Improve strategy, influence, and decision-making by understanding your brain | Evan LaPointe

Introduction and Opening Remarks

Evan LaPointe: The brain is like a college campus that has different departments in it. Most people rely on their history department way too much. If you instead send things to the more experimental, open-minded science department, the more creative art department, you get dramatically better answers.

Introducing the Guest

Lenny Rachitsky: I know you have a bunch of awesome advice on becoming more influential.

Evan LaPointe: It’s almost like you’re playing Elden Ring or some video game. The starting point is to choose your character. Hey, I’m the devil’s advocate approach, or I’m the break it and see if it still stands after I hit it really hard with a sledgehammer kind of guy, your personality kind of has a natural fit.

How the Brain Works

Lenny Rachitsky: How do we create better relationships within our teams?

Evan LaPointe: It’s critical to ask what kind of experience am I? Not how good am I at my job, how much do I know, how critical am I to this process, but am I a miserable experience? If the answer is yes, don’t worry too much about the other pieces yet. You got to fix that first.

Why People Are So Different

Lenny Rachitsky: I’m really excited for this episode. I think it’s going to be unlike any other conversation I’ve had on this podcast.

Self-Awareness Is the Starting Point

Evan LaPointe: Then here’s the surprise ending.

Understanding Differences to Foster Collaboration

Lenny Rachitsky: Today, my guest is Evan LaPointe. Evan is the founder of CORE Sciences, which teaches companies and individuals how our brains actually work, and through that lens, how to more effectively work with other people on teams, how to build better products, how to grow your business, and how to make smarter and faster decisions. Evan is a four-time founder, including founding a company called Satellite, which is the fourth largest analytics product on the internet today, which was acquired by Adobe where he later ran product strategy and innovation for Adobe’s digital business.

In our conversation, Evan shares a simple way to understand how our brains work, and through that framework, how we can get better at vision work, influence, running meetings, having more focus and building better and more productive relationships with our colleagues. This conversation is a beautiful mix of science, theory, and also, a ton of very actionable and concrete things you can do to be more effective in your work. If you enjoy this podcast, don’t forget to subscribe and follow it in your favorite podcasting app or YouTube. It’s the best way to avoid missing future episodes and helps the podcast tremendously. With that, I bring you Evan LaPointe. Evan, thank you so much for being here. Welcome to the podcast.

Companies as Ecological Habitats

Evan LaPointe: Thanks very much for having me. I’m excited to share some stuff with people.

Lenny Rachitsky: I am really excited for this episode because one, I think it’s going to be unlike any other conversation I’ve had on this podcast. Two, I think it’s going to really stretch our brains as we learn about how the brain works. Three, I think it’s really going to make an impact on how people work and how they relate to other people and work with other people. I thought it’d be great to start by laying a little bit of foundation for people to get a sense of just what they need to understand about how the brain works before we get into how we can actually apply some of the stuff. Could you just share some of the stuff that is really important for us to know about how the brain works?

The Gap Between Science and Business

Evan LaPointe: The brain is like a big galaxy. There’s a National Geographic quote that we throw up in all of our programs that when we train teams, for example, that says the brain is more complex than any known structure in the universe. It’s easy to read a sentence like that and just run straight away from the problem. I think that’s important for people to not run away from this problem but more run toward it. It’s our job to translate the complexity of the brain into really simple, straightforward systems that you can remember. The three or four main systems to stack on top of each other like layers, start with the fact that the brain has systems. I think of it like the brain is like a college campus that has different departments in it, and your brain has a science department responsible for open-minded experimentation.

It has an art department in it responsible for creative boundless thinking. It has a history department designed for looking stuff up that you already know. If you think about sending your thoughts to the right department on the campus or just different departments, you’re going to get super different responses back from your brain. Where we’re stuck largely is most people rely on their history department way too much. That’s because the brain is actually built to conserve energy, and that’s the lowest energy form of generating an answer to a question that the brain can pull off. If you instead send things to the more experimental, open-minded science department, the more creative art department, the humanities department of your compassion, et cetera, you get totally different answers. Certainly, if you ever build products as a company or offer services, those departments are going to give you dramatically better answers than the reference material just in your history department.

Lenny Rachitsky:

Imagination as a Simulation Tool

Evan LaPointe: That’s the first thing is that the brain has these departments and systems in it and it also has pathways. The pathways thing is really important to understand because there’s a likelihood that thought will go down certain pathways in each of our brains. Some of that has to do with personality, which predisposes us to have a higher-anxiety or a lower-anxiety response or a higher-creativity or lower-creativity response. You can also be more intentional with these pathways, and that’s a big component of self-awareness is to know what are my preferences and then am I actually letting those preferences take over in the situation or might be more intentional steering down the pathways to activate these best regions and systems of the brain. The simplest way to keep track of the systems is there’s three, there’s three really big ones.

There probably are more than three that you can learn about, but the ones we want to have everybody learn about are your safety system, your reward system, and your purpose system. Out of those three, two of them sound really real and one of them sounds like fantasy, to most people. The safety system is pretty obvious to most people. When we’re scared, afraid, uncertain, we have doubt, we’re resentful, angry, apathetic, etc. This system of our brain is trying to restore our standing in the universe, like I need to get out of this stress, out of this danger, out of this anger, etc. you have an objective that, that part of your brain, that system sets, and you go chase that objective, like I want to get safe. If you’re in a meeting, a practical everyday situation, and you’re exposed to a statement that makes you feel unsafe, your objective now actually isn’t to contribute to the meeting productively anymore.

Your brain’s objective is to get back to safety. The same thing of rewards that if somebody says you’ll get something, if you do this, which is the opposite of safety, that if you don’t do this, something bad will happen, then yeah, your brain gets into this pursuit, desire state, which seems great and can be great in a lot of cases, but also, can be pretty narrow. When you hear people say, “That’s not my job.” That’s actually the reward system speaking, saying, “I get rewarded for the things in this list and this thing that you’re talking about is not on my reward list and I therefore am not interested in it.” I have an easier time pushing away from it because the reward system of the brain is more transactional in a conceptual way. Then you get to this vague and ridiculous sounding purpose system.

Until you realize what purpose is, and we’ve all felt it, if you understand the impact of the thing that you’re doing and you understand and care about the people that are impacted by your actions, those are the conditions for purpose, and that can be really big. Like curing cancer, I understand the impact on the people, that’s huge. It can also be like I’m writing an email, I understand the impact of this email and the people affected by it. You can feel purpose at this tiny little grain of sand level of your life, not just at the whole beach and shoreline level, and we teach people that, that’s super important. That’s the foundational layer. Then on top of that, there are a few layers that have to do with your focus because the brain can dramatically shift focus from open mindedness to deep, deep focus.

Then there’s the final layer of ability, which is less science- y, less neuroscience, and more just practical that your ability is regulated by how much reality you know, like do you have the context for the decision or you just know you’re supposed to make the decision? People with context have higher ability than people without. The same thing with imagination and logic that if you push those boundaries in your mind further, your ability increases almost disproportionately to how much you’ve pushed, so these layers just stack on. I think it’s approachable, it’s simple. It’s like, we can all understand, is my safety reward or purpose system active right now? What is my level of focus? What level of connection with reality, reason and imagination do I have right now? Then there’s your output as a human or as a team, and all these things are like levers we can pull, which is super fun.

Practical Tips to Improve Work

Lenny Rachitsky: Amazing. Just to summarize here, so we have these three systems, safety, reward, purpose, then our level of focus, and then there’s the ability, are we able to actually do the job? Those are the puzzle pieces.

Setup and Decision-Making in Meetings

Evan LaPointe: Exactly.

Lenny Rachitsky: Where I want to take this is when we work with other people, working with other people is very hard, and some of the struggles people have at work in building product, in running a company and building teams, hiring, all these things, is they often get really frustrated by the way other people operate. Some people want to just start building a thing, some people want to really think about it. Some people are very customer qualitative, anecdote focused, some people are very metrics focused. Some people are very collaborative, want to work in groups, some people are very, I want to work alone. Just first of all, we just talked about here’s how the brain works and then there’s this idea of people work very differently. Can you just talk a bit about just this idea of why people behave so differently in an effort to help us learn to work better with people that are just like, “Oh, that’s so strange. This person wants to just their billing.

Debating Principles Over Tactics

Evan LaPointe: Maybe one of the worst pieces of propaganda that people walk around with in their minds is the phrase we’re more similar than we are different. My theory on why we walk around with that phrase or why we’re told that phrase, if we zoom in on the situations where we hear that is that we have this theory, it’s easier to get along with people that are like us. If we fantasize that this person is like me, then I might get along with them better. When in fact, we should probably be building the muscle that we have the capacity to get along with people that are extremely different than we are. That fourth piece that we talk about in our coursework when we train managers, for example, is personality. We talk about your brain systems, your brain focus, your brain’s ability, which sort of paints the picture that humans might be similar to each other and we can activate these things kind of unilaterally.

Then we have to drop this bomb at the end, which is, and here’s why that doesn’t work consistently across different types of people. I know you took our profile, our big five-based profile, and that’s just one tool out of many that can help a person understand where on these various spectrum of personality traits and motivations they sit. We often use the metaphor in our training of culinary school that we’re more culinary school for human performance instead of cooking class. That helps people conceptualize that I’m used to going to cooking classes in my training, here’s how to do a one-on-one, here’s how to offer feedback, here’s a framework for generating product ideas through to prioritization and backlog. We’re like, “Well, what’s going on beneath the surface? What are the underlying principles and forces at work that all the stuff that comes to life on the surface really originates from?”

In this culinary school metaphor, one of the things that’s really important for a chef is to actually understand what are my preferences? What do I like to eat? Because if I don’t know what I like, then I assume everybody else likes what I like, then I’m not going to be a very dynamic chef. I’m going to be like, “Everybody likes lots of salt and acidity in their dishes.” Then you’re going to go to Germany and open a restaurant and be like, “That is absolutely not what we’re looking for in this cuisine.” Self-awareness is a really important step, not just of culinary school, but for everybody. You sit somewhere on a spectrum, your brain has these pathways and these traffic cops directing traffic in your mind. You have to start with square one with yourself and understand, am I prone to try to say things politely, and so that they’re received well? Or am I prone to be super blunt and direct and maybe even mean and harsh? Am I prone to sit back in conversations and let things happen, or am I prone to take over?

Am I prone to go to intellectual abstract thinking and try to deconstruct ideas or am I prone to stay very pragmatic? If you don’t know who you are and you think that the universe resembles you, then you’re going to get super lost in that broader spectrum. I think the big five, I mean there’s a bunch of models. You have Myers-Briggs, disk, etc. They’re just all imperfect ways of measuring personality, but also, useful despite the fact that they’re imperfect and especially useful if you take a growth mentality instead of a justification mentality to reading them. If you say, “okay, I’m low in politeness, I’m super direct.” Your justification mentality of that would be like, “Yeah, damn right. I’m awesome that everybody knows what I really mean and how I really feel.’ Versus the growth thing, which is like, well, maybe there are situations where I can try a little harder than 0% to phrase things in a way that if we work backwards from the outcome, we want to choose our actions right now, would these actions so direct actually increase or reduce the probability of that outcome?

That’s when we become more dynamic chefs, more dynamic people. Personality is a broad spectrum and self-awareness is the starting point for the whole thing. The big five model gives you a really good list of attributes to scan yourself through, and then you should be making a game plan for how to do that. Then you can turn your attention to the network of humans you’re a part of and say, “Okay, well in what ways, because I’m me, am I so different than these other minds?” How can we create a mesh mentality where thought shifts among the group to fit most naturally? In product work, especially, whether you’re a founder, entrepreneur, thinking about product at that level and your team at that level, or you’re in the thick of product work pushing your mind and other people’s minds to get this right, then you’re going to benefit a lot from understanding these traits and these differences.

Strategy and Vision

Lenny Rachitsky: I think the big unlock here for a lot of people is that the reason you are struggling, getting something done, working with someone, being successful at your company, with your manager, with a partner in your team, is they have a very different way of their brain operating, and so they think in a very different way, they react in different ways. You may think the entire world thinks the way you do, but they don’t, and these tests help you see that. To make this super concrete for people, are there a couple of examples or wins you often find that you can share of just ways to use this to become better in your job, say this week? Whether with meetings or convincing someone of something, anything along these lines?

