Facing Fear Head-On - Olov Eriksson

00:00

I think you can be successful in many ways, and you need to play to your strengths. But, I think there are a couple of core things I've seen, and I stole this from a guy named Reyes on Twitter, actually, I'd recommend following, but it resonated a lot with me and he kind of made two axes. One was your skills and how good are you in your craft and your skills. The other one was your agency, which a lot was defined or be interpreting as your ability to still find a way, and the ability to take ownership of something and making things happen. I've seen a lot of people in my career who are fantastic at their craft, but they don't get anything done and they get become very... There's always these frustrated geniuses and it's like, "Oh, well, because of this, or because of that, or because of this structure, or because I didn't get that."

00:58

It didn't happen, all right? I think the environments I work in, we are growing really fast. Things are changing, processes are not in place. There's a hundred reasons why you can't get something done. But on the flip side, there's a hundred ways you can get things done. I think people who have that high agency that think like an owner find ways outside of the processes, where needed, tend to be tremendously more successful than the people who are high skill but lower agency. Even the people who are high ownership and low skills usually do better than the high skilled ones, to the frustration of the high skilled ones.

01:49

I've realized as I've grown older that I'm very much run by my emotions. My thesis is that most people are. We feel certain things about certain people, for example, about certain things and we make up reasons or a rationalization for why that is true. The decision is not usually rational, it's emotionally based, and the judgment is usually not rational. It's emotionally based and then rationally motivated. I've seen this a lot in myself. We think a lot about that when we build our product. I think I have a numerous example in my work life that I think the easiest is often with colleagues, right? One example could be that when I joined Pleo, we had an engineer, it was a fantastic engineer and I had all these changes I wanted to make and he was really the only guy pushing back.

02:39

I didn't think he pushed back and I didn't like that he pushed back a little bit. I was more junior back then. I also felt maybe the way he wasn't doing was pushing back. This led me to view more of his actions, more of his push backs in a negative light and make certain assumptions beyond the actual things he was saying. What happened was that after a time we also started to connect more on the personal level and the relational level and I started to understand his background and his motivations and he understood me and my background and motivations, and my feelings about this person completely shifted. That also made me view all of his other actions in a completely different light. I've had these so many times with people where I made a judgment of them or whatnot based in a few interactions, and then I have a few more personal moments where we connect and I start liking this person more.

03:43

I see my entire world view of this person change based on so little interactions. The beauty in this is when you become more aware of it, it's easier, at least for me to... It's hard to ignore, but at least makes it easier for me to, I think, make better decisions, and maybe to wrap up the story with this engineer, he's left the company now, but he's the one person that I keep in contact and I talk with every month. He left two and a half years ago. I think also going through things like that, yeah, I think there's two points and one is the emotional part and being aware of it, but also going through this and connecting deeper also tends to lead to the best relationships, right? Maybe  those are the two points I was trying to make.

04:37

Olov, it sounds like in relationships that are easy, you don't learn a whole lot about yourself, but the relationships that are more challenging, they often give you a different perspective of your own self and your own being.

04:53

Yeah, yeah, definitely. I feel like I'm being a bit incoherent here. First I was talking about decision making, then about relation building, but I think I agree with you, and that's something I've also learned at Pleo that we are taught a lot and talked a lot about how you interact with people on both of the... You have three levels, you have the professional level, then you have the relational level, and you have the personal level. The personal is just yourself, right, and being aware of your personal emotions in certain situations and how your relations with other people. If we focus a lot on developing that, the two lower levels and then the professional levels becomes so easy.

05:47

Because relating back to my earlier point, if we want to handle professional topics and you have the feelings underlying on the relational level, that really impacted your judgment also on the professional side, because you will start seeing things that person do in a too negative or too positive light, for example. Or, you don't find ways to really incorporate and build on each other. You'd rather try to maybe find faults just in the other person's argument instead of taking good parts of their ideas and build on it. To me, a lot of what we focus on in our management team here and at Pleo in general, is the professional is easy if you solve the relational one and you are a bit aware of your own emotions.

