Run Your Own Race

“What is my job on the planet? What is it that needs doing, that I know something about, that probably won’t happen unless I take responsibility for it?”

— Buckminster Fuller

In the mid-1990s, whether you were an investor or entrepreneur, everyone in technology was flocking to internet startups. Companies like eBay, Amazon, and Yahoo were gearing up for monstrous initial public offerings. It was a frenzy.

Meanwhile, Tony Fadell went to work for Philips building consumer electronics and handheld computing devices. Everyone told him he was out of his mind. Philips was a dinosaur. The Internet was where all the innovation was happening and fortunes were being made. No one needed another handheld device. But while everyone else chased lucrative internet startups, Fadell continued building hardware. 

Prior to Philips, Fadell spent five years working at General Magic—a failed company that lives on in the lore of Silicon Valley because of its alumni who went on to play pivotal roles at Adobe, Android, Apple, Google, and Nest, among others. 

At General Magic, the team worked to create a mobile computing device for personal communications and entertainment. It was released as the Sony Magic Link and had a phone, touchscreen, email, apps, games, a way to buy plane tickets, and animated emojis. The problem was that the technology wasn’t reliable and it was built for an audience that didn’t yet exist. 

The product was clunky—its processors weren’t fast enough, the touch screens weren’t great, and the battery life was too short. The team at General Magic built almost everything from scratch which was incredibly time consuming and expensive. And in 1995, the Internet was still in its infancy—email had yet to reach widespread adoption. The device became an exercise in innovation to impress other engineers at the company. The team failed to start with a problem that real people experienced and could relate to. They were ten years too early.

As the product floundered, Fadell created a plan to pivot away from making a communications and entertainment device for the general public, instead focusing exclusively on businesspeople. He pitched the idea to Philips since they were already a partner, making semiconductors and processing parts for General Magic.

Explore a different angle

Fadell held to his conviction that there was room for something amazing between desktop computers and cell phones. After pitching the mobile computing device for businesspeople on the go, he joined Philips full-time and got to work. It remained a niche market, but they successfully launched the Philips Velo in 1997 and the Philips Nino in 1998.

In 1999, after a successful run at Philips, Fadell left to start his own company. His vision at Fuse Systems was to build a better digital music player. People were starting to ship MP3 players but they were all clunky and difficult to use. And Fadell was tired of hauling around his collection of CDs everywhere he went. 

Again, he was cautioned by peers that he was continuing to compound his own mistakes by remaining in consumer electronics while the next big wave in tech passed him by. In 1999, internet startups were reaching their pinnacle of hysteria. Fadell continued to stick with personal electronics because that’s what he loved and that’s what he wanted to learn—bridging hardware and software, atoms and electrons.

The dot-com bubble finally burst in 2000—markets crashed and venture capital funding dried up with it. Fadell pitched his company to 80 different VCs and was rejected by every single one. Risk off. No one was interested in investing—even if it wasn’t internet related.

The team at Fuse was barely hanging on when Fadell received a call from Apple in late 2000. Apple had recently purchased iTunes and the application was starting to take off. Steve Jobs wanted iTunes to work with MP3 players and realized Apple needed its own device.

Jobs asked Fadell to join Apple as a consultant on an initiative to create a digital music device, codenamed Project Dulcimer. Fadell agreed, hoping he could use that money to continue paying his team or parlay it into a buyout for Fuse. 

As conversations developed, Fadell joined Apple full-time in January 2001 and brought over his team from Fuse. Jobs signed off on the concept for the device proposed by Fadell and his team in March. And the first iPod was shipped in November.

Fadell led the team that created the first 18 generations of the iPod and the first three generations of the soon-to-be iPhone. 

While people thought he was a fool to stick with hardware and personal electronics for a decade across five companies, by the time Apple called him to make the iPod, he knew exactly how to do it. Every job he held had given him a different vantage point on the same problem. He built a more complete view of the challenge and knew with precision what to work backward from. 

In retrospect, Fadell’s decision to stick with personal electronics seems obvious. But to hang in there for a decade while everyone around you is clamoring after the next big thing—internet startups—and constantly in your ear about missing out while they make nauseating amounts of money is no small feat. That takes serious discipline and trust in yourself. 