Understanding Your Openness

Evan LaPointe: I think one more layer would be helpful to this, especially if you’re a leader or a manager, which is the business world isn’t just hand-to-hand combat between a bunch of individuals on the blank matrix loading screen. You’re actually in a habitat as a company and your team is like a habitat. I think of companies and teams, almost like little terrariums that we’re inside of, and is this terrarium set up with sand and a heat lamp and we’re a bunch of frogs, like we’re going to turn into frog bacon, simply because we’re in this habitat? A lot of it is you want to actually create a habitat or an environment that’s predisposed to high-functioning thinking and high-functioning interaction between people.

Because if the habitat is working against all of you to begin with, then all the hand-to-hand combat that’s going to show up is actually largely a function of you just being in this heat lamp, dry, devoid of life, devoid of productive ways to grapple. That’s where a lot of teams and companies sit today, especially more established teams. They’ve either lost their way in the habitat and haven’t really set the scene for good, kind of thinking and interaction, or they just never had that to begin with. Some of this stuff, like when you’ve talked to a couple of other people in the past, your conversation, the Canva conversation, the Figma conversation both come to mind as like it is super obvious the energy that has gone into the habitat to predispose people to high function.

Lenny Rachitsky: You’re referring to in my interviews with the folks from Figma and Canva.

Translation Costs in Competitive Markets

Evan LaPointe: Exactly right.

The Plasticity of Personality Traits

Lenny Rachitsky: I see. Oh, say more about that mean.

Evan LaPointe: You think about the, even in the Canva context of coaches instead of managers. I love this, let me back up for just a second. There’s a great quote, I think Dan Pink has summarized the problem better than anybody when he said, “There’s a mismatch between what science knows and what business does.” In that gap, it says, “Well, what is it that business is doing that science knows better?” You can almost look at this as an equation of science knows minus what your business does equals dysfunction. That is a pretty crystal-clear thing. If you take this managers versus coaches, they’re taking intuitively, I think. I don’t know if they’re neuroscientists, but intuitively, I think a lot of great founders understand humans don’t work a certain way, and this whole paradigm of managers seems to be failing a lot. This whole paradigm, like mantra, fail faster. Seems to be failing a lot, and mission statements seem to fail a lot.

You look at this, science knows business does as a lens to examine yourself through and stuff that fails very often is worth a look. When you look at, okay, do we really want managers, because that seems to fail a lot? Or is there a paradigm that works better for human beings that activates more human potential and hit the nail on the head? If you do the math of Canva, what science knows versus what Canva does, whether they know they’re doing it scientifically right or not, the math equals zero. There’s no difference between what science knows and what business does in that case. Also, the Figma conversation, I loved the phrase from that conversation, imagination is a hypothesis generation engine, I think is what the word was.

Pursuing the Perfect Percentile

Lenny Rachitsky: Oh, the Dylan. Yeah, the chat with Dylan.

Balancing Openness and Conscientiousness

Evan LaPointe: I loved that idea. Because when we talk about imagination as a part of ability, we talk about imagination’s capacity to generate alternatives for you, that’s its purpose. It’s not just to doodle in the margins in the middle of boring meetings. That’s part of it, it’s a side benefit. When you look at imagination’s purpose, if you have a great imagination, you always have a lot of choices in life. Mickey Mouse was a choice. It was like a new alternative way to send messages through a talking mouse. Like, that’s okay, that’s interesting. The other part of the hypothesis generation engine that we focus a lot on is it’s not just the ability to generate choices and hypotheses, but it’s also the ability to load them into your Oculus headset and walk around a world in which that choice already has been executed. That’s akin to vision in a sense that do you have a really good ability to load that one branch of this imaginative tree, this one hypothesis into a simulation and then explore what the world looks like with this in place?

If you look at this coaching thing, it’s going on at Canva instead of managing, you load that in the simulator and you’re like, “Boy, this looks pretty nice. This is higher-performance thing.” With advocacy instead of regulation, we have growth. There’s a whole bunch of aspects that are inherent in that approach where science, and if you ask a neuroscientist, would that work better? They’d be like, “Oh, hell, yeah. That would work way better.” Because it activates this in the brain, it reduces cortisol, it does all these things that science knows work much better. There’s a whole list of stuff from very deep to very tactical of things we can do differently that reduce the gap between what you’re doing and what science knows and the dysfunction just shrinks and shrinks and shrinks as you do those things.

Lenny Rachitsky: Are there things that you’ve found people can change in the way they work based on the way the brain operates, whether it’s run better meetings, be better influence? What are some things people can try to do this week that will make them more successful at their work or working with colleagues?

Conflict Dynamics in Meetings

Evan LaPointe: In the list of what science knows and what business does, everything is in there. Culture is in there, meetings are in there, goals are in there, deadlines are in there, team dynamics, all this stuff is in there. We’ll probably just pick a few things out of that very long list. Meetings are a good one. Meetings, I forget what the statistic is, but it’s some insane 12-figure amount of, no, not 12, nine-figure, no, 12-figure, hundreds of billions’ amount of waste is caught in meetings. We spend gazillions of dollars on waste of time and meetings. For us, like in our programs, the average delta is between 10 and 20%. People save anywhere from a full half of a day to a full day per week of work as a result of just cleaning up the way they’re using meetings. Some of that is just the design of meetings, like treat meetings like a product and treat them workflows that should be organized and used intentionally, but a lot of it is inside the meeting, like what’s the tactic?

Here’s something super tactical, which is, meetings, generally speaking, are a combination of priming and decision making, if you look at meetings through the lens of the phases that they are. A lot of meetings skip the priming step altogether. They launched directly into decision making. It would be safe to skip the priming step if we began the meeting under the assumption that everybody here is on the same page, has the same information, and generally speaking, intends for the same outcome. I think that’s a ludicrous assumption for most meetings, and yet most people are actually shocked to find out that we’re not on the same page even though we literally never have been, and as long as you’re on day two plus of working together. It’s a crazy thing that we don’t do priming, and priming can be simple. It can even be done in the invite. One of the things that’s crazy about Outlook and Google is you can put a very terrible useless meeting into Outlook and it will never look at it and be like, this is probably useless.

Just like you can go into Trello and put the dumbest project in the company’s history into Trello, it will ingest anything you put into it without any discernment as to its value. Now, imagine we’re going to have to do this ourselves for now until a better calendar comes out, but imagine if Outlook or Google Calendar or Cron, which now is part of Notion, would just be like, “Uh, uh, uh. What is the point of this meeting?” You could say, “Okay, this is here. This meeting is about the generation of options or creative problem solving or very tactical problem solving or efficiency seeking, or what is the category of conversation we are about to have? What are some of the basic principles that should apply? Are we honoring sacred cows or are we eating sacred cows in this meeting? What is the mode mentality, the priming? How can we all say this is the mindset and the ultimate purpose that applies to the meeting?”

You can write that and you can read that in under three minutes. It’s not some arduous process. Amazon does it in an arduous process, they’re known for that. That’s wisdom to know, like we need priming. They’re wise enough to realize the need for it. They make that a very robust execution. It doesn’t have to be that robust. Skipping priming is pretty bad. Other meetings get the priming and the decision-making backwards. We start to open the meeting. You’ve heard of diamond-shaped thinking, let’s open the meeting with expansionary thought and let’s end the second half of the meeting with convergence. Well, we start the meeting instead with convergence, realize that we can’t reconcile the various party in the room, their needs for convergence.

Then you might hear in the middle of a meeting like, “Well, let’s start over again and remember why we’re all here.” We do the priming in the second half of the meeting just in time for the meeting to end. That’s a super obvious thing that people can do, but that people very rarely do in priming. I’m happy to generate a list so we don’t have to talk through everything, but maybe make some little PDFs or something that people can download that say, “Here’s what great priming looks like.” Then when you move to the decision making, here’s what great decision making looks like, and that way, you can have a little bit of a guide, and again, do your own math, what science knows what we’re doing in this meeting. We’re skipping a bunch of steps, that’s growing the probability of dysfunction or things will going wrong, and let’s shrink that probability instead of growing it.

Leveraging Strengths and Cognitive Blind Spots

Lenny Rachitsky: Amazing. That’d be sweet if you have that. We’ll definitely link to that on the show notes. The advice here is make sure when you’re starting a meeting, running a meeting, prime everyone around the problem we’re trying to solve or we’re trying to get out of this meeting, the context, versus just diving into decision making.

Peak Performers in Team Dynamics

Evan LaPointe: Very notably, the principles that apply. I think that’s really, really important, not just what we’re here to do, but how we can think about this best. You can even have a debate about the principles, and it’s way better to have a debate about the principles than it is to have a debate about the tactics that are rooted in the fact that you have super misaligned principles. If somebody is trying to make the decision with speed in mind and another person is trying to make the decision with accuracy in mind, it is completely inevitable that they’re about to have a cat fight in the meeting. It’s not resolvable until they come back and revisit the fact that deeper down, we are approaching this in a completely different mentality with completely different objectives.

Practical Exercises to Improve Openness

Lenny Rachitsky: Awesome. If you end up having these PDFs of waste to prime successfully, that’d be great.

Evan LaPointe: For sure. Will do.

A Reality Check on PLG

Lenny Rachitsky: Okay, great. Other things that people can do to work with better. I know you have some advice on how to influence more effectively. I know you have some advice around strategy and vision, so maybe we go into those two directions.

Influence and Relationships

Evan LaPointe: Let’s start with strategy and vision, because I think it’s nice to be better at strategy and vision before you start influencing people. What you’ll encounter in life, in your mind, is ideas are swirling. Whether you’re generating those ideas or other people are, is your brain is going to sort those ideas into believed, believable, kind of conceivable and inconceivable. You can come up with your own words for that, but that’s like a starting point, which is if somebody says something you’ve already experienced, it’s something that is believed to your brain. If we said we should implement an OKR framework and you’ve experienced it in a prior workplace or you’ve read all about Google doing it, then you’re going to be like, “Yeah, we should. It would clean up a lot of junk around here. Okay, great.” Your brain is already in a yes.

If it’s believable, maybe you’re reading Harvard Business Review and you’re reading about things that your business has never done, that you’ve never done, but there’s all this evidence that it works and it makes sense to you mechanically, so you’re like, “Okay, yeah, I find that believable.” Now we’re leaning toward yes, or we’re still in the yes bucket. Now we get into these unbelievable, yet maybe conceivable. These are the things that seem to be far-fetched. Going back to the Canva conversation, the conversation with Uri that you had. Most of the things that are totally believed by these leaders are unbelievable to most other leaders. We don’t need managers? I don’t believe it. Now we’ve shifted the mind from inbuilt kind of tailwind to inbuilt headwind. This is why minds struggle with strategy and with vision, is that every mind based on personality we talked about earlier, that line of demarcation between believed, we all have different lived experience, so the more experience you have, the more believed you have.

Then the believable and then the unbelievable, but yet conceivable, these lines shift a lot from person to person. An idea that totally makes sense to Uri, he’s probably been in a thousand meetings where other people are like, “That’ll never work.” Even though obviously, science knows, for example, it totally will. One of the great benefits of science in culinary school is let’s not reinvent ideas that are already proven. We already know that certain things activate people’s purposeful state and the full brain that seeks comprehension seats deeper problem solving, seeks human connection. Those are known things, and the same thing as the debate about the value of design sits in the strategy and vision. How do we know there’s an ROI to a better design here? Well, if you could disprove that instead of proving it, because the last million people who asked this question proved it.

If you could disprove it, you’d probably win a Nobel prize for being the first human to disprove something that is like ironclad. Like, we’re done. We’re done with this debate. That, I think is what we have to recognize in ourselves. Big part of self-awareness is where our unbelievable threshold begins, where our believable threshold ends. Then the inconceivable is like, get out of my office level stuff. A lot of the vision thinking and dialogue that happens inside of businesses directly activates people’s inconceivable response without any self-awareness that, that’s a personal problem, not a objective problem. I think it’s a really, really important thing for companies and individuals to invest in themselves to kind of say, “Do I have the capacity to recognize the situation that I find inconceivable, but that could be totally wrong?” Then we can avoid the months potentially of arguing that sit between us and experimentation.

… that sit between us and experimentation. So I think that’s the starting point for that. And if we were to do paint by numbers on that, what dominoes do you want to knock down? Know your personality, what you’re looking for in the Big-5 model which we lean into is openness. If you are low in openness, your brain essentially has abstract, creative, intellectual, complex thinking wired to the pain systems of the brain. That’s how your wiring is. As soon as things get abstract, not only are you like, I don’t like this, you have a much more visceral negative response to these types of ideas, and you are now going into your pain cave while somebody else in the room may have all that abstract, creative, exploratory thinking wired to their reward systems.