06:34

Well, it's interesting how we spend so much time reflecting on decision making in our professional journey and how we make decisions to be a part of this company or be a part of that company. But in essence, a company is just, I guess, a group of relationships. It is just a group of people and the decision that you're making is completely reliant on the relationships that are out that you're kind of deciding to... You're effectively deciding to join into their relationships. It's not like you're deciding to, I don't know, eat some food or read a book. You're deciding to proactively engage in a new relationship. The nature of your own relationships and how you deal with them is an understanding them, of being aware of them is such an important part of your decision making.

07:17

I think I agree. I think they're all these kind of wonderful frameworks by Bezos and others. Like, "Is the decision reversible or not?" And those types of things, how fast you take and I think all of them are correct and they're good and we try to apply them where we can, but I think they're not complete without the psychological aspect of it. I think that's sometimes what's missed in those things, because I think that is often the largest part of, I think, in mistakes in relationship, or in not reaching optimal decisions, because you end up fighting each other in non-constructing way trying to get your way and trying to be right, trying to claim your status or whatever it might be instead of really, really working together to get the best decision. To me, that is probably more important than all of those frameworks. that's probably something I think about a lot in decision making. Am I too influenced by these things to see things clearly?

08:25

How do you know if a relationship is going to be one that's productive for you? Because, they kind of wrap themselves up sometimes in the ones that don't look like they will be like your example.

08:36

No. I think, in most cases it is possible, I found. Even when I felt it's really, really difficult, because we have such different world views or such different backgrounds or understanding of things. But, I would argue when really tried, we've always succeeded if two core things are true, that that person's intentions are good and they're honest. Been at least my experience, you can overcome most things. You can find the common ground, you can understand. I want the best for Pleo and I'm being honest with you. But, then you'll often find the common ground and you can trace back to, "Okay, well you are trying to accomplish this. I'm also trying to accomplish this, but through this way and whatnot." But, if you end up dealing with a person who, for whatever reason, has bad intent or is simply not honest, then I usually don't find it worth the time.

09:52

It's really interesting you said that, because I, as you were saying, I was busy reflecting on how I come across in circumstances and how I talk to people or want to go about doing things. And I'd say that my intentions... easy to self-reflect and say that they're good, but are good and that I'm truthful, honest, and spit the truth. But, there are definitely also circumstances where I care about the other person, I worry about the other person and so I will... Intentions and honesty doesn't involve empathy, and the empathy can sometimes warp you out a bit to the point where it makes the relationship harder, because if both parties are constantly being empathetic, trying to imagine what the other person is feeling, then no one is... You're creating this middle layer that's just not needed if the intentions are good and you're willing to be truthful.

10:52

Yeah, that's a good point. I think empathy is a great thing to be sure, in general.

11:05

Yeah, we should caveat that.

11:08

But, I've also found myself, and probably not to the empathy itself, but in a way where I look at a situation and I understand why someone acted the way they did, or maybe I found something in this situation that I could have done better. I think I've found myself both in professional life and in personal life too often using that to excuse the other person, behavior, or results, or whatever it might be. And it's like, "Well, I could have done this better," doesn't mean that the other person also couldn't have done something better. Or, just because I understand why you chose to do that way, I still expected you to do better or different. That is something I think, at least that what's came to mind when you talk about empathy, is I think...

12:00

And that is something, I think. At least that's what came to mind when you talk about empathy. I think empathy is good, but I think empathy sometimes combined with maybe a fear of conflict or overused to kind of understand or excuse others' behavior usually doesn't lead to the best outcomes.

12:18

No, and the fear of conflict can really get in the way when you're trying to see the truth of a decision that you need to make at work or whether you are genuinely happy or whether you want to pursue a different project or not. Because your fear of conflict and your worry can really put you off getting anywhere close to a decision or anywhere near the truth. You just kind of avoid it.

12:44

Yeah, I agree. I agree. I think fear of conflict is... I think fear in general, honestly rules so much of us in good and bad ways. Now, diverting a bit from the fear of conflict, but that's another thing I think for myself and I think for a lot of people, that fear is a strong driver. The fear of not succeeding, not looking great in other people's eyes, not making the career or whatever it might be, getting fired or stuff like that. I've definitely found myself having all those anxieties and often turned that into action, which has not necessarily been bad for my career.

