love to start off with what key decisions in your working life have played a part in unlocking that mindset.

00:42

Yeah. So what I think is important to note is that some of these decisions were not deliberate. Like it wasn't intentional. So I became a software engineer because I had to choose something to do after high school and computers were kind of the closest thing to what interests I had. So I ended up being a software engineer and it just happened that I fall in love with the actual work, with the actual profession. And I also ended up with a group who took this quite seriously. So being good was a value there. And then it just turns out that if you really like something and you spend a lot of time, then you will eventually get better than those who are not putting that amount of time.

01:39

So in programming and with computers and with software engineering in particular, I became pretty good. And just the idea that I can do things. Like the whole idea that you start out with a zero-byte file and then you can build something that does something. Even if it's very stupid, my first program was pretty selfish. It basically calculated my scholarship at the end of the year, based on my grades throughout the semester. But the fact that you can build something custom was pretty fascinating for me. And I also realized that this is a really good mix, a really good thing that I get paid to do something that I would do for free either way. And there are people who give me positive feedback based on that. So I was kind of hooked on that. And then these are the kind of unconscious decisions or just luck how I ended up there.

02:43

But then it became... By default, I'm very competitive. In my youth, it was usually sports because that's where people send you if you're competitive. And then I ended up with a startup that we started when I was 19. And then I started to feel that I am part of this elite sport, which I was not. I was just associated with that, but I was too young to understand that. And then basically I ended up working for startups and founding startups. And at the time I put a lot of effort, a lot of things to do work, to be a better engineer. And then later on to become a better CTO and then a better leader. And what work means for me came much, much later. And that was very deliberate because I worked a lot. And then it's also through self-observation, but in more formal setting when you go to therapy. And usually you associate therapy or psychoanalytics when you have something clinical to tackle, like when you have some issue to tackle. And that's usually when people go to therapy, like when they have something very pressing.

04:13

But I think everyone should do that because the ultimate journey that you do is understanding yourself. And what's pretty amazing is there is a lot of depth, a lot of meaning in kind of minor things we do. So the way I worked a lot came back to proving to other people, to working or being good in engineering became a way for me to get accepted. And that just was not absolutely not conscious. So what I started like two years ago roughly is this... I guess, you call it self-discovery or... It's pretty weird to be honest, because you take a journey in yourself and the whole sentence sounds pretty, pretty weird to be honest. But then it turns out that's a hell of a ride and very frightening sometimes, but then you start to realize why your life ended up the way you are. And for me, because I worked a lot that was like 90% worked.

05:23

So now, the question for me to answer is like who I am or like what's the person I want to become? And then, what kind of work matches that? So for instance, now I have a family. I have a two years old. And so I cannot work that much. And so if work is not a hundred percent for me, it's not like the center and the meaning of everything, then what it is? Is it something that provides money? Is this something that provides meaning? But now I have a competing thing in my life. And so, for instance, last year, my co-founder left and I became the sole leader of the team. I really had to answer that. So here's this company that now I decided to take on instead of like cashing out to. So what I'm going to do with this? And that pretty fast led to the question like, okay, so I can maybe grow this, exit, get enough money that I don't have to care about money anymore, and then go to and do some interesting work.

06:41

But then, I mean, that's silly. I could do that kind of company here. So why not turning this company into something where I could enjoy working for the rest of my life. Even though I know that sounds naive, but let's go with that. Because my thinking was that I'm an engineer, so I need engineers. And if I figure out what is a company that I would love to work to, then I can get other people to tag along. And so the next big thing, which... So, to be totally honest, I'm probably the wrong guest here because I still couldn't figure it out for a hundred percent.

07:21

But the next question was what a company looks like? And so I was pretty fascinated by the idea that start from first principles. It just sounded something pretty good. And I heard a lot of successful people did. I myself, I could never do that. I was always... I'm reading a lot. And I think I'm pretty successful just getting things from books and then building out my own understanding of the word, my own mental models. And in this case, I think this was the first time when I could actually do this. Because the basic question I asked is that what a company looks like where... which is built around people? Because we are in knowledge industry, we're a professional services firm. So basically if you take the people out of this company, then I'm left here with 30 computers and a lot of standing desks, but nothing else.