So that’s something to really know, and vulnerability is the best approach to this because if you think about the domino two, once you know this stuff, then the question is how do we socialize this knowledge in a team? Let’s say it’s a C suite, a leadership team, a founder and co-founder and the rest of the leadership team. And we work a lot with YC companies on this here, because it’s super important. As they hire people, every incremental hire is an increment of psychological diversity, and it changes everything about how these conversations go.

So knowing this, okay, what are our options to socialize this knowledge? Vulnerability is the best option. But Brené Brown will sell vulnerability for its own sake, not everybody buys selling vulnerability for its own sake, because it’s a scary thing. But it gets a little less scary when we consider how much scarier our alternatives are. I can pretend to hide this, that’s my other option, or I can not hide it, be a Tasmanian devil, and then be unapologetic. So those are your three options, and when you realize I can be vulnerable, I can attempt to hide it, or I can be unapologetic, those other two options are ruinous compared to vulnerability.

Lenny Rachitsky: The thing you said about openness and not being good at big vision, brainstorming, super resonates with me, because that’s exactly me. So I took your test, what is it called? What do you call this test, by the way?

Influence Framework: Choosing Roles and Modes

Evan LaPointe: CORE identity is what we call it.

Lenny Rachitsky: CORE identity test.

The Speed of Influence

Evan LaPointe: Yeah.

Lenny Rachitsky: Okay, cool, and we’ll link to it in the show notes.

Mid-Speed Influence and Challenger Selling

Evan LaPointe: Okay.

Choose Your Influence Style

Lenny Rachitsky: So I took, it’s basically the Big-5, agreeableness, conscientiousness, extraversion, openness, and formerly known as neuroticism, now called need for stability. I’m looking at it right here. And I’m actually, and I knew this about myself, I’m pretty low on openness, which I don’t like to see, but it very much aligns with exactly what you said, I’m not great at big vision thinking. Like when people propose, say a designer on my team proposes this whole redesign big vision rethink of the way we, I’m like, no. It’s my pain cave, like you said, and that’s exactly what this test reflects.

So I think it’s a really powerful example of just understanding this is the way your brain is going to respond to things that are totally out there, inconceivable, or how would you call it? Somewhat conceivable but not necessarily believable, and that being aware that that’s how your brain works is really powerful, being aware other people have a very different experience with that is very powerful. And your advice here is one, this combination of this habitat, create this habitat where you have all these versions of people’s ways of thinking, where some people are in their happy cave when they’re thinking big, and then along those lines, your point about vulnerably sharing, hey, this is me, I am low in openness, people need to understand this on my team, and let’s work together to not let that hinder us. Is that right?

Evan LaPointe: Yeah, absolutely. I mean, because if you think about these ideas as pegs in holes, we’re going to take a creativity shaped peg and try to put it through a more pragmatic shaped hole, there’s a translation problem there, and it’s a huge burden. If the team actually needs to be innovative, it’s a huge burden just in terms of time spent on that translation, to translate the visionary strategic ideas that are accurate but are inconceivable into ideas that feel believable for those who need that more grounded thing.

And of course the most common scenario here is ROI, which is the classic question to ask about any idea, what’s the ROI? Well, if the idea is inherently generating nth order effects instead of first order effects, like what is the ROI of having fresh flowers in the lobby of a Four Seasons hotel? There’s two possibilities for the Four Seasons, they either have an answer to that question which satisfies the pragmatic shaped hole, or they have said in their habitat, we don’t ask those types of questions because they’re a huge waste of time.

And if you’re thinking about a competitive market, most of the people that you interview are in highly competitive markets, the team that spends less time translating satisfactory language before they move, which inevitably they’ll move, and sometimes they’ll move because the market forces them to. They spend so much time locked up in the ROI conversation or the justification, the translation conversation, that eventually customers start leaving, employees start leaving, and they’re like, oh, okay, it’s becoming more believable now. Well, because moved out of the realm of ideas into the physical world that we can see right in front of us.

And that team, because they got stuck in the translation phase instead of the experimentation phase, has a huge disadvantage in the market, and if you’re competing head-to-head with one team, this is what I loved about the Figma conversation, that habitat inherently is built for speed because the habitat itself, words are tattooed to your brain that are like, we will not spend time in the translation phase, we will not spend much time. And we see this a lot in the interplay between finance departments, product departments, and things like that, where an overpowered CFO can start asking questions for which there are no answers, that just we’re dragging the team into a different language that is much more literal than the more experiential language of the business, so you can see this play out all the time.

But I think vulnerability is great because if you are sitting in a meeting, you Lenny, and you say, this is not my thing, basically everything you’re saying is inconceivable, now I’m being honest with you, nobody’s going to hate you for being honest, they’re actually going to be glad that you are honest about the gap instead of glad that you are super certain that you are the right human to index off of in the decision-making process.

Specific Dimensions of Role Selection

Lenny Rachitsky: And the thing you recommend being open about is this is my personality, this is my CORE identity, I don’t know the language you’d use, but it’s not I think all this is inconceivable, it’s I think all this is inconceivable because this is the way I think.

Turning the Difficulty Setting Down

Evan LaPointe: Absolutely, yeah, unpack the detail, for sure.

Relationships, Environment, and Focus

Lenny Rachitsky: Got it.

Defining and Framing Relationships

Evan LaPointe: Yeah, I mean tell people, this takes my brain, all this abstract and creative future-centric thinking that’s not rooted in the concrete is where my brain goes, alarms go off and I’m like, I need something concrete. So if you can give me something concrete, I’m more comfortable, but at this point I have to maybe move into a lot of trust, and trust may be my alternative to agreement, right?

Lenny Rachitsky: Yeah. And there’s also, I imagine, what I always do is I recognize, hey, I’m not amazing at this, let me push myself to be more open to these things and find partners that are really good at this and let them drive the ship more.

Competence: The First Relationship Element

Evan LaPointe: Yeah, and it’s great, one of the things that’s so cool about the YC teams that we work with is they’re so sophisticated and so smart. So even though they might run into this roadblock, A, they’re going to do exactly what you just said and they’re going to push themselves. You may notice in your profile the dot that you scored is surrounded by rings that represent how hard it is for you to push yourself to think in different ways, to think beyond the home base way of your brain working.

Now at a certain point your brain breaks and you move into foreign territory, and there’s a level of, I mean, if you are a very conservative person and somebody’s like, “Let’s go to Burning Man,” that will break your brain. You don’t go all the way to the other side of the spectrum necessarily.

Lenny Rachitsky: For the record, I’ve been four times, even though I’m apparently low in openness.

Trust: The Second Relationship Element

Evan LaPointe: Perfect, and there’s lots of reasons to go.

Lenny Rachitsky: Got married at Burning Man. Makes me feel better about my low percentile.

Attraction: The Third Relationship Element

Evan LaPointe: But you’re pushing your brain. I mean, Burning Man’s actually a great example because there are a bunch of different reasons you might go. And if you go for one reason, then you’re exposed to the other reasons. And that may be interesting, and you may kind of venture closer to those other reasons. You may be like, I’m going to stay in my reason bubble within the greater context of this place.

So there’s a whole bunch of… And business is no different, you can say, okay, I’m going to push myself, and I may get into these places that go beyond my brain’s flexibility, where the elastic band reaches its limits, and then from there I’ll trust people and I’ll have people, what I was going to mention about the YC founders is so many of them are so smart that they’re really able to efficiently translate what they see beyond where your band stretches into the language you feel comfortable with, quickly. Other teams do that really badly and they just accuse you of, “Why can’t you see this?” And then you get even more stuck.

Environment: Beyond Mission, Vision, Values

Lenny Rachitsky: How much shift have you seen in people, say they take this test and they’re like, as I am, 23rd percentile in openness, do you see people move meaningfully across this if they work on these sorts of things, or is this just like, here’s who you are, you’re not going to change significantly?

From Performative to Logical Cultures

Evan LaPointe: Personally I’m more concerned with the effect on teams than on people, because if you look at this through the… I’ve been a four time founder, and if I look at this through how is my company working? How are my teams working? I don’t need all the individuals to get to perfect, I need, especially in cases where there’s this translation issue where a team is working on something and some part of that team is saying, “Let’s stop here and let’s dwell here.” If they can move enough that the team, the effect on the team is now freed up, that’s what we really feel as a business.

So to answer your question directly, people can move a lot, especially through the first three rings of that range that we depict, really, really well. Self-awareness is actually kind of the key, and self-awareness and self-consciousness, the difference here is that self-awareness is simply being intentional with your brain, whereas self-consciousness is being worried about your brain. We don’t want people to be worried about their brains and insecure, we just want you to say, this is a situation in which my brain can work this way, and this is a situation where I want to push myself.

So it’s being intentional, and we talked a little bit before this episode about this instinct versus intellect duality in the mind, and essentially you’re just using your intellect to either verify or improve your instinct. You’re always going to have instinctive responses about risk and fear and uncertainty and doubt and need for data, and all these types of things, but then your intellect can come in and watch that part of your brain thinking and say, you’re super worried about the risk of this, but it’s actually pretty low stakes for us to jump in and try. So your need to stabilize that is a little misplaced, and your intellect, that’s really what you’re doing is saying, how much do people change? I don’t really worry too much about how much they change, it’s more about how much they can spot with their intellect something that’s misfit to the situation, and then take what they’re motivated to do, and what they choose to do, and separate them. It doesn’t matter if we change your motivations, if your choice of behavior and your underlying motivation can be different from each other, that’s awesome, those people are super. And we all know people like that, where you’re like, I know this person is uncomfortable right now, but they’re totally making it work, and I really appreciate that.

Lenny Rachitsky: Yeah, part of the reason I ask is, I was talking to you about this before we started recording, I want 99th percentile at all these, I just want to nail this. And I know that’s not how it works, I know you have strengths, you have weaknesses, you can’t be amazing at everything. But that’s funny my mind goes there.

Just to close the loop on this advice around getting better at vision and strategy, if I were to reflect back what I’m hearing its be very self-aware about what you are not strong at, say openness. Is that specifically the one to focus on if you’re trying to figure out how to get better vision and strategy?

Deriving Values from Roles

Evan LaPointe: So there’s a whole bunch of stuff… Well, let me try to make the list simple. Openness is the biggest one because it is essentially your tolerance of vision and strategy, and the lower that is, the lower you will tolerate the abstract pieces of the puzzle, for sure. The outlandish and purely creative and rules-breaking components of strategy and vision, lack of precedence, those types of things. Now the other thing to look out for is as your conscientiousness rises, which is essentially your desire to be efficient, effective, busy, not waste time.

Lenny Rachitsky: I’m high on that one.

Turning Culture into Actionable Tools

Evan LaPointe: Yeah, structured and organized, that is another contributor in the negative, which is it’s objectively great to be a conscientious person, there are so many benefits, until we have to waste time productively, or we have to break order in organization. And then that strength that four days a week, or 28 days a month is great for you, on those days where we go and have the offsite and say, what if we blew it all up, to your example of new design, new website, blow it all up, start over again, different direction, that’s where the conscientiousness is going to be like, why are we doing this? Why are we having this conversation? What’s the need? This is inefficient, I could be spending my time doing something else.

And sometimes that’ll express itself even in meetings of, I was in a meeting one time after we were acquired, this was eight or nine years ago now, and when you’re a founder and you get acquired, there’s a new flavor of habitat that you find yourself in with very new rituals. And one of the rituals that I find myself around a lot was the ritual of saying, we can’t talk about this for the rest of our lives. And we would be about six minutes into a meeting when somebody would drop the, “We can’t talk about this for the rest of our lives” line, and I would look at my watch and be like, “I didn’t realize that you were terminal, I mean, why are you even in this meeting if you’re about to die?”