Chase problems you care about solving, not trends

Fadell was never optimizing for money. His primary focus was aligning to problems he wanted to learn more about and a space he was passionate about driving forward. That meant building devices and working at the intersection of hardware and software. It’s what he loved doing and that was enough justification for him. 

The most difficult challenge we face in life is to avoid getting pulled into races we aren’t willing to run. It’s why we end up chasing trends or grow insatiable in our quest for more. We’re perpetually consumed with a bigger title, a larger paycheck, the next milestone in life. We don’t want to miss out on anything. But this comes at the cost of sacrificing ourselves along the way. 

Oftentimes we allow ourselves to be carried away by the herd because it gives us a convenient excuse to cling to throughout life. By not committing to our own personal direction, we tell ourselves what could have been. “If I wanted to, I could have written a book, built my own company, led this team.” But you didn’t. The fear of actually dedicating yourself to becoming, grinding it out, and putting your ass on the line left you cowering in fear. So you chased after everyone else. 

To combat this, you must determine what is your own. You must slow down to clarify what you’re after, hone in on the problems you want to spend your time thinking about, and ignore everything else that gets in the way.

If you allow yourself to get caught up in the status quo—what everyone else around you is doing—it’s easy to end up in a dead-end career. You trap yourself into solving problems you don’t find meaning in and in doing so, diminish the impact you could have otherwise had. 

You’re not going to make a dent in this world or create anything meaningful by jumping ship every two years and chasing the next big thing. If you’re deeply interested in a problem and care about solving it, you have to stick with it, regardless of who thinks it matters. Over a long enough time horizon things will work out in your favor.

Staying true to yourself will be the hardest, loneliest thing you will ever do. You’re going to be standing in the wilderness wondering what you’re doing while other people get rich and seem to have it all together. But authenticity is about playing the long game—what can you sustain indefinitely? What were you meant to bring to life? That’s where your best work is born from. 

And while those same people who got rich overnight lose it just as fast and get written off as one-hit wonders, you will have slowly built an empire. Because you ran your own race. 

Ready yourself to face distractions

You’re still going to receive calls that entice you—opportunities to make more money, follow your friends, work on something trendy. But these are distractions that will only pull you away from the work you find real meaning in. That’s why you must determine what you’re after and hold to that with all your might. 

You must be able to navigate these distractions without losing yourself along the way. Do you have the willpower to stand up for yourself? Are you prepared to do the hard thing and turn down opportunities that don’t align with where you want to go? Do you have the endurance to stick with a problem you care about while everyone else jumps ship and tells you it’s a waste of time?

In 1973, Ed Catmull, the founder of Pixar Animation Studios, visited Disney to pitch a new computer rendering technology for animation. Disney laughed him off and instead tried to tempt him into a job designing theme parks with the Imagineering team. Holy shit, what a cool job. Since childhood, Catmull had been fascinated with Disney. But he turned it down without hesitation. He knew it was a diversion. He wanted to animate. And he trusted that. 

Life will throw everything it can at you—attempting to distract or tempt you along the way. That’s the test you must face. When things get tough are you going to give up on the work you care about? When the easy money or the comfortable job comes knocking are you going to sell out on your own priorities? Or are you going to stand steadfast in what matters most to you—the work you are meant to do?

If authenticity is what you’re after, you have to find and stick with what you believe in. You have to trust yourself enough to run your own race. And if you do, it’s just a matter of time before you come out ahead. 

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Sources:

1. Build by Tony Fadell

2. General Magic by Sarah Kerruish and Matt Maude

3. Masters of Scale with Tony Fadell

4. The Tim Ferriss Show: On Building the iPod, iPhone, Nest, and a Life of Curiosity

5. Creativity, Inc. by Ed Catmull

A Call to Arms: Guarding Yourself from Despair in an Ocean of Layoffs

Let’s be honest about the current environment in tech. The past decade made us soft. We got caught up in the hysteria of unicorn valuations. Companies succeeded despite mediocre execution. And along the way, we tricked ourselves into believing things would always be up and to the right. 

But we all have to learn this lesson sooner or later—never allow yourself to be caught off guard. To combat this, resourcefulness and self-sufficiency are critical—the ability to think for yourself, adapt, and focus on what’s within your control.