13:26

It's pushed me to work hard. It's pushed me to solve problems. It's pushed me to go the extra mile, and both to accomplish, to get rid of that fear in the moment, but it's also a way that maybe makes you a little bit unhappy over time. And I found that myself in my career at my last job. I'd got them fairly far, I was a director of product, running a successful product and I was like... I made decent amount of money. It's like, why do I go around spending my days being scared? What kind of life is that?

14:04

And I think that's driven a lot of my career. And I imagine many others kind of like this insecurity turned into action in a way. And that's been a very journey for me the last few years. It's like, well what other things really do motivate me, seeing people grow, building something that lasts or are there more positive emotions that motivates you?

14:30

It's hard to let go of though, isn't it?

14:32

Yeah. But it's easy to conjure up fears, right? But also the same principle there, being aware of them takes away a little bit of the edge for me at least. It's like, well okay, this is actually why I'm doing this. It feels kind of silly, but of course it doesn't go away.

14:48

And we'll want to believe that we could have got to the director of product of a successful company by not being fearful. You want to believe that the drive could have come from a different place, from a place of light, not dark. But is it there? Is it possible? Could you have done that?

15:14

I believe so. I honestly believe that motivations can come from different things and I think as long as you have it, you can harvest it. And I think some motivations make you happier than others. So I'm not saying that fear is a better motivator than others. I'm probably saying it's the worst one for your personal health, not necessarily. It does cloud your judgment sometimes. I don't think it's the best one. But yeah, I personally believe it's possible to be successful without being driven by fear, for sure. But I think I'm often doing a better job now not being driven by it, because it also makes you take maybe bigger risks and things like that where you're not as fearful. And in startups and in scale up and stuff like that, you need to take risks. You want the big rewards. You need to take the big risks and when you're less scared, you're more open to doing that.

16:17

There are two ways to approach fear that have always stuck in my head. You could either go with a Buddhist way of looking at fear or a stoic way of looking at fear. So if you have a Buddhist way of looking at fear, you will accept fear. You will live with fear. There's a story about Milarepa. I think Milarepa was one of the Buddhist teachers or something. And demons come to Milarepa's cave and he's trying to get rid of them all and he shoos a few away and they magically... But there's one massive demon who still waits, and the demon said to him...

17:06

I'll mess it up, but he said something along the lines of, I will leave if you let me eat you. And Milarepa put his head in the demon's mouth and the demon disappear, as if to say you should fully accept fear. The other is more of a stoic way of approaching fear as if fear is something to be conquered. The obstacle is the way. These things that we fear are the directions that we should take ourselves in. Both are so noble, both in different parts of life feel like wonderful ways of thinking through problems. But yet both are complete opposite.

17:46

Yes.

17:47

It's hard to know which ones follow sometimes.

17:50

Yeah, I think it's a really good point. Well put. Thinking about what am I? I think I'm probably both or I apply both. I think when I had a lot of worries at times, my wonderful wife, she's a lot like meditate, accept it. And that kind of works, especially to me when it's unclear what it is you're afraid of. Just accepting it tends to work for me. But I'm also a strong believer... When I worked in sales I had this guy like always do the most difficult first things in the morning. It's like you tackle the difficult things and the fears head on and train that muscle. And I think there's a lot of wisdom in that too. So I wish I had a... I don't think I have a strong... I think I probably use both. But I think it's a really well way of putting it. What do you think around this?

18:57

I think it does depend on the circumstance. If you were to take a decision about, well... But I guess it also depends on what you're motivated by. For example, the two of us are probably, half of us wants to not be so ambitious and half of us likes being ambitious. That's a great assumption. And if that's the case, then I want to tackle fear. I want fear to be something that I can overcome because I want to move forward and progress and make something. But the other is no, I don't want that. I want to accept it. I want to live with it. I want to be next to it. I want to embrace it.