08:15

And so, basically I realized that I like building. Building out a company seems like a hell of a building. So now I got my target, which is build a company which is centered around people. And whatever we do, I feel that we are in Formula 1, if you are familiar with that. I said, "I don't care what we do." Obviously, it's going to be with data because that's my expertise as a data engineer. Whatever we do, we should do that on the very top level, because that's one thing that I answered. That one thing that I want to feel is that I want to work where it matters how we work. Like the tiny optimizations that you do around your workflow.

08:59

Can I take us... If I take us back step...

09:02

Yeah.

09:02

... there's so much that we can unpack there. And in so many ways, I think that you are the perfect person to talk to because you're in the middle of it as we all are. And there's a way that we can relate to the experience that you're going through. It sounds like all of this starts from a moment of reflection and then you can go and build that environment. And that reflection in part was therapy. When you were reflecting on work in therapy, what depth did you have to go to in order to understand what work you wanted to pursue? What was the deepest place that you went to in therapy when you were exploring that?

09:57

So I guess there is no real... There's not a good measure because it just affects everything. So many things that I did in work, or for instance, just the very reason that why I worked so much was pretty tied to my need to prove to everyone, right? To the people who are listening and the people who are not listening, but I just tell them anyway. And so that's very deep because it comes back like, how did you became the person you are as a 32 years old. But then there are also a lot of horizontal movement around the surface of your personality, the way I treat people, why initially I thought I'm a very kind and very helpful person. And it turns out I'm just a people pleaser and that has a lot of consequences.

11:03

That's the same from the outside.

11:04

Yeah, exactly. And those are more... Or the way I try to avoid uncomfortable conversations, that was very obvious looking back. That came because I had a really hard time telling anything, even if it was reality, even it was true, that I knew people would be disappointed. And I had this great quote that says that the measure of your maturity is the number of uncomfortable conversations you're willing to have. And that was like a really nice way because I realized that the way forward is to actually increase the number of uncomfortable conversations I'm going in. And then it turns out you can actually tell people bad news and they're not going to leave you at first glance. So that was a huge learning.

11:54

So when you talk about work and a huge... I read a lot of psychology simply because I think my work as a leader is mostly psychology. Of course, there's business, there is finance and marketing. But I try to build up the management team and you're working with people. And basically psychology is how people work on the surface, at least. So in psychology, there is something called the client-centered psychology by Carl Rogers. And he talks a lot about how you should be okay to be able to help others. So you have to be mature enough and you should have the emotional strength to getting to other people's emotions and come out, not necessarily untouched, but you're not anchored to them. You can still function the way you did before. And that's a realization that it's not just how therapy and your work relates. I think it's kind of the same. And there is the saying that leave your private life outside of the door, but that's insane. I mean, this is not how people work.

13:11

So what I realize is therapy for me is not just about being retrospective. It's not just about finding who I am and why I do, but also become a better person to work with simply. So what depth you go down, I guess, all the way down, because work was the way I projected my fears and my insecurities. At the same time, I had to understand how my personality traits affect the way I conduct work. And the same time I had to realize it's a lifelong journey to become a better worker in what I do. I just need to keep doing the self-discovery.

13:51

Why do you think it was work that was the place that you projected your fears and insecurities as opposed to other areas of your life?

14:00

So I think because I started to have results early on. And when we were 19, I was in the startup and it was called Distinction and we did a cocktail app called Cocktail Flow, which became pretty successful. And this was a cocktail app and our office was in a pretty nice place in the city. Was not paid by us, by the way. And we had a lot of alcohol, cocktail ingredients in our office because we were developing Cocktail Flow. We were...

14:35

It sounds great.

14:36

It sounded cool and it was cool. And everyone was giving me feedback, directly or indirectly, that this is pretty cool what you guys are doing as... The whole startup movement was very early in that time. So we were called to give interviews and we were called to present on stages. So then, so 19 years old, 20 years old, that was pretty, pretty good to do. I guess it's almost like a drug, you just get... You get pretty attached to being out on the stage. You get kind of addicted to getting these positive feedbacks about, "Oh, it's so cool what you guys are doing." And so, I assume the more you're into, the more you lose yourself in work. And at some point it's hard to imagine life without... I guess, for me, it's just my identity was pretty much just derived whatever I did in work.

15:43

Sounds like the therapy was in some ways a way of detaching that somehow.