Because my take on this is we are super far away from the rest of our lives right now, why are you saying that we can’t talk about something for six minutes when the diminishing return of added information in the priming of this meeting, to use that again, you knowing X quadruples your decision quality, and you are resisting knowing X. Now we’re going to hit a point where you knowing Y, Z, etc, we’ve hit a diminishing return and now I’m improving your decision quality by 1% instead of by 4x. But we haven’t established any sensitivity in this room to the diminishing return curve of incremental thought and incremental information. And this is like a new habitat, I’m like, in this habitat do people really hate thought? Do people really consider themselves to be the police that watch the mean streets of intellectualism for any activity? It’s just kind of crazy. But yeah, that’s kind of the practical side of this, is you got to watch out and you got to be careful, and that’s why I habitat is such a big deal because that’s a perfect example of a well-intentioned room with mostly people that are there for the right reasons and the right outcomes, but where this normalness of saying a phrase like that, or saying, “I disagree.” Same meeting person goes, “I completely disagree,” and I was like, “With everything?” “Absolutely everything.” And I go, so let’s look at the meta, the overhead camera of this meeting.

This was the initiation of combat, that’s what the brain is seeing. All the brains in the room are like, oh, fight, right? And now what are our objectives? My objective now becomes win, their objective, because they’ve taken a huge risk of saying, I disagree with everything, becomes win, and because they are disagreeing with a lot of stuff that they don’t understand, the inevitability is they’re about to be annihilated in this room where they have both said, we can’t talk about this forever, and now put all of their chips onto the table to say, “I completely disagree,” instead of, “I have a question,” or, “Can we pull that thread?” Or, “I don’t see how these dots connect.”

So that on a super tactical level, there’s things we say that activate the amygdala, the combat mode of the brain, versus a different choice of phrase which is going to activate the prefrontal cortex which is like, “Hey Lenny, you’re connecting these two dots, I’m not seeing how they’re connected,” logic, now let’s activate the prefrontal cortex with this sentence instead of, “Lenny, that’s dumb, I completely disagree,” let’s activate the amygdala instead.

Politeness Is a Utility Transfer Mechanism

Lenny Rachitsky: I want to talk about this habitat point you’re making which I think is really important, but just to close the loop on the strategy vision piece, so just to give people some very tactical advice is, basically understand your personality, maybe take this CORE identity test, or something like that, understand if you’re low in openness and high-end conscientiousness, maybe you’re not amazing at vision and it’s going to be hard for you to think big and think of it-

From Why to Role

Evan LaPointe: Yeah, your brain is just going to feel agitated when you’re around vision. But, I mean, you can still do it, right? You can still ask people to translate. The key tactic is, okay, it’s not this you’re predestined to suck, it’s more if you’re low and openness, especially if you’re also high in conscientiousness, then recognize your native language for ideas is a mismatch for the native language of vision and really, really good strategy.

And then you can be open about that and you can ask for some translations, and you can ask for… I mean, trust doesn’t have to be non-participation, you can actually say, it would help me trust if you could explain this gap. A great example would be a second order effect, why should we have awesome documentation? How are we going to make more money if we have awesome documentation? Great question, don’t be hostile in the way you asked it, but just help me understand, what thread are we pulling? Well, we’re pulling this thread of customer satisfaction, retention, recommendation, et cetera, Stripe is really good at this, especially from the early days, that great documentation justifies all sorts of second order effects that then will lead us to this first order effect you’re asking about.

Focus and Brainwaves

Lenny Rachitsky: Awesome, okay, that’s really great. And I was going to go one direction, but I want to talk about this real quick. Something that comes up a lot on this podcast is the power of leaning into strengths and not feeling like you have to be amazing at everything, and that in this example, I have a low openness, high conscientiousness, I can still be very successful in the role by, in my opinion, leaning into things I’m actually really strong at, say conscientiousness, and I’m also high in agreeableness. I don’t like the sound of that. Thoughts on just, it’s okay if you’re not amazing at vision because your openness is low, but you can be better at other stuff and together you can be really successful no matter how your personality.

Evan LaPointe: Absolutely right, yeah. I mean, the truth is we look at, taking that Canva example of coaches and managers, not only does that change the way an employee feels about the way this connection they have is invested in them, but it also changes inherently a lot of the meeting dynamics and teaming dynamics from hierarchical feeling things manager to more mesh based intellect. And within the mesh, you don’t have to worry too much about the hierarchy anymore. You can say, this is the nature of my contribution.

So even in the vision and strategy piece, maybe your contributions to idea generation, there are going to be some, and they’re probably going to be good. But those are not ideas to protect in the state that you brought them to the table, they’re ideas to set on the table so that people can surround them and improve them. And then as other people contribute ideas that aren’t as natural to you, kind of just realize we’re not in the phase yet of judging and ranking and prioritizing these ideas, that’s not where we are in the overall storyline. So let it happen, and then if you can improve those ideas, improve them.

And once ideas have that early stage, that kind of like what Jony Ive described as the infancy of an idea, when it’s really weak and delicate and susceptible, if you can nurture that idea to adolescence where it has a little bit of ability to defend itself, then now you’re in a situation where your conscientiousness can start to think about things like how would we resource this? What sequencing makes the most sense? What is the ROI of these things relative to each other? And consider the second and third order effects, and so on. And what would the project plans, and to your point of being both conscientious and agreeable, you are this master of coordination and alignment naturally.

So when that phase of the project begins and we have to get people bought in, high functioning together, getting on the same page, staying focused, getting the project done, all of the people that were good at the beginning with all the vision and strategy, they are just a complete disaster in that phase. That’s just how things really work in the real world, and I think we’re so, again, focused, like we talked about at the beginning, we alluded to the fact you have to unpack enough complexity. I love the Einstein quote, ” Make things as simple as possible but no simpler,” and we’ve made things way simpler than possible in business by saying this is the right way of doing the whole thing.

It’s like, no, no, no, if you’ve ever lived a day in real life, building a real product, the dynamics shift a lot throughout the course of product life cycle, as an example, or really any life cycle as an example. And the peak humans as the dynamics shift are very different, peak humans. Lenny is awesome here, contributes here 10%, contributes here 98%. Evan contributes 98% here, please get Evan out of the room when it comes to these meetings, that’s great. And yes, we should lean into our strengths, but not so much that we don’t know our weaknesses, because another human strength on your team is the patch for the bug of your weakness. And we run buggy software in companies and we say, “Oh, I am leaning into my strengths, I don’t need to worry about my weaknesses,” well, then you become the person who needs everything translated into your language because when your weakness flares its head up, it slows everybody else down.

So it’s really, just from an operations business fluidity perspective, a team that is highly unaware of its weaknesses is going to have a lot of slowness and a lot of problems as a result of that. They don’t have to fix all their weaknesses, but be aware of them and know who is a patch to your weakness.

Environment, Permission, and Deep Focus Needs

Lenny Rachitsky: Evan, this is so interesting. I love that we’re digging deep on this. Is there one tactical thing you could recommend for someone to become better at openness in, say, a brainstorming experience when they’re doing vision, or when they’re low at this, say me.

Tactical Advice on a Quarterly Rhythm

Evan LaPointe: I think the best exercise for a conscientious person especially to feel more open is to become obsessed with reverse engineering. And it’s to say, there’s two forms of reverse engineering that I think are really helpful here. Number one would be reverse engineering against a desired outcome, to truly understand the inputs that generate that outcome. And if we think about that at a big level, like, okay, we want to win a market, what are the real inputs to deconstruct that outcome and understand what our strategy should look like to attack all of the most relevant inputs that generate that outcome? I think that’s the specific form.

And then at a super tactical level, if you want to give feedback to somebody, and let’s say, for me, I’m low in politeness, you’re probably much higher in politeness than I am, and I struggled for years with feedback to generate the intended outcome. I delivered the feedback, but the delivery wasn’t the intended outcome, and the way that I delivered it actually reduced the probability of the intended outcome because I was being too impolite, too direct in many cases, too harsh. And what does harshness do to the brain? Well, that’s crystal clear. So what I was doing and what science knows were very different things, and that’s why I failed in those cases.

But as soon as I started closing the gap and realized I need to try harder to think about the story arc of this feedback, that becomes clearest to me how to do it when I have the intended outcome in mind for the feedback, I really would like this person to start turning the corner on this particular way of thinking. If you and I worked together and it was about openness, we’d be like, what are some things that I could do right now to increment and set the stage for a big shift in openness as time goes on that you are bought into? And that’s a very, if I’m impolite and be like, “Lenny, what’s your problem? Why can’t you do this? Everybody else can do this.”

Your willingness to start turning that corner, I mean, it may be there, the safety system is activated, like, oh, bad things could happen if I don’t do this, but I don’t want your safety system to motivate this change.I mean, in most cases, that’s an optics based change instead of a material change that will occur. And that’s why a lot of people, accountability is a great example, asking for accountability is the best way to not get it, because asking for accountability activates people’s safety systems, or especially saying, “I’m going to hold people accountable.” Then everybody’s like, oh, great, we should set up a whole movie set of facade houses that pretend everything’s great with no substance behind them, and that’s why so many companies end up that way. But yeah, I would say that’s the tactical.

The second thing to understand about openness and reverse engineering is just situational awareness. Very few conscientious people spend, in my opinion, as a very open person, enough time immersing themselves in the reality that is every day situational awareness necessary to do their job. Simplest example of this is how many executives have ever talked to N greater than five customers? That is a… Because, well, I’m busy. I got a lot of stuff to do, I don’t have time to go take a world tour, which is like we don’t have the rest of our lives to talk about this. I’m not asking you to take a world tour, I’m asking you to stuff into your brain enough situational awareness that the decisions you make every day that affect all those people you’re not talking to are considering those people that you’re not talking to.

So less about an intended specific outcome in this case, and more about, do I really know the… I would think about this as if we think about aeronautical engineering, do I actually have an understanding of the conditions, the flight conditions, that I’m in every day in order to fly really well? And the answer to that for a lot of people is no. So reverse engineering is probably the whole category. I don’t know if that makes enough tactical sense, I’m happy to be more descriptive, but that’s the category I think is have you reversed engineered how to get outcomes and have you reversed engineered to predispose your mind to come up with really good ideas and good decisions, as opposed to come up with decisions that are super disconnected from reality.

Great example being PLG, I mean, if you haven’t done enough situational awareness work, you have no idea if PLG is a remotely viable strategy for growing your business. If it’s remotely relevant strategy for growing your business. And company after company after company has leadership team obsessed with this concept that in principle we should be able to let people just sign up and swipe a credit card and onboard and great. No, we have a hyper technical solution, that is never going to happen, or that’s not the way they do budget, or there could be any number of ways that that’s not going to work out, and those are just some concrete examples.

Lenny Rachitsky:

It feels like there’s a fractal of stuff we could talk about and endless threads of things that I want to dig into. Let me shift a little bit to influence, we mentioned this a little bit earlier. I know you have a bunch of awesome advice on how to build your skill at becoming more influential, that’s something a lot of listeners of the podcast, or product managers, also founders, need the skill. Who doesn’t need to become better influencers? What can we learn about how to become better influencers?

Raising the Floor or the Ceiling

Evan LaPointe: We’ll probably unpack a second topic and open up an off ramp here right at the beginning, but there’s two things, there’s influence itself and then there’s relationships, and we should probably talk a little bit about relationships. Trying to exert influence through a dysfunctional relationship is not going to go great. And most human beings, especially when they go to work, are pretty out of sorts when it comes to relationships.

And you even hear crazy mantra like we have to each other to work together, which are like, good luck with that. I mean, just watch a text message pop up on a phone of a person who doesn’t like you and watch their response time to the text message, or their Slack message, or whatever. I mean, you’re talking about you’ve built in a multi-day, at least multi-hour delay into responsiveness purely because the relationship isn’t good, and then you compound that effect over whatever size your company is. That’s massive operational inefficiency just because I don’t want to respond to Evan right now. So that’s the one piece.

Now assuming the relationship is in place, and we’ll come back to that and talk about that because a whole very actionable framework to unpack, assuming the relationship is good, I think the starting point for influence is to choose your character and choose your mode. It’s almost like you’re playing Elden Ring or some video game, and you’re going to be like, am I going to influence him this way as the hero or the exemplar of these things, or am I going to influence through back channels, what is my character? And everybody for your personality has a natural fit for the character you’re going to select as this mode of influence, and then you’re going to pick a speed of influence, which is slow, moderate, or fast.

Evan LaPointe: Then you’re going to pick a speed of influence, which is slow, moderate, or fast. The habitat can help a lot with this. If a founder is listening to this and you haven’t created a habitat where fast influence is easy and the permission isn’t there, then you’re slowing the company down inadvertently by just not clarifying this with the team. So slow influence is the we’ll let them find out the hard way influence. They’re going off a cliff, we know they’re going off a cliff. And a lot of times we find ourselves in what’s called the Abilene paradox.