19:38

I mean, if I was making a decision about where to work next, what would I want? Which would I rather? Would I rather accept? Would I rather look towards the future and accept fear or try and overcome it? That's really interesting actually, because my initial reaction was to say that I would want to overcome it because that's progress and something I could move towards. But actually if I continue doing that, I'm only ever going to move in a direction that is fearful. I'm only ever going to go towards things I am scared of. Whereas actually if I accept those fears and I live with them, maybe I can start to be motivated by things that are more positive.

20:26

But both ways, in a way, tackles the fear head on, doesn't it? None of them is going in a different way. It's not going away from the demon or...

20:34

Not avoiding it, yeah.

20:38

So maybe one could argue that both are headed technically head on just in different ways.

20:45

Unless, your acceptance really does accept it truly and you then do... It's like a sidekick and you really don't see it. You just crack on with whatever direction you want to go and if you really truly can accept it.

21:01

Yeah.

21:01

Is there any way that you've learned to develop an awareness of your emotions as you go through making decisions or creating relationships? Because, it's so easy to say that we should be aware of our emotions and use them in certain circumstances or not, but it's so difficult to know how.

21:20

Yeah, I thought I was very aware, to be honest. I look back five years, I thought I had full control of it. It's like how difficult can this be? I can see when I'm getting upset. But the more I dug and the more I talked about it, the more I saw these situations where my judgment on certain subjects would change dramatically just based on my general feeling about the person or situation. I realized that I was a lot more run by emotions than I wasn't. So now I actually, not so much in personal situations, I do it there as well, but especially in professional situation, whenever I feel myself having a really strong opinion, I become very suspicious. And I think I've trained myself to see these, I for sure miss a lot of them. But it's more like if it's on the level 10 scale of up or down, then it's probably something else than just this thing and I become very suspicious.

22:25

Oh, interesting. Okay.

22:28

And then I think also the relationship you build with the people around you... So actually the conversation I had right before this one, between the boss, I had an interview and then I spoke with a close colleague, and we discussed the meeting we had yesterday. It's like, how did I come off there? What I said there, I doubt it even made sense. You seek that feedback continuously to kind of hold other people, because sometimes you blind yourself, but you want to surround yourself with people who can call that out.

23:07

Got to have some courage to do that.

23:09

Yeah, but we are quite good at those types of things here. But we also, we had another meeting yesterday where we kind of just decide, okay, Olov, you look at it from this angle, you look at it from maroon, you look at it from a bias angle and you look at it from... We discuss a topic and everyone had to really take on that hat to see and make sure that we catch biases or how it fits with the operating model of our strategy or whatever might be so that people are actively challenging ourselves from those, make sure that the decision becomes as good as possible. So I think there are those types of simple tricks that you can use, but of course it's not a 100% covering.

23:52

How did you navigate it when you got to the point where you decided that you didn't want to be driven by fear day-to-day and you made the calls join…

24:00

...Fear day to day, and you made the call to join Cleo when you did. How did that manifest? What period of time were you aware of it? When did you make the final decision and how did you get the courage to make it?

24:23

So I think they're not a hundred percent related, decision maybe to join Cleo and avoidance of fear. But I do think one, there's always a choice to join a company, but I think there's a continuous choice to stay. And I think joining Cleo, it was very emotional. It's like I remember I actually turned Cleo down first because who cares about expense management? But then I had a chat with Yappa and he really laid out the vision and he got me super excited and it's like this can be huge and we can do all these great things and you seem like a great person to work with. So it was a very emotional based decision in that sense.

25:20

And then, I continuously chose to stay. And then I spent a lot more time and I was like, why do I stay? And what do I seek in my working life? And I think this will be different for different people, but to me I think a lot about just a few things. I want to solve problems I find challenging. I want to work with people that... I like to solve those problems with people I like. I think life is too short to not do that. And I want there to be limitless potential. I don't like feeling boxed. Now we do a great job when it becomes this big. I want it to be like okay, we do a great job, but it can go huge. That entices me. And of course the good financial is upside also, because of the practical things. And my last one is, and this one is probably the one I'm changing most over the last period, but I wanted to have at least, I feel like it's something positive for the world.