15:49

Yeah. Yeah. So I was generally, if identity is tied to one thing and one thing only, that's not very robust. There's a TED Talk about power postures. I forgot the author. It's one of the most viewed TED Talk. And basically it's just talking about power postures, which is a different topic. But at some point she tells the story about being in a very bad car accident in college and his IQ dropped significantly. And she was always associated with being smart. She was always identified as being smart. So her whole identity was being gifted and then you just take that away. So that's not very robust, right? When you take, there is nothing left. So who you are and what I'm doing with my life.

16:46

So I never had to go through that, but through therapy, I realized that if work is the only thing where I define myself, then it's really hard for you to build a family. It's really hard to be a friend, a son, a brother or whoever, because that's just something you do on that limited time you have apart from work. So definitely. But there is a lot of research that being out in nature, sometimes being bored actually helps with creativity. And I was pretty obsessed with productivity as everyone who's working a lot. So I was optimizing my note-taking system, optimizing my to-do list. Probably I changed the note-taking system every six months. And this is by the way a really good productivity tip. Just keep with whatever you're using. You're saving a lot of time.

17:50

But then now what I think is that actually I'm horrible in multitasking. So I try to do less things, but the quality should go up. Because detaching from work actually allows you to take time off. And therefore I became better in what I do, because I was just more relaxed. I had a perspective, which is super important when you're trying to coach others. So therapy was around detaching from work, getting back my life, which is not about work. But at the same time, I became, I think, a better coworker as a result. So that's actually maybe a counterintuitive thing that happened.

18:44

How did you handle the voice in your head that's saying the way to success is extraordinary hard work, putting absolutely everything into it? Not necessarily defining yourself as your work, but just going absolutely hell for leather and just caring about that one thing. We hear so much of this. How do you silence that out and instead find acceptance that there are multiple parts of your life that you want to pursue?

19:21

So it's not easy, definitely a lot of time. And I don't think that I am there. So I still have that. So one other thing that I found in the last year is writing and writing helps you a lot. And writing helps you in multiple ways. But two that I think was pretty fundamental to my journey is writing is a thinking tool and writing is a way to think about certain topics. So the first thing is actually less relevant here. But now when I have to think about something, like for instance, what should be the structure of one part of our organization, what kind of partnership we want to do with certain companies, now I just write an essay.

20:14

And actually it turns out, again, as most of the wisdom, this is pretty old wisdom. But when you're writing an essay, you're just going through the same... You're just basically improving the ideas you have. And when I'm thinking, I cannot hold my thoughts at the same time in my mind. It's more like a conversation. You're going from one place to another. But when I'm writing this down, it's basically, I physically burn this into a paper so I can come back and revise, or I do this digitally, but the same thing. So essay writing is a great way to explore a certain topic. But the other thing is like exploring your own mind. So there is daily journaling, where you write every day about certain topics. And I think one of the most common ways is just to have a set of questions you answer every day. And for me, what is like, what are my goals? And everyone you ask it changes over time. So if you start to write it three months down, it's going to be a different thing.

21:22

So for instance, when I started to write down, I had a very specific financial goal that I want to achieve and it's not part of my goals anymore. And that was a whole journey. And it turned out that it's not an exact money. It turned out it's more about lifestyle. And then it turns out lifestyle is really about having freedom to do certain things. And then now it's more like what kind of work I enjoy and I want to have the freedom to pursue those tasks. And so journaling helped me a lot. The other question was like what I'm worrying about? That helps because you are writing down and you're not escalating, that you're putting it out. That helped a lot.

22:08

And then what would be... What's the weekly goal? And then every day, what makes this day a great day, or what makes today great? And then I say, just write three things. And if I do that, I'm content. It doesn't matter what else happens during that day. So how that changes my day is that I always have a lot more to do than time I have in a day. So before, I started to go through my to-do list, but you just kill five task or 10 task. It doesn't matter because I have another 75. So I always ended up being a bit frustrated that I couldn't finish all my work. And there's all these things I could have done. So maybe I should have eat faster. Maybe I should have taken a cab instead of riding public transportation. Maybe that walk was unnecessary, because I could have done more.

23:17

But when you are doing the three things, the big three things a day, or there's different ways to call these task. And it can be one, it can be five. I think five is too much, but whatever. You upfront in the beginning of the day say that, "It doesn't matter how much I work. If I do these three, be that two hours or 12 hours, I'm happy because I moved towards my goals." So now, I still have that voice in head that says, "Maybe don't go home at 6:00."