The Abilene paradox is where everybody in the room knows it’s a bad idea, but we’re all like “We’re in.” And the classic Abilene paradox kind of if you look up memes on Google, it’ll be like the dad thinks that the kids might want to go camping. Mom doesn’t want to go camping, the kids don’t want to go camping. Dad also doesn’t really want to go camping, but everybody’s like, “Dad probably wants us to go camping, so let’s give it a go.” And they all go and don’t enjoy it. And we see that play out all the time.

And a lot of people will just say, “I can’t do anything. I don’t have any influence in this case. We’re just going to let him fail and they’ll learn.” Or this impolite person like me giving feedback the wrong way years in the past, I’m not going to sit Evan down and talk to him about this. He’ll figure out on his own through failure that this doesn’t work. And that can take months, that can take years, that can take a lifetime for people to learn the slow way. And it is a form of influence. You are being intentional to say, I think the world will create enough failure that adaptation will occur. That is a form of influence, just the slowest one.

And a lot of people listening probably realize, “Oh, that’s what I’m doing. How can I go way faster than just letting things fail?” So that’s where moderate influence comes in. And a great book to read for a moderate influence is the Challenger Sale. And in the Challenger Sale, what we’re looking at is the concept of teaching people something. And then when they live with this new knowledge, they’ll see things that they weren’t seeing before. So for example, in the feedback example that we can keep using over and over again through this is, “Hey Evan, you might want to notice people’s body language while you’re saying these things and here’s some signs to look out for that when you’ve done this and you get this, that’s probably a sign that people are bought in and still with you. And when you see this, that’s probably a sign that people are pushing back.”

And you can ask this question in that moment and you’ll probably hear answers like this. So you’re like giving somebody a tool that their future is going to unpack. And the Challenger Sale kind of assumes a long enough sales cycle where you’re not going to land the sale in the meeting, you’re not trying to close them right there. You’ll teach them some stuff and you’ll, “Hey, if you see this stuff, that’s a pretty clear sign that you need to take action. So why don’t we call you in 30 days, and 30 days later we get on phone, “Hey, have you been seeing this?” And they’ll go, “Everywhere I look, I can’t not see it now.”

And that’s how you influence a person in a few days, a few weeks, maybe a few months at worst, way faster than letting them fail.

Quick Q&A

Lenny Rachitsky: We actually had, I don’t know if you know this, we had the author of that book on the podcast, Matt Dixon, I think his name. And the Challenger Sale, the idea there is challenge their perspective and view on what is actually real about the market and what they need.

Book Recommendations Part Two

Evan LaPointe: Exactly. Yeah. I think yes, there’s the challenge component to it, but I think the underappreciated piece of that methodology is that you’re still letting that person see the world, but you’ve given them new information that is breaking some calcification in their brain challenge. It’s not the moment of the challenge where all the magic happens. There’s moments that occur later that continue kind of putting that calcium, lime and rust melting formula on this expectation or this kind of decision in their mind to the point where sometimes they’ll turn around and be like, “Thank you for even telling me this.”

Great Products Discovered Recently

Lenny Rachitsky: So the advice here is if you’re trying to influence someone, try to figure out what they don’t know. Find information that you know they may not know because once they know that and they may be like, “Oh wow, I totally see what you’re saying.”

Evan LaPointe: Yeah, exactly right. And let them know it and let them live with it. Don’t cram it down their throat and make them accept it If they live with it just a little bit, even just a couple days, that might be enough to come back to a much softer conversation.

On Looking Like JD Vance

Lenny Rachitsky: Does this connect to what you said earlier, which I love this idea of pick a character, like pick your influence style based on your personality, whether it’s back channeling and that makes me think of a very specific person. He’s coming on the podcast actually, he’s this Jedi that just gets people aligned but very behind the scenes, very the meetings before the meetings. So that’s one character or it’s just telling a compelling story probably in a deck. Or there’s other character I guess. Does this idea of sharing information, is that a type of character or is that just something that everyone should just do because a really effective strategy?

Evan LaPointe: I like the idea of intentionality in just about everything. Are we letting trade winds push us into certain things or are we actually making choices? And I think that step of being intentional about your style and this kind of notion of a character is a wise step to take so that you can kind of have some guardrails as you go through this and some consistency. It helps other people understand the role you’re playing in influence. If you are consistently coming from the same place, you’re about that style, like I want to try to influence this organization by doing this way and you’re going to see that from me over and over and over again.

You kind of have given yourself a little permission and also you can get some buy-in from people. If you do want be more the barbarian kind of approach, you can say, “Hey, I’m the devil’s advocate approach, or I’m the break it and see if it still stands after I hit it really hard with a sledgehammer kind of guy.” Is it okay if I do that over and over and over again? And now you’ve bought future you the permission to approach things in certain ways that would yield meaningfully different influence outcomes, like meaningfully different. I was able to do this and it accelerated something.

Conclusion and Contact Information

Lenny Rachitsky: So the way I am hearing this is there are many ways to get what you want, think about your personality style and find the path that is most aligned with the way you operate.

Evan LaPointe: Exactly.

Lenny Rachitsky: Whether it’s behind the scenes, whether it’s a compelling story. Awesome. So this character is basically figure out what your… It kind of comes back to leverage your strengths, what are you good at? And use that channel to convince people of the thing you want them to be convinced of.

Evan LaPointe: Yep, absolutely.

Lenny Rachitsky: My mind goes to what are the list of ways, what are the character options in this list when I’m opening up the game and choosing? You went through a few, but just to give people like, oh, okay, I see I could try it this way. Is there a small list you could share of just like here’s ways you could try approaching influence.

Evan LaPointe: Probably the dimensions are most valuable to people. I would say one of the dimensions is compassion, which is do I want to influence by trying to help people, by trying to make sure that we get it right and that people get value. And then the permission I’m seeking there is can I ask questions about why are we not thinking about the user right now? Why are we not concerned with the value they’re getting and challenge us in that way?

I think there are characters based on logic and even belief, which is I would like to be the one to insert more knowledge and insert more causality into conversations and challenge causality in conversations to make us think harder and challenge what we believe and break up the sacred cows of the stuff we walked in the meeting with so that we feel differently about things walking out of meetings.

So I think there’s a bunch of different very useful dimensions. One could be very creativity based. If you follow this big five format, they’re kind of spelled out for you. Enthusiasm, interesting dimension. I want to challenge us through the lens of what do people get excited about? What makes people feel good? Does this make people feel good? And are there tweaks we could make to the product or this marketing campaign or whatever.

Look at what Siki just did with Runway. I mean I love that guy so much and there’s so many components of his character and obviously the characters he surrounded himself with that contribute to really next level stuff. And they’re definitely challenging each other using these dimensions of compassion to be the character of caregiver or the character of protector. And so there’s a bunch of different ways you could turn those dimensions into characters.

But I think when you see the value of each of those perspectives, especially in product, I’m a really big fan of product. If you have dysfunctionally high compassion, dysfunctionally high openness, you have internal rewards and motivations to explore regions of product that other minds aren’t exploring as intuitively. And you don’t have to have the whole deck to be amazing at product. But you have some unfair advantages if you are super prone to reverse engineering just by your nature. You are going to be more situationally aware and probably make a series of vastly better decisions than the team that has a lot less situational awareness than you do. It’s a huge advantage.

But when it comes to the concept of influence. I mean figuring out these dimensions that define who you are and then using them to kind of say, “I want the permission to ask a series of questions and challenge our thinking through this very intuitive strength that I have.” Can we all see the value in that or do I need to further sell myself? And then you’ll find you can take on that character and play that role really well.

Lenny Rachitsky: I imagine the ultimate unlock is that combined with what is that person’s personality style and what is the best way they receive information, which is a little harder. Because you can’t force them to take some tests and you can’t make them give you the results. But I know a lot of teams do these tests together as a team and share the results. And so it’s I guess a reminder of just that’s really powerful if you and your team, especially the execs at company.

Evan LaPointe: Yeah, exactly. And when you move into this vulnerability out of your three choices state, we don’t need a bunch of data for that to work really well. If you said, “Hey, I’m not super strong at this,” and the rest of the room was like, well “Wait, this other person’s super awesome at this, why don’t not the two of you work together,” then it’s like under 30 seconds we’ve unlocked potential that wasn’t there.

So you want to get business… I kind of think of extending the video game metaphor. Not only are we choosing our characters or we are a certain character, but the business has a difficulty setting that we chose based on the habitat. And I’ve worked in and with way too many companies where we are playing the game in nightmare and every enemy takes a thousand shotgun shells to bring down instead of just switching the difficulty setting to easy, which is like the enemies somehow become our friends as we go through this journey.

I mean, it really can be that transformative, especially with a case like yours that you talked about. Okay, I am not as high in openness. I’m very high in conscientiousness. If I can admit this and ask different types of questions, everybody else in the room will be like the difficulty setting of this just went to zero and the speed of it just went to way higher than it used to be.

And we underestimate this kind of less concrete part of the business world. And I mean that’s the genesis of this whole business that I was crazy enough to start after starting other companies in the past, which is like we are underestimating how much of our operational reality is a function of our human reality. And are we doing enough? Are we doing the right things to close the gap between what science knows and what business does? And do we even know what the science is? Have we educated ourselves to close the gap? And then it becomes super obvious, oh, this makes a lot of sense to be open and find the patch to my bug. And here we go.

Lenny Rachitsky: This fractal of topics continues to grow. I’m trying to contain it. There’s three things I want to try to talk about in the rest of our chat, that stuff we’ve touched on that I think will be really useful to people. One is relationships. You mentioned there’s more to talk about there just how to build great relationships. Two is I want to come back to the habitat and building a habitat that is very conducive to innovation and speed and success and those sorts of things. And then I want to talk about focus. We talked a bit about just how important focus is and how differently our brains operate in different states of focus. So maybe we start with the relationship piece just because that connects to what we were just talking about of how do we strengthen relationships, create better relationships within our teams.

Evan LaPointe: Yeah, so we were talking about relationships kind of as this off ramp or this kind of sidecar to influence. And real quickly the fast mode of influence and relationships goes really well together. So we talked about the slow and the moderate. The fast mode of influence is cognitive dissonance. It’s essentially saying in the moment, I’m not going to wait for you to experience anything. It’s saying in the moment, how does this formula compute? Explain to me, Evan, how you being too blunt in feedback is going to end up in a human being changing. Why do you believe that?

And especially it’s that second phrase of why do you believe that drill below the behavior down into the belief. What do you believe that has you doing this? And then we can explore how preposterous the belief itself is, which then bubbles up to the surface level of this.

And if in the environment, the habitat’s a huge component of this as our relationships, which is if you have great relationships where people trust each other enough to have this kind of cognitive dissonance conversation, and we have a habitat that is very clear that we are free to discuss cognitive dissonance and logical disconnects, that is really important to do. Then you activate fast influence mode basically. So that’s a really important thing. And then as you transition to relationships, well what are… The question that everybody kind of glosses over in my opinion is what is a relationship? I don’t know how you feel about answering that question, but it’s a really hard-

Lenny Rachitsky: I would just go to ChatGPT. What is a relationship?

Evan LaPointe: Exactly, right. Yeah. At this point we have some help that we didn’t use to have. But the other thing that goes along with what is a relationship is how good is my relationship with person X? Like, you and I both know Shreyas and how good is our relationship? I would say it’s awesome. Why is it awesome? I don’t know. It just feels great. So let’s double click on a good definition and a good framework because once you actually know why a relationship feels great, that example or why a relationship feels super difficult, now we can start to build some strategies, some actual action plans for them.

So what we propose to people is if you take that third component of your brain ability, that is one piece of your relationships, especially your professional relationships. So if you know an engineer and you have an idea of something you want to build and they have the ability to build it, their ability and their utility to you is a function of your relationship and it will contribute to the positive or negative force that you feel in that relationship. Like, wow, this person has a lot of ability. My appreciation is higher, my faith in them is higher, my cooperation with them is higher.

If you question a person’s ability or they’ve proven that ability is kind of unreliable, those things start to kind of vector downwards and we will pick on Shreyas through this as a good example? Because I think most of the people watching also know him. What is his ability? What is his utility? As high as I’ve ever seen. I mean every conversation he’s intellectually conceptually additive to. You’re better after you’ve talked to him every time. At least that’s been my experience with him.