26:34

And I feel Cleo is, but it's not like we're solving climate change. There are better things we can do. So we shouldn't kill ourselves on that too much. But I do think it has a positive impact on work culture and people's lives and stuff like that. So if a company meets those criteria, they become interesting and as long as Cleo meets them, I would probably want to stay. If they let me. So I try to build my framework for that and I think everyone needs to find their own, what they appreciate. But to me they go back to almost like this basic human things. We sat around the fires and hunted together and solved things together and that's what kind of brings happiness.

27:27

And when you were at Klarna before, what was the tipping point? When did it reach a point where you were like, "Okay, I want to make a change here." And how did you know that that time had come?

27:46

I was with Klarna for seven years and I think there's a lot of fantastic things that I learned from my time there, a lot of things I've taken with me. But I'd also been there for seven years and I think for my last nine months or so, I also don't think my passion was there anymore. It was along the time when I realized I'm driven by my fear. Why am I working around the clock? I had a hard time answering the question, why? Which also I think really impacted my work. I don't think I was doing as good of work anymore and I wasn't as passionate about it anymore. I was still scared to leave but in the end, it was also seven years so I felt like now is the time. I don't see the big reason to stay.

28:48

And now that you've kind of gone through both of those experiences, both leaving Klarna and then joining Cleo, there's a challenge that we all meet at some point where we... Like when's enough, enough? How do you know what satisfaction is to you? Do you have this kind of goal that you are headed towards or is there this thing that you want to have achieved but you're not quite there yet? Or does the goal keep moving?

29:25

No. So I think there's like two levels. So one is the first level I described and that one is more constant. The problems will change, even the people might change and what not. But as long as you're in that setting, I personally get a lot of satisfaction and there are things that I want to, when I leave Cleo, I feel like I want to accomplish. I want to leave it with a fantastic product that I want to use. I want it to be a company that I feel proud of, that I would recommend to my friends working. And I have a few of these things that I really want to accomplish at Cleo as such. But I'm a much more person, also I think in how I run my teams and how I evaluate people and how I try to steer myself. I focus a lot more on the inputs than maybe the outputs.

30:29

And I think it has a little bit to do with the product as a profession. If you really understand the customer, if you have a great team with healthy conflicts, you have good ideas, you move fast, that's a very good predictor of success. Versus like, "Oh well, we just launched this one feature and it managed to hit the metrics." But we did all the other things poor, because there's so many things outside of your control. So we need to manage a lot on inputs. And I'm also a huge fan of the book, The Score Takes Care of Itself, which talks about this football team in the eighties where it came in and they were asked, "What is your goal? When are you going to win the league?" And the guy is like, "No, I have no idea, but I'm going to do all these things. I'm going to make sure that every linebacker, we break down what they need to be good at. They train at that. Then really, really make sure that all parts of the whole organization really was optimized to inputs."

31:33

And they created the most successful dynasty in American football history. And I approach my life the same way as well. I'm not the person who's like, "This goal. I want to accomplish this. I want to do that goal." I want to make sure that the things I put into my work and my life are as good as possible. Quality of the work, as good as possible, the time, the relationships, the problems. And I trust that that will lead to good outcomes.

32:02

Has it always been that way?

32:06

No. It has not. I used to be the opposite way. I used to be an athlete in my twenties and you will judge your whole thing about did you win or lose that match, right? And the success was purely measured on wins of tournaments and stuff like that. And you know, it's not fully under your control, but you control how much you practice, you control how good you become and then what happens in the game happens in the game.

32:40

But I really was the other way around. And the same, I think in school. It would be like, "Oh I did this math test and I passed and it was easy and I wouldn't study." It's like, "Oh well, what do you mean? I got the grade anyways." But I think that's a completely wrong way to think about life. You need to really focus on what can you do as good as possible. Doesn't mean that you can't dream, it doesn't mean that we have a strong vision of where we want to take the product or life I dream of. But what I spend 90% of my focus time is on the inputs.

33:19

They do sound mutually exclusive at times.