23:48

So it's still there?

23:49

Yeah. But I say, "Look, I've done my part. I move closer to my goals." And this is something that I actively remind myself. It's not a sprint. You cannot build something substantial in one week. You need years. And for years you need to take care of yourself. So do the three things and now go take care of yourself. And to be honest, have a walk or go out to have dinner. It's not that hard thing to do. So it's not like I need to... It's actually things that I like.

24:23

So yeah, I guess it's just accepting that everything is built one step at a time. And if you can somehow materialize those small steps, then you don't feel the need to always rush because you've done your part today. And for me, this is the way: my goal in life, weekly goals, daily goals. And then I use a to-do list which has four priorities. P1 is the must have. And I just don't... I don't go to bed before I have those. Sometimes it's more than nine hours or whatever, but sometimes it's less, but I'm happy. And the rest is just nice to have.

25:05

It sounds like what you've done is built a system to answer that question. Almost taken that voice that's in your head that's saying, "Keep going, keep going. Put everything into this." And you've, to answer it, put together a structure that is almost... Could it be labeled a defense? It's something that's there, that is attempted to try and root yourself and ground yourself in a methodical way of working that can overcome that voice somehow.

25:50

Yeah. Yeah. So I think... So, many times I feel like I'm fighting against myself. So when you try to eat healthy, I have a huge fight to eat healthy. So there is two things. So I think one is called the setting your environment up to success. I don't recall where I've read it. But the idea is that if you want to eat healthy, then don't have fast food and chip and things... unhealthy food in your home, because then it's really easy to eat those unhealthy food. But if you keep vegetables and you keep water next to you, then it's pretty... The friction to do the right thing is much, much less than the friction to do the bad thing. So to eat unhealthy, now you have to go down to the shop. And I don't like to go down to the shop. And it is just taking an apple out of the bowl and drinking water instead of soda.

27:04

So now don't have soda, or if you... I had a hard time going... I'm running or I do running and many times I only have time in the morning and I hate to go, to have run in the morning. But I do know that once I'm doing it, I actually enjoy it. So how do you... But many times I skipped it because I have a really hard time getting up in the morning. So what I did is basically just put all of your running gear next to the bad, except the shoes because that was a hard negotiation with my wife, but I failed. So now all you have to do is just get out and just do one step to get in your running gear.

27:46

But when you go out, you have to get, grab the shoes. Maybe the shirt is in the washing machine. So now you have to ask... There's just too much time to bail out, but then all you have to do is just get your shoes and get out. Then you just have less time to negotiate with yourself. Okay, so this is actually raining. So maybe it's not such a bad thing to... But then you don't have time. So the idea is that set up the environment not to fail. And basically what it evolved in me is that I cannot trust myself. And maybe if I can delegate the decision to a computer, then the computer is much more dependable and doesn't have that timely voice. Maybe just the bar of chocolate. So for instance, I always ended up doing the easy tasks, the nice tasks. So this to-do list came because I just said, "Okay, so no room for negotiation, no room for decision. I just start at the top and move from the top and they're sorted by priority."

29:00

So now I cannot do the priority three or the priority two, which is the easy task, which is the good to do task. Because what happened is that I wanted to do all the priority ones, but I ended up like 10:00 PM and I still had like three really important priority one. But then it was the end of the day, so the task that got postponed every day was the really important, but very uncomfortable task. But if I don't have the decision which task to do, it's always the first on the top of the list. And it's always the first thing you do in the day because that's the first thing. I could take out... It still happens sometimes. It's not perfect. But basically you almost like doing this automatically by a program. And that takes out that tiny voice because there is no decision point in this process. It's pretty mechanical, right? I get up in the morning, I stretch, I eat my vitamins, blood pressure monitoring, and I do writing, and it becomes like mechanical. I write the goals. And yeah, it helps a lot.

30:09

The tricky part to me is that if it's the choice between unhealthy food or healthy food, I kind of know which one is good, nice in the short term and what's good in the long term. If it comes to exercise, I know what's good in the long term. I know what's not good in the short term. The difficulty with ambition and with work is that it's something our society deeply celebrates, and it's not necessarily seen like that. In fact, it's probably thought of in the opposite way. It's actually the more work that you do, the better it will be in the long run. It's almost as if you put yourself through that pain now in order for it to pay off into the future. I find it really difficult to work out, which is which, because the kind of food side and the exercise side, I really understand that logically. But the work side is more tricky because it's not obvious to me that it's necessarily a bad thing to be all in on it.