And we all know people like that, with various fields and various abilities. So that’s one piece that’s really important. And why as an individual, it’s so important to invest in your ability because it is so integral to every relationship you have, particularly professional relationships and your ability, knowledge, your reasoning, your imagination, your skill set, these are all incrementable facets of you.

And that’s really, really key. Now here’s the plot twist. Your ability is actually not the most important part of a relationship, biologically speaking. There’s two more that matter quite a bit more. And the surprise ending is that the third one matters the most, which is scary in some cases.

The second factor of relationships is trust. So trust in the brain. If we go very primitive back to the amygdala that we talked about earlier, trust is simply risk. Human level risk and trust can span from strongly negative to strongly positive in a relationship. And we felt that full range with different people in our lives. Strongly negative trust is the brain saying, this person is dangerous to me. They’re very likely to try to undermine me. They’re very likely to not deliver something. Personal harm will occur by essentially kind of interacting in this relationship.

And then on the other side of trust, we kind of try to create some levels to this to keep it clean. And the fractal continues to grow a little bit, but we’ll try to keep this simple. But I like to think of trust one, two and three. Three distinct levels of trust. And trust one is, let’s say we’re having a cookout. Trust one is Lenny, could you please bring the chips, ideally sealed, but it’s a delegation of a simple non-critical task knowing that it is likely to get done and get done decently well. But it’s not like this huge level of trust. It’s the people that we work with where this type of delegation, and especially if people delegate under the thesis of “I want to do the high value work, so let me put the low value work on other people.” That’s all the low value work that we put on other people, and it allows us to purify our focus on the high value work, and we don’t need all the low value work to go beautifully well or be artistically brilliant.

So trust two is when we step up to almost like “I need to do this myself. Is there anybody who could do it as well as me?” That there’s no risk to me having them do it instead of me doing it. And that’s where you get true scalability of teams. So if you can trust people enough, your brain’s assessment of risk of giving this task to someone else or giving this knowledge even to somebody else, that they’ll treat it the way you would treat it, is a significantly higher positive trust that you can feel in a relationship.

And then finally, trust three is when we do hit these breakpoints in our brain where we say the way your mind works is beyond the way my mind works on this topic. So the classic example at the cookout would be if Wolfgang Puck was a neighbor, we’re going to have Wolfgang Puck do all the most critical stuff and maybe even set up the music and the decor and whatever. Or another example would be like when Steven Spielberg has John Williams score a film, he’s not hoping John will do it as well as Steven would do it. He’s saying, “Just send me the bill. Try not to go too crazy.” But he is not going to sit down with the invoice and be like, “Why did you need 13 horns instead of 11?” John just gets to do what John does because there’s so much trust in this kind of beyond my event horizon kind of risk. It would be riskier for me to do it than for him to do it or her to do it, right?

So that’s kind of the level, but that matters more to a human being because the safety system, if it activates, your utility is sunk. So if you’re an awesome engineer but you damage people, it doesn’t matter that you’re an awesome engineer because in the social network, the mesh of your organization, you are a node that has a protective covering around it. Information is not flowing to you the way it would normally, and delegation is not flowing to you and access is not flowing to you the way it would normally. So you are a kind of protected, deactivated, sequestered node of the mesh at this point in time. And a lot of people really don’t get that.

Lenny Rachitsky: Yeah, that’s a really good way of visualizing.

Evan LaPointe: And then here’s the surprise ending. The last piece of every relationship that you have is appeal. Appeal is how your brain interprets the shared experiences you have with other people. Whether or not you look forward to being around that person, whether or not you like their style, the feel of what shared experiences really are. And if you think about, let’s pick on Shreyas one last time. What is his ability and utility? Off the charts. To what extent can he be trusted? Trust three, off the charts. Will he ever damage somebody? I mean, not to my knowledge. He may have some really dark past that we don’t know about, but as far as I’ve seen, not a lot of damage in his wake. And then thirdly, what kind of experience is he? He’s an extraordinarily positive experience. So he naturally accumulates great relationship after great relationship after great relationship.

And again, if you’re that great engineer with a ton of ability, now let’s flip the middle dimension. And we trust you a lot, but you’re a horrible experience. Are you coming to our offsite? Are you in this meeting? No, you’re gone. We don’t want you there. You’re like a hurricane. So biologically speaking, the biggest bug in our programming as we transfer this to the business context is what makes the most sense in business is the most, if it’s a meritocracy, the best people with the best knowledge that we can trust should be in the room and we will fight it with every fiber of our being if they’re a terrible experience. And that’s a bummer. And what’s funny is you can flip it. We all either have friends or know people who have friends that you cannot trust, they have no ability to speak of, but they’re a super awesome experience. What a great friend.

So how is it that we get this thing completely flipped? And I think that’s the thing. As you parse that list, as anybody listening parses that list, it’s critical to ask what kind of experience am I? That is where to start? Not how good am I at my job? How much do I know? How critical am I to this process? But am I a miserable experience? And if the answer is yes, don’t worry too much about the other pieces yet, you got to fix that first.

And to this point of the profile, as you parse the profile, you’ll find things like obviously not a pleasant experience, like being really impolite, obviously not a pleasant experience, being super overbearing and assertive, obviously not a pleasant experience, being hyper low in openness and enacting out of that and telling everybody they’re overcomplicating everything all the time. Not a great experience for people who are actually well-intentioned trying to get it right. So there’s concrete things that you can do with this knowledge in mind.

Lenny Rachitsky: This last piece makes me think about why some of the most effective PMs are the PMs that bring a lot of energy and positivity to the team and just get people excited, which is such a soft skill, but such a powerful thing you can do for your team because people kind of look to you to lead them. I had a PM I was working with in every meeting, he is like, “This is going to be awesome.” He just comes right in every meeting, “Oh, who’s ready to make some decisions,” and it really changes everything. And so this is amazing advice.

So basically if you want better relationships, which will make you a better influencer, start with what kind of experience am I, when people work with me, ask me for stuff, ask me questions, and you shared a bunch of specific things you can do.

Something I always tell people is just try to smile, just look happy. That makes a big difference.

Evan LaPointe: Look happy.

Lenny Rachitsky: Bring energy, look happy. Just try to be excited. Yeah, so if you want to build better relationships which have all these amazing trickle down effects, your advice is think about the experience you are to other people when they work with you, work on trust and ideally get to the place that third level of you are doing it better than them. But that’s a high bar for all things. And then the last thing is, are you actually amazing? Work in your abilities, that’s kind of the last piece.

Evan LaPointe: Yeah, exactly. And it’s not that none of these become unimportant because the other are kind of the gateways. I mean your relationships require all three, especially your professional relationships. So yeah, it’s more just like if experience is the only thing undermining you when you’re otherwise very trustworthy and very skilled and able, that’s a shame. Just fix it.

And there’s a whole bunch of ways to go about that. But I like to leave that to people to explore that creatively. Like well, “Oh gosh, okay, I can change this to this to this.” On the trust thing, do you hurt people? I mean, that’s it. Do people have a reason to believe that you are risky or dangerous? And unfortunately in a lot of habitats, the habitat itself either allows or even rewards people that are super untrustworthy to play the system in advance of the system. And as you talk to Jeffrey about the power conversation, the worse the habitat, the more his suggestions work.

Lenny Rachitsky: I could see that.

Evan LaPointe: And the reason that he’s correct, he used the phrase, “This is how the world always has been, is how it is, and it’s how it always will be.” Well, it’s how the normal dysfunctional world always has been, is and will be. And if you want people in your organization to rise on merit and for influence to work to generate better decision-making, make better products, have a better company, move faster, et cetera, you need to create a habitat where what Jeffrey’s observed about the normal dysfunctional world largely doesn’t work within your habitat. So if it’s effective for people to harm each other in your habitat, you are performing at a much lower level than if harming each other was extremely ineffective. And that’s up to you as a leader, as a manager, et cetera. And then of course, skill is what it is. It’s your ability to convert your intents into outcomes.

Lenny Rachitsky: I’m glad you’re talking about habitat, that’s exactly where I wanted to go. So just two more things I want to spend our time on, habitat and focus, how to create more space for focus and get better focus. So you’ve touched on this many times at this point, this idea of a habitat. I think another way to think about this is the culture of your company. Is that right?

Evan LaPointe: Exactly.

Lenny Rachitsky: Okay, cool. So are there a few things you could recommend to people to create a habitat that is conducive of good stuff?

Evan LaPointe: Let’s start at the start here. So in the difference between what science knows and business does, let’s kind of zero in on the fact that the way most companies approach culture has a very shaky track record. Like if mission, vision, values was an airline, you would not allow any family to fly on that airline. It does not arrive at most of its intended destinations. That is just a super important starting point because I’m going to kill a sacred cow here while we talk about this. And I don’t want anybody to feel like I’m trying to be mean or anything. It’s just it’s worth looking at stuff that doesn’t work and wondering if there’s something that could work a lot better. So if we look at habitat and culture, it’s really about what people believe. It’s what people believe is acceptable, permissible, productive, and the biggest flaw in people’s approach to culture. And interestingly enough, even at YC, they talk about this mission, vision, values, culture, stuff that comes later, let some stuff happen with the business that comes later. They’re right to say that if that’s the paradigm you’re going to use because it’s not going to work either way. So you might as well do it later.

But if you’re going to do it the right way and investigate human beliefs, and we talked about priming for example, culture is just the macro priming of the entire business of what your central belief systems are and then the permission that forms from those belief systems. So if you’ve done that really well, you should do that right at the very beginning. In what way should we approach this company, building this, working together, et cetera? That would be really, really helpful to get right from day one. And the belief system that people have, there are two approaches to changing people’s beliefs.

Mission, vision, values is what we call a performative approach. Meaning I’m going to come up with some expression of an inspiring mission, inspiring values and inspiring vision, and it’s going to be performed well enough. It’s going to be like if we were busking in the park, this is going to be a cool enough mission, vision, values that people throw some change into my guitar case and they buy into it, they gather around. And I think that’s just completely the wrong approach because we’re hoping to inspire people. We’re hoping to be artistically talented enough to pull that off. The other approach is to be deductive, logically deductive, which is centrally speaking. There is hopefully a market out there that’s glad our company exists, who is glad we exist, why are they glad we exist? And that’s shifting our mission into something that we call your role, the role you play in the world around you.

Who is glad you exist? Why are they glad you exist? And that is a fact. That is not an inspiring idea. That is like, okay, we work with this company that does AI-based optical character recognition, document ingestion, et cetera. Why is the world glad that they exist? Well, because we get 95% of the documents scanned into structured data that normally people have to transfer by hand. That’s pretty compelling. Why is the world glad Warby Parker exists? Because before you used to choose between looking dumb and it being cheap and looking cool and it being expensive, and now you can look cool and it’s cheap. The world’s really glad we exist.

Now that’s true. I don’t need you to be inspired to believe that that is true. And now everything that we’re going to think about for the rest of our beliefs, we’re going to deduce from that. So we’re just going to use logic to build our culture, not inspiration. So this next thing we need to figure out is how can we understand the specific value that’s created when we play this role in the world? We save people money, we save people time, we open up markets, we help people explore possibilities and potential they couldn’t tap into otherwise, etc.

So what’s the role of Core? People are glad we exist because we tap into potential they had no access to before. And at the team level, at the company level, that could be a really big deal. So we know that and we say, “Okay, well gosh, that implies so much.” There’s so much we got to do now what value does that produce? And then I could say, okay, once we understand the definition of value, which comes out of our role, now we can change the definition of done. So a lot of teams talk about bias to action. And hamsters have bias to action. They get up out of their straw and they turn that wheel as hard as they possibly can and they go absolutely nowhere. But if you understand the role you play-

Evan LaPointe: But if you understand the role you play in the world, and you understand the value you produce in terms of time savings, cost savings, upside, whatever it is that you do, then you can say, “We should have a bias to impact, not a bias to action. We shouldn’t just do stuff, we should have an effect that has the result of value creation. We should save people time.” And now when you’re a product team, looking at this, and you’re saying, “Well, here’s a cool new idea, Lenny, let’s do this.” You can now use that as a habitat level permission to be like, “Oh, how does that produce value for people? How does that make people go faster, save time, get smarter, do something they couldn’t do otherwise?” And then you can still use that exact same vocabulary when you go sell it to them, “This is how it makes you faster, smarter, more efficient, save cost.”