33:22

Sometimes. But I think maybe they could be. But a practical example of how we run our product teams. We've documented, each team has their KPIs. They have their things they want to accomplish on an outcome basis. But we've also been very explicit about these are the things when we value it as a PM, those are only some part of what we look at. We look as much on these things, so we expect to see good things there. So I think they can be complimentary.

34:01

Do you think that you had to live focused on outputs in order to see the value of living through inputs?

34:19

I don't know. I don't know.

34:24

I had a dinner this week with a PM that used to work for me, now was the founder of another company. He's like 23 years old. Super smart guy and we were having some of these discussions around what you're driven about and fear and those types of things. When I was 23, I had not realized any of those things. Took me many more years to reach that stage of maturity in those things. So I don't know if you have to really live them or first do the mistake to then get to the thing. Maybe. I think sometimes we overrate experience. I think you can learn a lot from speaking to people and you can accelerate the journey through theories, through interactions, through various things. I don't think you necessarily have to play beach volleyball for 10 years to figure it out. But, yeah.

35:29

There's a founder I know who said to me recently that they felt that they were finding it really tough because they had 15, 20 years worth of experience. But they felt that at this moment in time they were only ever as good as their experience in the last nine months. And that in this moment things were moving so fast and they were learning so much that it was just that period of time. I remember thinking at the time, that's so appropriate to so many other-

36:00

It's just that period of time. I remember thinking at the time that's so appropriate to so many other walks of life, that this length of experience that we say we have is nowhere near as valuable as society perhaps puts on it and it's way more about your current circumstance.

36:20

Yeah. The way I think about it is that there's different types of experiences. I think an experience in a craft like organizational structures that you have done, or methodologies, or way to run things and whatnot. I've seen at Pleo, I've done it myself, I've seen it wherever I go that you will have leaders coming in, they have a playbook, "These are the solutions we're going to apply here." I did it myself. I actually can't speak for anyone else at Pleo but I know I did it myself. It's like, "This worked really well at Klarna, I'm going to implement it a Pleo." Half of it worked, half of it didn't, because at the end of the day, you need to start with what is the problem you're trying to solve? Where are you trying to go?

37:10

And then you put the appropriate solution to that. And I think experience can be a tool bank of things to draw from, but it's very rarely that you can just apply things, so you can take your experience from one place and apply it straight to anothers. But it trains you to maybe see some patterns, it trains you to have more solutions in mind. But really are strong believer if you're a good first principle thinker, that is more worth. If you're more good first principle thinker with some experience, the tool banks to draw from, you'll probably move faster. And I think that's one type of experience. And I think other experiences might be being in difficult situations with people and those things are harder to argue from first principles because they're emotional experiences.

38:10

Have I done things where I've gone through difficult times with people or this person's struggling at home and it impacted me this way? Where you live through pains and joys as a leader and those kinds of experience, you can't read yourselves to them and you can't really copy them or argue them from first principles if you're really smart, you have to experience them to understand how you will react in that situation. So I view different experiences differently and I think when we think a lot about hiring, we often ask the questions, for our senior leaders, "What would you not bring from your old company?" Just to check if they're a person who's just going to come in with a bunch of solutions or are they someone who can adapt to the very, very fast moving space we're in.

39:09

It's interesting that those leaders that are coming in, they're at a point where they're making a choice about where they want to work and they have two ways of looking at things. The first is they could look at their own experience and say, in some ways driven by insecurity in a way, what am I good at? What are my strengths and where can I apply them? So that question will then be extraordinarily disarming because you're asking them where would they not use those strengths, which is really difficult. But a different way that someone could approach that scenario is they could say, "Instead of me thinking what I'm really good at and trying to apply it, why don't I try and figure out which problems are in some way related to the problems that I've solved in the past?" Because there's likely to be as much crossover between those problems as possible. It's that empathy thing again, it's like how can you actually just take a moment and think what the other side needs rather than what you have?

40:12

No, but to me, that resonates a lot because to me it's like what problems are fun to solve? Which ones do you want to tackle and do I have the skills to be able to tackle them? I think that resonates a lot with me.