31:14

Yeah. But it's not that objective either, right? So healthy food is still somewhat subjective, but there are kind of common understanding what is considered a good diet. But then work, I mean, it's just people. So I always thought that I'm the successful one and like family members who thought that I've worked too much, I thought that they're just the sore losers who are not that successful. But then I realized that they are playing a different game. So their game is not measured by the same goals that my game was measured. In my game it was measured in exit, successful valuation. Their success was measured in free time. So that's a very different thing.

32:00

So I think the difference with work is that everyone plays a bit of a different game in work. Being all in is needed. I mean, it just to build... For me, to build... For me, the goals that are interesting to me are usually ambitious enough to require a lot of work. So I guess it depends on what kind of game you're playing. Not everything is related to work a lot. But if your success is defined by building something, then going all in is not necessarily a bad thing, but you have to understand that humans are not built and evolved to work 16 hours a day or 14 hours a day. We can do, which is a pretty amazing thing that my mind and my body was built to find food and reproduce. And now I'm working with organizational structure and business.

33:06

And I mean, this is pretty amazing if you think about it, but you still have to understand that it was not built for that. That's why it's so inefficient. That's why I need to externalize a lot of things because I was just not built for that. And going back to your question, not necessarily bad to go all in. And depending on your career phase, it might be the best thing to do. I certainly earned a lot of calm and a lot of peace now by working a lot when I was 20, because now I'm in a better financial state. I have more freedom to control my time, which is a pretty big thing.

33:46

So really interesting thought that we've evolved at this point. We are inefficient. And so we use external systems to give us a crutch to our kind of lacking evolved self.

34:06

Yeah. It's almost like we're augmenting ourselves, right?

34:11

And then the layer below that, it's figuring out how this game works. And more importantly, choosing what that game is to us and defining it. And there are, as we've gone through with therapy, so many ways of doing that. I guess, once you understand that game, and perhaps you've built a system that can deal with your lacking self, you then enter a different paradox where you are changing moment to moment as time goes through. And you have to... It's not like a one time thing. You don't like work out what the game is and go to therapy once. Oh my goodness, I understand myself now and then I can go and do it. You're at a state of flux. The world is at a state of flux. And experiences are going to happen to you that are going to begin to reshape that definition. How do you balance the changing nature of yourself and what success means to you as you go through that process?

35:26

I don't think that I have any system apart from just every morning, I start with writing what are my goals. And it definitely changed. So I guess the way that three, four things that I write down every morning have reached out on, I don't know, a three months period. That's just the tracking of that change. And yeah, it's not a change that you can easily recognize, right? So sometimes you're stuck in your past. And somehow just the same things doesn't give you the same kind of resolve, the same kind of entertainment, the same kind of the thing... the same kind of state of like being okay, like having enough, being satisfied with what I've done. And then you realize that you've changed and you need to change the thing.

36:18

So I'm a pretty extroverted person, so I like to go out a lot. And then I just... And I was still chasing friends to go out, go to party, when I realized that it's not just that all the parties are... Not all the parties became bad. It's just, I changed. So it's not that the places are very different. It turns out that I became different. But I was still organizing these events because it's almost like inertia that you're still doing the same things you know makes you happy. But then you start to realize that these things are not making me content or satisfied anymore.

37:03

And so then again, okay, so what is it now that makes me... So yeah, it's an ongoing... I mean, what I think now is that I'm going to do therapy for the rest of my life. And I don't have any urgent thing that I need to work on. It's not like if some people think I am super solid and well placed, and that might be true for a certain level. But I will still go to therapy because, again, you're changing. That's exactly. So yeah, it's an ongoing, it's a never-ending journey.

37:50

How have you taken systems and applied them to decision-making at work? So there are particular moments where we have to make big decisions about where we choose to spend our time, whether we're going to start a company, whether we're going to leave it, whether we're going to join this company, whether we're going to leave, whether we're going to start this new skill or not. And those small decisions make such a large impact. Do you have a framework in the same way that you do for your day-to-day decision-making, for your long-term decision-making?