When you get caught up in it and lose your sense of self along the way, these lines become blurry. Your company and your job consume your identity. And over-identifying with a job or a company strips your ability to think for yourself and hands over your peace of mind to something beyond your control.

It’s difficult to guard yourself against this as you get further into your career or if you’ve idealized working at a certain company as your ‘dream job.’ The definition between you and your job begins to blur. You get wrapped up in your work because you care, you see your recent valuation as a lottery ticket, and you tell yourself that your Metafam will always take care of you. Then a downturn hits, your job is cut, and you’re facing an identity crisis. 

“No one is crushed by Fortune, unless they are first deceived by her.”

— Seneca

It’s easy to feel like it’s all over when the winds of fortune shift, as they can and will for all of us. Because too many of us have trapped ourselves into focusing on externals and things beyond ourselves to define who we are and fuel our sense of self-worth. And too often we fail to recognize that conditions of the recent past won’t extend indefinitely into the future. 

To combat this you must first untangle yourself. You are not your company. You are not your job. If you were impacted by a layoff and feel blindsided, you are not alone. Now is the time to build the muscle so you’re never caught off guard again.

This starts with a focus on the mental models and resources you need to establish a greater degree of self-sufficiency and resourcefulness. With these, you can build resilience, flexibility, and independence. That way, when the unexpected strikes, you are able to avoid catastrophe, instead using that as a catalyst for growth. 

Hold your identity lightly

“You are not your work” sounds catchy. People throw it around, but what does it actually mean? When you tell yourself you are a ‘Head of Product’ or your identity is constructed around the fact that you were an early employee at Stripe, and then you’re pushed out, things crumble. Because titles and companies are externals that fall beyond your complete control. Over-indexing here can make you rigid and fragile. 

“When you cling too tightly to one identity, you become brittle. Lose that one thing and you lose yourself.”

— James Clear

The reframe this, you must go back to why you do what you do. Who are you as a person? Forget the bullshit, forget the vanity, forget the ego. Who are you at your core? Are you the type of person who loves building and creating? Are you a storyteller?

When you base your identity in who you are rather than what you are or where you are, you create room for flexibility and resilience. Holding your identity lightly allows you to adapt. It allows you to find harmony in the motion that is life.

Assign things their proper value

Inherent to this focus on who you are rather than your title or your company, is a shift back to what’s within your control. Self-sufficiency begins with identifying what’s within your control, what’s beyond, and what falls in between. By going through this exercise, you can start to map out and assign things their proper value. 

You can control how you show up. You can control your focus on your craft. You can control the boundaries you set between your job and your identity so they’re not blurred beyond all recognition. You cannot control economic conditions. You cannot control every decision made at a company. 

Focusing on what’s within your control is about reducing the dependencies you create between external conditions and your internal well-being. The less reliant you are on others to provide the things that only you’re able to give yourself—meaning, character, integrity—the more resilient you become to the whims of market conditions and executives. 

“There is only one road to happiness—let this rule be at hand morning, noon, and night: stay detached from things that are not up to you.”

— Epictetus

Live below your means

If you’re working in tech, you have been in an extreme position of privilege in terms of compensation. But inflating your lifestyle to match your income is one of the most dangerous things you can do. And while you might be able to get away with this in good times, should economic conditions turn south, this mistake will crush you.

“Independence, at any income level, is driven by your savings rate. And past a certain level of income your savings rate is driven by your ability to keep your lifestyle expectations from running away.”

— Morgan Housel

If you’re in this position currently, write this on your mirror and stare at it every day: build a safety net. When you’re employed, you should be stashing away as much of your paycheck as humanly possible. While inflating your lifestyle to match your income makes you fragile and dependent. A safety net creates flexibility, independence, and peace of mind so you’re never buried in desperation. 

You always want to have options. This is about taking back your life from those who have you strung out on an addiction to your biweekly paycheck or annual bonus. 

Getting laid off from a job can be a catalyst to come back to yourself, find alignment, and focus on more meaningful work. But without a contingency plan—emergency funds and a modest lifestyle—you’ll throw yourself into a state of panic. This state of desperation forces you either jump at the next opportunity rather than the right opportunity or get stuck in jobs you hate. 