So it’s like really logical deduction. And if people think that we should do something, build a product that doesn’t create value. Now instead of being inspiring, we can be logical. We don’t build things that produce no value, that is not a priority until we can turn it into something that does produce value. So you’re turning culture into something highly usable, in getting away from performative culture into logical deductive culture. And I think that’s really, really the key for most people is to say, “Let’s understand why the world’s glad we exist.” That’s why we have a team, that’s why we have customers. And what does that imply about our standards for ourselves when we execute in value creation? Even down to the email. If I send some wonky email reply to somebody’s question and it doesn’t produce value for them, I’m not done. I need to finish the job until it produces value for them.

Quality standards are baked into this, that again is implied. Would I be happy that Warby Parker exists, if they shipped me something that’s a two out of 10 in quality? No. So we can’t make things that are two out of 10. And everybody has a belief. There are plenty of people that probably interview at Warby Parker that think, two out of 10 is perfectly fine, just get it to them. And no, we need an antibody to that belief. We have decision-making intelligence, which everybody believes we should go fast, break stuff, or we should be super slow, and get everything right and wherever in between. That’s a fun one to talk about. And then finally, you have a teaming dynamic belief, which is essentially every single human’s belief of what is acceptable treatment of other human beings. What state does that put the other human in?

And a lot of people, particularly like I’ll pick on myself with the low politeness, will spend years thinking, “I’m giving honest feedback quickly. This is efficient.” And you’re like, “How is it efficient when it takes people six months instead of six minutes to act on your feedback because they just don’t like you so much, and you have this appeal problem that keeps you out of all the rooms?” Actually your utility, which, your politeness is a utility transferred mechanism, but we don’t want you in the room. So you’re not a business benefit in this case. So that’s kind of the starting point. That’s ground zero of habitat is do not build an habitat on the roots of inspiration. It doesn’t work. It can work, right? If you do it super inspiring stuff and you’re super inspiring people, then you probably have the artistic ability to pull that off. But even then, you’d still be better off if you would do it through logical deduction instead of inspiration.

Lenny Rachitsky: Say someone is like, “Okay, I’m going to improve my habitat, I’m going to improve my company culture. Or I’m just going to start setting up a good habitat.” What’s something they can do? What can they do today, this week, to just start to do that? Is it, sit down and think about what is the value we provide? Why do we exist? Is there something else you’d recommend?

Evan LaPointe: So the brain craves an answer to the question, why am I doing this? And not only are there things we should start doing, but I like to deepen the commitment in people’s minds to what we should start doing, by thinking of it as, we should start doing things that we’ve been negligent in doing, right? Not just, oh, this would be even better, but we are actually causing some habitat problems by being negligent in certain things. So the primary thing that people are negligent in is answering the question, why should I do this, to their team. And saying, you should do this because it’s your job is a form of negligence, right? You’re not actually answering that question in any useful way. Because I could also answer that in the safety way, which I sort of just did by saying, it’s your job. I’m implying that there’s a consequence. But I could be like, because if you don’t, here’s the specific bad things that will happen.

You could be giving them a why in terms of reward, because, oh, if you do this, you get this, or if we do this, we get this. But you could also be giving them a purposeful answer to why, which is not a form of negligence, which is to say, because our work actually matters. There are people out there waiting on us to ship this product to improve their situation, and they also want us to get it right at the same time. So bias to impact through that lens. We do need to ship this. It needs to happen, and it needs to be right, or at least right enough in its first version.

So if you have been negligent, and we all have at times, right? I’m not trying to judge, but I’m trying to convict, right? To build some conviction, to build some commitment. If you have been negligent in answering to all these minds that work with you, why we’re even doing this. That’s the starting point, is make sure everybody knows why. And that why is a shared why across the team. And not just the Simon Sinek big picture why? I mean, very specific why. That for my team, when we build training materials, when we look at it through that lens of, if we get this right, this is what happens to teams, and companies, and products and their customers.

There’s a through line at the big deal and that’s why we can’t do it this way, or that’s why we should get more obsessed with quality, and why we should get more interdependent as a team and stop doing things that are just our own ideas. But say, “Hey Lenny, I’m thinking about doing it this way. Is there anything you’d add before I hit go?” And then you’d be like, “Oh, I think it would be 10% better if you did it this way.” And then now our product is 10% better. So that’s kind of the square one is ask yourself, when’s the last time our team had a conversation about why we’re even doing any of this? What value it produces? Who is affected by our decisions? And if that hasn’t happened in a while, that’s not good.

Lenny Rachitsky: Is another way to think about this, your mission, is that a term?

Evan LaPointe: Yeah, I think it’s an alternative to mission, I try… And I don’t want to stomp all over mission, vision, values because I think they can work. But I think it’s easier for people to conceptualize the importance of their work, if they understand, we are playing a role, not fulfilling a mission. And role implies obligation. There’s no obligation in mission, unless you feel the inspiration so powerfully. And these differences are subtle, but neurologically, it’s different. If I tell your brain, “Here are the people counting on you to get this right, Lenny.” Your brain activates a region called the anterior insular cortex, which starts to think about other people in the context of the solution you’re creating.

And if I say, “We are here to change people’s lives through this,” in a more general sense, your prefrontal cortex will still activate to solve the problem, but your anterior insular cortex will not, to more deeply consider the humans affected by the problem. So you’re kind of adding to the toolkit of what the brain will bring to the table to generate solutions. And if you activate more good regions of the brain, you get better solutions. So I lean into this. Personally, I’m like, “You really don’t need a mission statement. You need to understand the role you play, and people need to have some response, some physiological, like, ‘I get it, to my actions impact people.’” And if they don’t have a response, you should go find a human who does, for sure.

Lenny Rachitsky: One last thread I want to follow, focus. You have some really cool advice on how to help. And this just comes from everybody wants to get better focus. Everyone wants their team to have more time for focus. Everyone wants their engineers to sit there and build things faster, their designers to get stuff done. And it all comes from getting really good at focus and creating space for focus on your team. What advice do you have for folks that want to personally learn to focus better, and to help their team have more time for focus, get stuff done essentially?

Evan LaPointe: I mean, isn’t this the question? Because this is where it all ends, right? First things first, let’s look at the neuroscience that we have available to us. Which is, the study of focus either is or is tightly associated with the study of what’s called brain waves. That’s becoming a lot more popular. We’re seeing it even in athletes, like professional golfers, or studying how their brain waves are focused on the golf shot and which mode to put the brain into to play golf at the highest level. Same thing applies to work. There’s a bunch of different kind of bands of brain waves. Most of them actually are when you’re asleep. So your REM cycles, your deep sleep cycles, your kind of drowsy cycles, those are brain waves. You can feel your brain turning off, you can feel your brain turning on when you dream. But when you’re awake, there’s really three primary modes that your brain is in.

The nerdy side of this, kind of the nerdy language is alpha, beta and gamma. Those are the distinct ranges of brain activity, and they basically represent how focused your brain is. So alpha is quite simply daydreaming. So your brain is very quiet and empty. Easy metaphor is if you’re in your house at night and everything’s quiet, you hear things that you don’t hear during the daytime, and that’s what alpha is like in the brain. Your brain is actually working subconsciously a lot. But when you’re busy, which is beta, your brain is too noisy to hear any of those little creaks and pops in the house. But when you’re in alpha, you hear stuff.

So the most common setting for alpha for most people is the shower. So it unlocks this mystery of like, why do I have all these ideas in the shower? Well, it’s because your brain is in alpha. It hears these little creaks and pops inside of the attic, and it unpacks them. He goes, “Oh, that’s an interesting idea,” it comes out of nowhere. It can be driving, gardening, car washing, cycling, whatever. As long as there’s not too much cognitive load, then you can be daydreaming. And I’ll come back to this in a second because there’s a big permission problem at the habitat level for some of these focus levels.

Beta is productivity mode. So if you’ve ever seen somebody with a poster on their back wall that says, “Get shit done,” that’s basically just a poster that says beta on it. I love beta. And answer emails, have meetings, write code. And there are some gamma code, deeper thinking scenarios where you’re writing code, delivering presentations, making presentations. So much of our workday is beta, and it’s just… I mean, some of us have an infinite amount of demand for beta work. There’s just a never ending stream of stuff we could do and get done.

And then gamma is your brain’s intense focus. So if you’re learning something really complicated, you’re learning thermodynamics in college or something like that, and you’re just like, “Wow, this is not easy.” And you have to really push your brain to grapple with these concepts, connect the dots, even remember certain things, that’s gamma. And we feel that sometimes at work, that here’s a problem, a complex issue that we could tackle in beta by slapping duct tape on it, or we could tackle in gamma by reverse engineering, and going deep. And that’s where we start to connect the dots that we talked about earlier, that focus and reverse engineering are related. That in beta, you have no intention to learn anything new to get something done, to think more deeply to get something done, to reconsider an existing process, or structure, or framework in your mind to get something done, you’re going to utilize those things to get something done.

Gamma is where we go, “I would normally do it this way. I can see why that’s not the right way. I need to make something new. I need to break my framework and build a brand new one right now to do something.” So we generally spend too much time in beta in work, and that’s both a judgment call, because I certainly have my own opinion about beta. I call it the conscientiousness crisis, which is conscientiousness wants beta, openness wants gamma. I’m kind of thinking of tying these pieces together. And it’s not that conscientiousness is inherently a crisis, but when you meet teams that haven’t done any innovation, haven’t rethought the market, have become insensitive to changes in the environment around them, have become insensitive to their own employee problems and are still just kind of like this locomotive that keeps on going, irrespective of what’s going on around it. It’s that heads-down form of conscientious beta, that feels like, “Now’s not the time, let’s stay focused, let’s stay focused,” et cetera.

So we don’t want to get rid of beta, we got a lot of work to do. But let’s put a rule of thumb out there for people to explore, because it’s going to be subjective to every team and every company. But as a rule of thumb, if 25% of your year is spent in gamma and alpha, you’re probably a lot better off than the teams who spend less than 25% of their year thinking deep, and being in this more daydreaming mode. So what I wanted to circle back on is, how could we possibly daydream productively? Well, that’s preposterous. And this is where you can build in your mind… And I do have another PDF for this, if people want to see it.

But you can build in your mind a 3 x 3 grid where we have the safety system, reward, and purpose system in columns. We have alpha, beta and gamma in rows, and we basically have a list of nine channels that the brain can activate to generate different types of thinking. And most of the companies out there, most of the teams out there, are primarily, all their programming comes from safety beta and reward beta. How can I be busy to get rewards, ROI, customers, deals, whatever? Even promotions, more self-centered kind of rewards? And beta safety, which would be, how can I be busy? Optics, manage my reputation, avoid risk, that sort of stuff?

The crisis is basically realizing, spending too much time in those two out of our nine available boxes, is probably not generating anywhere near the ideal outcomes. And if we could instead shift to the purposeful column by answering that brain’s craving for why, with an answer that explains, it’s not about you, it’s not about us, it’s about other people are counting on us to get this stuff right, does that matter to you? Because for most people, they’re like, “Yeah, that’s actually really cool. I can have an impact on real stuff happening in other people’s lives and in the world outside of me?” So that that activates, now all of a sudden we can say, okay, let’s look at alpha across the top row.

Alpha safety is when you get in the shower, and all of your anxieties, worries, et cetera, come out of nowhere, out of the attic of your mind. What happens in alpha reward? It’s when you have these breakthroughs of how to get a deal, how to win something. It’s daydreaming, but your brain is primed to daydream in a certain way, whether it’s about anxiety or anger, or whether it’s about rewards you care about. If it’s purpose, this is where from a vision perspective, a possibilities product perspective, you’re going to have all sorts of crazy cool ideas pop into your mind if you’ve primed your brain to being purposeful and then you daydream.

And you can do this in the middle of a day. Certain companies, it’s easier than others. But if you can push away from your desk, and just go sit in a park or something for 10 minutes, 20 minutes and calm your brain down, listen, something cool will probably happen in your brain. I can’t guarantee that, but you have to experiment with it to find out how it works for you. And then the same thing for gamma, when you hear phrases like, “We can’t talk about this for the rest of our lives,” that is the gamma prevention team kicking the door down and saying, “We’re here to get you back into beta. Everybody, put your hands behind your backs,” sort of a thing.

And that’s where the habitat and the focus kind of matters because you will not ever get a gamma idea from a beta mind. You will never get an alpha idea from a beta mind. So if your business needs some breakthrough, daydreaming, interesting ideas in order to create adjacencies to build new products, to seek new markets, to better fulfill the role you’re playing within this market, then team has to have permission to enter that intellectual focused state, or that you’re turning that channel off. You’re taking that off of the programming available through your particular subscription.