38:30

So there are two that comes to my mind. I'm actually a big proponent of mental models, which is somewhat that you described. One is that every decision can be categorized by in two dimensions. One is the impact and the other one is whether that decision is irreversible or not. I think it's called the Eisenhower Matrix. And basically if the decision is not huge impact, then just go ahead and do that. If the decision is irreversible, but small impact, again, you can do that. Really, the time where you should spend is the irreversible big impact decisions. And those are where you should spend time. And some decisions are not a huge impact. So like taking a five-minute call, a 15-minute call, then just... You can do that. It's not a big impact. And there is, I think, phases in your life when you are exploring options and you're exploring yourself. I don't remember where I... There's a great book called the How You Measure Your Life? by the same author who wrote The Innovator's Dilemma and...

39:50

Clayton Christensen.

39:50

Clayton Christensen, yeah. And he says that you should be in... He says that you should answer three questions. And one of the question is like how I'll find a work that inspires me and motivates me. And then he says that, and I think this is a great mental model, that if you don't know for sure, then you're in exploratory mode. Then take small risks, explore. And going back to that 15-minute call or that five-minute call, I think like luck, you need luck to become successful. Simply, there's just too much outside of your control. So you need to have a certain luck.

40:31

But luck is also a surface of opportunity. Like how many opportunities you're exposing yourself to. So if you're going to meetups, if you're going to conferences, you're exposing yourself to more occasional luck than if you're staying inside. So maybe when you're in exploratory mode taking that 15-minute call is a good idea, because that can be a great opportunity. And that certainly happened to me. I actually just went to have a coffee with someone that I thought is totally just a waste of time. We're still working together occasionally. And I definitely got a few projects which were super valuable for us through that person. So again, that is definitely, you should expose yourself as many opportunities as possible. But then when you found what you want to do, like in my case, building data power is definitely my five years goal now, then you can focus, like super focused. Like don't take that 15-minute call if it's not related, because now you just need to execute, right?

41:46

So I assume there is an exploratory mode, then you need to just take small risks. Maybe go to places you don't find the... Maybe I think Steve Jobs said and that is a great thing that you can only connect the dots backwards. You never know what leads to the next thing. Again, going back to I have a couple of these principles that I try to live by, again, trying to externalize what I don't think. And I just wanted to recall that idea about the opportunities. And I think that's a good way to think about the exploratory mode, which is basically luck is a function of surface. So just throw yourself, like increase your surface. And that's a different mode than execution then you know what you want to do now. So don't distract me.

42:45

It's so similar to shapes.

42:47

Yeah.

42:48

If you were to just figure out how often a... The circumference of a tennis ball, if it was dropped in water, like how often that parts of the tennis ball would be touching the water. If it's bigger, it's more likely it'll be bigger. If it's smaller, it's less likely it'll be smaller. And it kind of makes total sense in nature. But yet when it comes to our life, we don't necessarily make the leap or think about it in that way.

43:19

Yeah. I mean, so for instance, when people, when they have a great idea, sometimes they're very protective about that idea because someone will stole the idea of the century. But I think it's solely backwards. Like when you're starting out, you should tell everyone because you don't know who's going to be super excited about your idea. And maybe you're finding your CTO. Maybe you're finding your next investor who's not just investing in you because you look like a good opportunity, but it's because they're passionate about the idea. And you should just find people who are also passionate about your idea. And that's the same thing that when you're looking for work, just tell everyone about what you're passionate about. Because getting the job is good thing, but getting the job, which aligns with your passion is much better. So yeah, you should just be a bigger ball that you drop into the pond.

44:14

Why don't we do it? Why are there so few people who actually do that?

44:19

I don't know. I mean, for me, it's easy. I'm more of an extroverted person. But I assume going out and telling about ourselves and our passion can seem naive. If you're not giving out a lot of... If you don't give a lot from yourself, it's kind of a safe place, right? You don't have a surface that people can mock, people can maybe criticize or whatever. And I was pretty insecure. So I know it's not easy to open up. And I got a lot of confidence over the time. So now it's easier for me.

45:02

But I do remember when it was not obvious for me to just go out and be super excited about gadgets. Now I'm open that I'm super excited about technical gadgets. I know it's kind of foolish and sometimes even childish. But, I mean, I'm building a company. So being childish, it's not a huge negative thing. So yeah. So I guess it's not easy. It takes, I guess, confidence and a lot of things that you get over time, but not when you are maybe 20 something, 30. But as I say, I'm on-the-surface psychologist. I don't really know the depth.