40:28

Is there a thread that you've seen that defines people who are typically more successful?

40:40

I mean it's a good question. I think you can be successful in many ways and you need to play to your strengths. But I think there are a couple of core things I've seen, and I stole this from a guy named Reyes on Twitter actually who I'd recommend following, but it resonated a lot with me. And he made two axis, one was your skills, how good are you in your craft and your skills, and the other one was your agency, which a lot was defined or be interpreting as your ability to still find a way, the ability to take ownership of something and making things happen. I've seen a lot of people in my career who are fantastic at their craft but they don't get anything done and they get become almost these frustrated geniuses. It's like, "Oh, well because of this, or because of that, or because of this structure, or because I didn't get that, it didn't happen."

41:42

And I think the environments I work in the, we're growing really fast. Things are changing, processes are not in place. There's 100 reasons why you can't get something done. But on the flip side, there's 100 ways you can get things done and I think people who have that high agency, that thinks like an owner, find ways outside of the processes where needed tend to be tremendously more successful than the people who are high skilled but lower agency. Even the people who are high ownership and low skills usually do better than the high skilled ones, to the frustration of the high skilled ones. And if you both are very skilled and have high agency, you will go anywhere in the company, anywhere in career. That is something I really try to talk with people in Pleo and with my direct reports of my team, there's a way, find a way. Think like Jeppe, think like Nico. And if I were to look over my career, that's the one biggest determinator.

43:02

Essentially that final axis is the opposite of what I thought you were going to say because typically you would leave skills on it, but then I've seen more of those graphs that say skills and then what you enjoy. And it's really interesting to think about agency because in some ways, agency is, a lot of the time, what you don't enjoy. If you've got 100 reasons why you can't get something done, it's not very fun or at least the mindset that you have in that moment is there's all this stuff going on. It's hard to get this through. And in some ways, we kid ourselves if we say that there's an axis which is skills and things that you enjoy because they are purely based on you. All of that stuff is within your control but agency, the interesting part is that where you're saying effectively is okay, have your skills, have your individual part, but that has to meet the needs of the world at some point, and agency is how can you pierce the needs of the world with those skills.

44:01

No, I agree. And this might not be true if you work in a really big company where all those processes are in place, and you don't need a high agency, and you can just leverage your skills, but not in the environments I've seen. You won't get things done in the pace and you will find excuses not to if you don't have. And this is harder to coach, to be honest, at least in my experience. There's people great at coaching, just more informing them and showing them, but skills, you can learn, and it's sometimes harder to coach, in my opinion. Also, it's a mindset thing and if you just go in with that attitude then, at least at a company like Pleo, you tend to be very successful.

44:56

My final question is what are you optimizing for now?

45:06

No, but I optimizing my work life very much for the things I said earlier, working on problems that interest me with people I like. That to me gives me a lot of satisfaction when I do that. That is probably one of the core things for me personally to optimize for, then I optimize with different things in Pleo strategy-wise and whatnot. But on a personal level, that I found given the most energy. Then I have an eight-year-old daughter, so to be honest, if I looking at the whole thing, I also optimize my work life to be able to spend time with her. So I will block off time between 5:00 and 8:00 every day, and be able to drop her off at school, and stuff like that. And then I have to take a meeting late at night or work on the weekends if needed, as long as I have certain times that I get with her. From a total level, it's doing work with people I like, and tackling problems I'm passionate about, and making sure that I have time with my daughter. It's very simple equation, those are the things I'm going for.

46:22

I think the thing that will stick with me most from this conversation is where relationships intersect with decision making and how we don't make these decisions in a vacuum, but we make them in a wider context. And the second thing I think I remember is your clarity on finding people whose intentions are good and who are honest. And if we can go about our working life finding people whose intentions are good and who communicate in an honest way, we'll be in a good place. Thank you so much for breaking it all down.

47:06

Thank you for asking lots of interesting questions and given your own perspectives as well.

47:11

All right, man.

47:12

All right. Have a good rest of the day.

47:13

You too.

47:14

Bye-bye.