Working without ego

Growing up, I attached a lot of my self-worth, and self-esteem to my work and my grades at school and how good it was in certain disciplines. Growing older as an adult, I've had to detach myself from that. I've had to detach myself from the perfect scorecard or being good in all of those disciplines. It's okay.

On some aspects you'll be average and you'll continue to do it because you still have to show up and speak to people and sometimes I'll speak in all hands or I'll do interviews or something like that. So, you still lean into it and you get yourself out there, but the burden of perfection or that burden that your head is trying to impose on you: that is a narrative that's unnecessary. So yeah, freedom definitely comes from removing yourself from perfectionism.

I occasionally hear people who are younger than me banging on about “growth mindset.” And I think it's a terrifying concept because it seems to be rooted in the assumption that you're not good enough already, and that you can't be. And the truth is while it is accurate that age 17, I was not good enough at literally anything that would make me a useful, productive human, over time I have got a bit better at some things, and I'm good enough at some things. And I could either spend the rest of my life stressing about that and trying to push even further, or I can just bank what I've got. And I think we'd all be happier if we were willing to bank what we got.

The obvious example that's always talked about is the Instagram mindset of people endlessly exposing their vanity as they encourage others to feel inadequate. None of that is a valuable thing to do.

I'm not sure ego is quite the word I would use for it, but certainly that level of comfort that you are already... Well, actually maybe the right way to put it is just to accurately have a sense of your own capabilities and which ones you really care about getting better at, and being comfortable that you are already good enough at the things you want to be good enough at.

Maybe that was the point of which I tried to set my ego to the side a little bit. It's like, "What do I want to do? What kind of person do I want to be?" Me, me, me. With a little bit of like, "What problem?" Or combined a little bit with, "What does the world need?" But actually, I think the philosophy that's worked best for me is to try to get out of my own head a little bit. And I call it narrow framing, it's a concept I found quite useful.

Narrow framing is where you kind of take a small picture of reality and you sort of think that that's the whole of reality and then you loom very large in that small picture because you are in your head a lot. But actually when you open the vista and you frame more widely, you kind of realise you're just one person in the world and everyone's just trying to get by and live their lives. And it's all basically fine. And I think when you take that approach of just everything that happens to me is not about me and it's not all about me, then that changes the frame with which you encounter or maybe it changes a little bit how you encounter the world.

At DBT, they have this thing called “Strong opinions, loosely held”. And that resonated with me so much because that's absolutely the way that I strive to work, which is, I will always have an opinion for you, or 90% of the time if you ask me a question, I'll have an opinion. But if you give me a good reason why that opinion isn't the best one, then I'll absolutely agree with you to build the better option.

We're not building a company to show off how great our ideas are, we're building a company so we build a successful company and a successful product and an amazing community. And if someone else's idea is better than mine, then absolutely we should build their idea, but I don't not have ideas and I think that's the key balance is you have to be able to not get precious about your ideas. And I think there's so many ways that you do this, like mental models, deciding on impact of things, but you have to be comfortable in not making it about you and making it about the business and saying, "Why would this problem be better solved this way?" So, yeah. Strong opinions, loosely held, I think is the way that I approach that.

So one is understanding, as a founder CEO, understanding where I should be placing my skills and my effort best. That's where I can do my best work.

And then I think it's also understanding from the point of view of a business as a stakeholder, understanding in order to deliver the best work for the business, where my limitations exist, which of course there are profound and many, getting help and leaning on other people to help plug those gaps.