45:55

If one of those works, those smaller ideas, when that's great, but the difficulty is we don't know when to quit sometimes. So if we do do loads of those different things, it's like, well, all of a sudden, you have a sunken-cost fallacy on all of the different things that you've tried. Because now you don't want to quit doing them because you will waste all the time that you spent doing it and you don't know which ones are actually going to work in the long term and which ones aren't. And it's difficult to get started, but it's also really difficult to stop. How do you work out once you've gone through that phase of discovery and you've started a few different things? Which ones to quit and which ones to stick?

46:44

Yeah. I don't know. And also it's really hard to get a good idea because good idea... Because when you read about successful people, they were the people who never gave up, who even when everything... Like there is a very famous Hungarian entrepreneur who are famously like took out mortgage loan and went all in with his company and all his co-founders left because it wasn't working out. They were not willing to take mortgage loan out. And he became one of the most... one of the richest person in Hungary. And so, it can sound like... It might sound like the way you become successful, maybe it can be whatever, not necessarily money. But then also I think this is a very bad thing to do like... Okay, so he maybe got lucky or he might be an outlier, but the expected value of never quitting is definitely not a good decision. So if you're looking at the successful people, then, yeah, some of them definitely walk that way, walk that line. But that's survival bias because you don't...

48:02

Yeah, we just see those stories.

48:03

Yeah. But you also see the stories who were pivoting a lot and became successful when they are like 50. So quitting early is also kind of a way to have success. So I guess the answer is there's no clear way and this just maybe common sense, whatever that means, but I guess there are these kind of stories and that kind of stories. I assume that there is so much opportunity. I mean, I'm coming from tech, right? Technology might be still very early. I mean, it's really weird to believe, but we might still be very early in the whole computer era. And considering the length of humanity, then this is just a tiny, tiny, tiny friction since we have internet and iPhones and stuff. So there will be a lot of opportunity and maybe quitting early is a better strategy than not quitting at all, because you only have one life, but a lot of opportunities. So I assume from this kind of perspective, maybe quitting early is a better strategy on the long term, because then you're not losing the resource which might be the most limited, which is your time.

49:23

It's almost as if in order to make the decision there where you didn't have much information, what you did was went to real depths to try and understand universal truths that would apply in the really long term and then optimize for those. It's almost as if, as you go down the layers, you get closer and closer to fundamental truths that are perhaps slightly easier, although you cannot are easier to predict. And then you can align yourself to those if it's over a longer period of time. So if it is, are we early in the history of technology, that is one of those deep fundamental truths that many of us don't contemplate or reflect on. But if you did, then you could make working decisions based against it. And that's fascinating. Very few people do do that.

50:20

I don't think that I do that. I just read a lot of fascinating people. So again, as I mentioned, so if you have original ideas, that's great. But one of the striking thing is that when you read about, for instance, philosophy, it's kind of like the same 35 people coming up with all the ideas. And this is the same names all over again. And I guess... And they also interact with one another, not necessarily because they were living or they lived in the same time or they interacted through the books and stuff. So I guess this how original you are is like a spectrum. The more you have original thoughts, that's great. But for many of us that's not given. And the more you don't have original ideas, that's fine. I mean, we have so many original ideas in books that you can just read a lot and just put these things together.

51:22

So for instance, this idea, it just came because I've read some philosophy. And then it turns out that the ancient philosophers... I'm talking about like Roman philosophers and, for instance, Stoics, which is a very popular direction now. But they had the same kind of ideas. So I was thinking that maybe history does not change that much. Maybe it's a different setting. We build buildings from a very different material now, but the same dynamic happens between people in society. And that gave me the idea that, I mean, for sure, because history is so big. And then technology is just my domain. But when you read about history and you read about that Seneca had the same kind of problems or Marcus Aurelius had the same problems as today's politicians. Then you realize that not a lot changed in those multi-hundred, thousand years. So then you realize the technology is just a very tiny fraction of what is it.

52:30

So I guess you just read a lot and then you put things together. And I mean, I think Steve Jobs or someone from Apple said that like creativity is sometimes just reapplying components in a different way. And I guess if you read a lot, at some point you will have a lot of different ideas from history, philosophy, biology, society, and then just put things together and interesting things might come out of those.