And the same thing applies to gamma. The habitat basically needs to establish that gamma is a viable channel for a lot of work, and there’s permission to go into it. You can certainly overdo it. That’s why I say 25%, you don’t need to spend half of your year, three-quarters of your year in gamma. It bonkers how smart you can be if you spend three or four hours in an afternoon in that deep-focused state, you’ll just do stuff you’d never do. And if you can get the team to have off-sites that are gamma-focused, everybody’s scatter and be alone, and do this stuff that are gamma and alpha-focused, that are productive and you bring ideas back. You’re just simply going to generate thinking and outcomes that you wouldn’t otherwise. And it may be that 10 percent’s right for you. It may be that 30 percent’s right for you, depending on how dynamic your market and customer base are. But just to challenge yourself with the question.

Lenny Rachitsky: This stuff is so fascinating, I wish we had another hour just to dig deep into this. Because it feels like just this alone is going to really transform the way companies operate. So let’s try to give people something tactical they can do to create more space for alpha and gamma waves. And essentially your advice is, a fourth of your time should be spent, if possible, in alpha and gamma time. Is that right?

Evan LaPointe: Yeah, I think that probably is overabundance, in all honesty. But if you think about it through the lens of a quarter, if you’re going to be on a set of cadences, and this is probably the tactical advice. It’s like, look at your cadences and say, at the quarter level, that’s probably the right level of fidelity for most people to look at their calendars in terms of what big stuff should we be doing? Because six months is usually too long to do anything big. Too much has happened in the world. Year is definitely too long to wait for a cadence to kind of kick in. So quarterly is really good. And what’s nice is when we cluster our gamma time on this quarterly cadence, we can take a lot of the stuff that would be what we call calendar invaders, these random conversations that come up out of nowhere. And we can be like, “Well, we’re getting ready to have an offsite, this quarter’s offsite in two weeks. Can this idea wait until then to be processed?”

So you kind of get this nice little black hole effect, where a lot of distractions have a new home, because you’ve actually said, “We’re going to distinctly do stuff.” You’re saying, “Yes, but not now,” to a lot of distractions. But yeah, I think that’s the ideal cadence. And that, for some teams, it needs to be maybe a half a day or a full day. You’ll figure it out based on your own business. But what per quarter is a necessary amount of time for us to break beta and go into deep thinking analysis mode? How healthy is our operation? How smart are we being? Are we delivering value? What needs to be reevaluated from the market’s experience, the customer’s experience, the team’s experience? Let’s look at these different views of the business, and make some prioritized decisions about, we’re going to make specific improvements this quarter for these areas.

And then even once a week, maybe just find half a day if you can, maybe, but maybe less than half a day, couple hours to be in gamma, once a week. And you’ll kind of feel it out from there. But the reason the rule of thumb of 25 is out there is 25 is kind of the risk point. Because most people will be like, “We’re not even spending 5%.” Or the perfectionist team might be like, “We’re 50.” So if you’re far away from that rule of thumb, that’s a pretty good indicator it’s a good time to audit yourself.

Lenny Rachitsky: When you hear the term, deep work, is that generally referring to gamma time?

Evan LaPointe: Yeah, people can use that term in a couple of ways. I think a lot of people call deep work, don’t bother me beta, which could be one. And other teams might call gamma deep work, but that’s probably more appropriate. I think, don’t bother me beta is for some teams, they need to be told, “No, no, use this time not just to not be interrupted, but to think differently about problems. To think about is the architecture even right? Is the way we are thinking about this even right?” Not just get a lot of stuff done.

Lenny Rachitsky: Yeah. So it’s not just sitting in your email and write documents, it’s actually try to think about bigger problems, things that are challenging your brain, not just like, “I’m just productive getting stuff done, getting stuff done.” Awesome. Something that worked really well for me, similar to what you just recommended is having, I had two blocks of time during the week that were two hours or three hours long, where it’s just, “Don’t bother me, deep work time.” So I had it I think Wednesday morning and Friday morning for two or three hours. And actually in the calendars, if you book something during this time, I’ll slap you. And that worked really well. And nobody complained.

We covered a lot. Here’s the things we’ve covered. I was just taking notes and all the advice that you’ve shared, how to help people run better meetings, how to get better at developing vision for their team, and company, and product, how to be a better influencer. How to build better relationships, how to create a better culture for your company, how to create more focus and more productive focus. That’s a lot. I’m very proud of our conversation. Before we get to a very short lightning round, because we’ve gone pretty long, I want to keep it short.

Evan LaPointe: Sure.

Lenny Rachitsky: Is there anything else you want to share, leave listeners with that you think might be helpful before we close-

Evan LaPointe: No, I don’t think we need… I mean, there’s certainly a lot more that we could talk about, but I think we don’t want to melt any minds. So we want people to kind of walk away and be like, “I can do that, I can do that, I can do that.” So definitely pick two or three wins. I kind of call them pots of ocean to boil instead of oceans to boil. So get a few pots of ocean to boil first, and focus on that for sure. And definitely make one of those pots, if it’s a problem area for you, what kind of experience you are. I mean, that’s central to everything. Everything else works better in the whole system once you’ve boiled that pot of the ocean, and then things get easier.

And then I guess the only last thing I would add is, think of everything we’ve talked today. It might help to put some language to it as floor risers and ceiling risers. Because your company has a horizon of performance that you’re heading into, and there’s a bottom end of that range and a top end of that range. So as you get better at meetings, not only are you increasing… You’re raising the floor to get rid of bad meetings and waste, and you might be saving a ton of time or converting useless time into useful time, but you also might be raising the ceiling.

And I would be really specific with yourself and your team about, which outcome are you chasing? Is it both? Is it one or the other? And say, we’re actually trying to raise the floor so that our performance never goes below a certain range. We get faster, smarter as a result, fewer mistakes. Or are we actually trying to uncap a ceiling that we’re dealing with right now, especially around things like strategy and vision? If we feel that those conversations always end up feeling like inconceivable arguments, we have a ceiling on our business’s performance. As a result of that, can we raise that ceiling and explore a higher horizon of performance for the business?

Lenny Rachitsky: Amazing. Evan, with that, we’ve reached our very exciting and very quick lightning round. Are you ready?

Evan LaPointe: Yes, let’s do it.

Lenny Rachitsky: All right, so let’s start with what are two or three books that you’ve recommended most to other people?

Evan LaPointe: Well, the obvious first one is Never Split the Difference. I recommend that book to everybody in the universe. I think if you haven’t read it yet, you shouldn’t get your driver’s license. For those who don’t know, it was written by Chris Voss, he was an FBI hostage negotiator. And it explores how to negotiate with people, and not just hostages, but your colleagues, your parents, your wife, like everybody. And there’s some very surprising technique in there that is unexpected, not trying to get people to agree with you, but getting them to say no, more often. Instead of saying, “Hey, Lenny, are you willing to do this?” Say, “Hey, Lenny, are you opposed to doing this?” And it’s just this reversal. And “I’m giving you the out,” is the way he explains it. There’s a whole bunch of other technique, but the more of that technique is in a team, the better. The better the team does. That’s a no-brainer.

The second one I would say, since we’ve kind of covered this topic a little bit about habitat today. If you enjoy reading books that are sort of root canals, but you’re better off because you read them, there’s a book called Never… not Never Split the Difference, there’s a book called The Person and the Situation. It was written by some researchers, some psychological researchers. And what it explores is the difference between how personality influences your behavior, and how the situation you’re in, or like we talked about, the habitat you’re in, influences your behavior. And if you’re not yet convinced that either of those matters, like, “Oh, it doesn’t. I’ll do what I do regardless of the habitat, or I’ll do what I do regardless of who I am,” that book will melt the face off of that existing mental model conclusively. It’s really valuable knowledge to understand the mechanics of how the situation influences a person, and how the personality influences the person.

And then I guess the last, maybe we’ll put a fork in the road of a choose your own adventure. If you’re a real student of the game, and you want go 10,000 leagues under the sea on this stuff, there’s a series of books called the Cambridge Fundamentals of Neuroscience. You can find it on Amazon. A lot of them, you can just get on your Kindle for a lot cheaper than the library-decorating version of it, but that is bonkers. It talks about how your brain applies to intelligence, emotionality, relationships. It’s incredible knowledge. If you instead want to keep it more in the part of the world you experience and can see and not the brain. Thaler wrote a book called Misbehaving. It was kind of the major book about behavioral economics.

And again, we spend a lot of time in companies talking about the way people should act, instead of the way people do act. And behavioral economics is essentially the version of economics that’s about how people do act, not how people should act. So I think that’s a great field of study. And then again, Robert Greene’s whole library is super valuable, especially Human Nature, if you’re into that. He’s a little darker of an author, certainly kind of doesn’t pull punches about human nature. So those are all great books to explore.

Lenny Rachitsky: Do you have a favorite product you recently discovered that you really love?

Evan LaPointe: I look more at the category level of products. I really like products that have great ergonomics. A lot of people underestimate the value of what it feels like to use the product. Are things in the right place at the right time? I just started this newsletter that’s kind of like, how do you break all of what we do in a bite-sized pieces for people who are super interested in this stuff to get something weekly? And it exposed me to Beehiiv, which is a very well-designed newsletter platform, high ergonomics. I don’t ever find anything hard to find. I can get things to work the way I want them to work.

So just, I like that example. And I remember even back to when I was obsessed with finding the perfect backpack to travel with, and then you find these brands where you’re going through security, and you didn’t even know it, but there’s a pocket designed for your phone in exactly the place you would want the pocket for your phone to be. And you’re just like, “That’s so great. I love that this team designed this pocket just in the right spot.” So that’s really my focus is ergonomics in product.

Lenny Rachitsky: Final question. I saw you tweeted that people are telling you that you look like JD Vance, which is hilarious. Do you think this will be a net benefit or a net hurdle?

Evan LaPointe: It’ll be an incredible benefit to Halloween, because it’s totally clear what I’m going to do for Halloween. Yeah, I mean, I guess I’m going to have to see what people in the street… Fortunately I live in Park City, so I don’t run across a lot of people in the street who want to yell at people. But if I lived in Chicago or something like that, I would’ve no doubt somebody would come up and throw something at me. But yeah, I’m neutral on the topic so far, minus the Halloween bonus.

Lenny Rachitsky: We’ll see. We’ll see how your life changes. Evan, this has been amazing. There’s so much richness to this conversation. And like I said, we’ve covered basically everything people want to get better at as product manager, you could say. Two final questions. Where can folks find the stuff that you do to dig deeper, to learn more, to learn more deeply from you? And two, how can listeners be useful to you?

Evan LaPointe: Yeah, I mean, they can certainly find a lot of the stuff we do on our website, core-sciences.com. Find a link to that profile you talked about on there, which can be super fun to take and insightful. The newsletter, all the stuff that we do, you can kind of find out there. And then certainly Twitter. I mean, I’ve always been really prickly about people that get on Twitter to post only and not to interact. I’m kind of the opposite. I really love people’s questions and pushback. And just yesterday, I probably spent way longer than I should have out of my portfolio management approach to time, just on a thread where I was talking to this really interesting woman about this debate almost, about the probability of people doing things based on their beliefs, which was… And then we had some kind of bystanders watching the whole thing happen, and I had a meeting with a good friend Rod afterwards, where we talked about how that all went.

So I love to talk to people and answer questions, and I’m sure people will have plenty of questions that they’d love to dive deeper into. So I’m on Twitter for sure. And then how you can help me. I mean, fortunately for me, I’m in the business of helping other people, whether those are individuals, teams, companies. So the most helpful thing to me is you helping yourself. So if you find our content valuable, if you want to have awesome managers or anything like that in this sort of science-based, kind of more efficient approach to getting there would be interesting, then reach out. We don’t bite. We’re pretty easy to work with. And that would be super fun to have a conversation about what your team needs.

Lenny Rachitsky: Evan, thank you so much for being here.

Evan LaPointe: Thanks for having me. This has been really cool. Yeah.

Lenny Rachitsky: Same for me. Bye everyone. Thank you so much for listening. If you found this valuable, you can subscribe to the show on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or your favorite podcast app. Also, please consider giving us a rating or leaving a review, as that really helps other listeners find the podcast. You can find all past episodes or learn more about the show at lennyspodcast.com. See you in the next episode.

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