52:59

If you were to take the lack of data that we've spoken about and apply it to an early stage in your own life, one of the tricky parts about decision-making at work is that when we need to make the big decisions that end up having an impact on us later on, we don't have enough information at the time in order to make them. When's an example in your own life of a time where you've been in that position and how have you tried to overcome it?

53:37

Yeah, that's a one of... Yeah, I guess it's one of my superpowers. So I just ask a lot of people and I am pretty, pretty brave now. So many times... I mean, to be honest, I don't really know the answer for most of the questions that I have to answer. But over time I get to know people and then those people know people. So sometimes I just go to LinkedIn and ask people like, "Do you know someone who might have some thoughts about this idea?" And then I started to meet with people. And that was a really surprising thing that I realized is people are actually quite willing to talk to you. So there is a consultancy, this is a small consultancy in the Nordics here in Europe. And I just read one tweet from the founder where he rejected to work with a customer who had a cryptocurrency affiliation because he didn't... he thought that or he still thinks that cryptocurrencies are not a good thing for the planet.

54:49

And I was just writing him a message that, "Hey, this was pretty fascinating. I'm also trying to give values to my company. Would you be okay to have like a one-hour meeting? And just don't even answer me if you find this creepy or awkward." And I guess it just helps. I mean, if you accept that this is not a usual thing people do, then people are quite willing to actually go along. So there's a guy who did awkward things for 30 days every day, something different. And then one of the takeaways is that if you accept that this situation is awkward, then the other people will realize that this is not as awkward at all. So he went into some shop and said to the person who was in charge of that cafe or something, and he asked that, "Can I just stand outside of your door and just greet people?" And the guy was perplexed.

55:45

And then the guy who asked says like, "This is a really weird thing to ask, right?" And then it's like the relief. "Yeah, this is a pretty weird thing to ask. Look, I'm just trying to do weird things. Can I go outside? And I will be super kind." And the guy said, "Okay," because now we establish the fact that you don't think that this is okay. You think this is weird too, and I think that this is weird. So sometimes I just write people, and for instance, I started to write to companies, to founders and CEOs of companies that, "I am building this company. I really want to do well for the people who tag along. And I don't know the answer for 90% of my questions. Would you mind talking to me one hour about these questions? And if you think this is weird, totally okay to block me." And sometimes they answer, and of course they have a lot of wisdom about that.

56:40

So my thing is that I just ask a lot of people and books, because books is like... If there is a book written about finance, then there are answers in that book about finance. So I guess books and just going to people and tell them that, "Hey, I really want to do well in my work. And I have no clue about this. Can you help me, or do you know someone who can help me?" And yeah, people are surprisingly friendly.

57:11

That's interesting that what you're trying to do in some ways is unearth the past, either through books or through people. You're trying to gauge the lessons that have passed that you weren't privy to or haven't been privy to yet, and then apply them to your future. You're kind of taking one from one place and trying to use it for the other.

57:38

Yeah. I mean, think about how smart that person would be who has all the experience of humanity. And that would be a super smart person. So I guess you cannot do that because it's all scattered in books, videos, people, memories. But you can do better than what you're capable of, I guess, by just tapping into... And look, many of us are not doing things that are extremely unique. So the things that I face with building a company, those are not absolutely new, never seen problems. So probably when you are like a researcher and you're trying to figure out something completely new, asking people might not be that useful. For building a company, I know for a fact that building... The companies were built in the past and they became successful in the past. So this is not something that was not done before.

58:43

I do have certain new ideas. So for instance, we're building out our career path. And we just came up with the idea that what if we do a game out of it. Like what if we actually talk with game designers and your career path would be like a role playing game with tribes and specializations and badges. And it would be like a whole game. And this is a totally new idea, but the general guidelines how to build a career path, a multi-year career path for the people, I can ask people about the guidelines. I just add a little bit on that. So I guess it's not just copying others, but like building on what others realize. And in IT, it's a very well established model that you build on the abstraction of others, right? And they're all standing on the shoulders of giants. So this is what we do. Ask people, read books, and just add our own twist.

59:47

And when we find work, the problems that we face are so often ones that have been faced throughout so many people, throughout history. And I have loved the way that you've mixed both the deep philosophical and theoretical with practical systems that make life that bit easier. I'm so grateful you've shared them. So thank you, mate.