The mania will return one day, do not allow yourself to get caught up in it. Begin building a buffer to protect yourself against ruin. You always want to have the power to walk away or bounce back if difficult times come your way. Work your ass off to create a safety net that puts you back in control of your own life. 

The good times won’t last forever, but neither will the bad.
 

Take back your identity

If you want to take back control of your life and build resilience, focus on eliminating dependencies. Disentangle your identity, your sense of self-worth, and your well-being from your current job and company. Assign things their proper value by focusing on what’s within your control.

You are not invincible. You are not immune to the winds of the market. The best way to guard yourself against the waves of mania and panic that define the human condition is a relentless drive toward self-sufficiency and resourcefulness. 

With these skills, you can take your happiness, your well-being, and your life back into your own hands. No one else can do that for you. Not your partner. Not your job. And certainly not your company. This allows you to build resilience, flexibility, and independence which guard you against despair when all hope seems lost. 

It all starts with creating the space for yourself and sitting in that. No matter how uncomfortable it might be or how much easier it is to lose yourself in the busyness of work. You must sort through the noise and determine what is your own. 

Now is the opportunity to find your way back to yourself. Now is the opportunity to create your own momentum in life.

7 Lessons from Life as a Product Manager

Six years ago, I found my way into product management out of necessity. I was beginning my career at a healthcare technology startup in what was supposed to be a marketing/communications position. But during my third month on the job, I was thrown on-site at a regional hospital to help facilitate a go-live with our software. As it turns out, job titles don’t always predict the scope of your work in startups.

That day, it became obvious that there was a significant gap between key stakeholders, customers, and our development team. It was impossible to prioritize or build the right thing because we weren’t close enough to the end user. As a result, we ended up working exclusively on client requests–perhaps the least effective way to develop a product. We needed someone to step in, close the gap, and work alongside our small team of five developers. Cue my newfound career path.

As companies learn the importance of evolving into product-driven organizations, there are increasingly greater opportunities for those with a specific skill set — see below — to explore product management. Over the past few years, I’ve put together some of the key lessons I’ve learned from leading product at my own startup, as well as from the innovative, hardworking teams that I’ve had the privilege to be a part of.

1. Develop a multidisciplinary approach

Broad exposure to a range of subjects enables you to leverage the most useful knowledge from each and make better decisions. Specialization gets a lot of attention these days, but it doesn’t fly here. Product requires seeing things from multiple angles and being able to quickly navigate a latticework of mental models. On any given day, you need to be able to evaluate the user experience, assess the feasibility from a development perspective, identify and sort relevant data, communicate key experiment results, and determine how a feature aligns with the overall vision.

Developing a multidisciplinary approach should also help to set you apart, as most who work in technology are focused exclusively on concepts and trends native to the industry. The majority will miss the important lessons and models from other fields of study that can be applied more broadly.

But the ultimate reward is that by positioning yourself at the intersection of multiple disciplines, you develop the ability to connect seemingly unrelated ideas in a way that the vast majority are otherwise incapable of discovering. It’s here where true creativity and the most innovative solutions are found.

2. Establish three skills in the top 25%

The best companies look for diversity on their teams in terms of background and experience, as well as hard and soft skills. This range of skills includes analytics, communication, design, development, research, strategy, synthesis, and user empathy, to name a few. Figure out which you’re good at and commit to developing those skills further.

That’s not to say you shouldn’t listen to feedback about where to improve. But you distinguish yourself by becoming very good (top 25%) at two or three skills.

Reaching this level demands years of dedication to your craft and the discipline to continue learning. You’ll only be able to sustain this effort if you allocate more energy to the skills that you’re naturally drawn to and enjoy immersing yourself in for indefinite periods of time.

“You make yourself rare by combining two or more ‘pretty goods’ until no one else has your mix.”

— Scott Adams

3. Manage product, not people

Any job with “manager” in the title carries an immediate connotation that you’re overseeing people. There’s no worse approach to product or faster way to alienate your team. Your sole focus should be on building the best product and user experience. This means collaboration with your team, not management. And if you’ve developed at least a few skills in the top 25%, you should be a true contributor.

Those who resort to managing people often do so because they lack the willingness or ability to contribute to the experience being built. Make yourself an indispensable part of the process.

4. Help your team answer their own questions

You can’t possibly have the answer to every question, nor should you pretend to. The most intelligent, respected leaders are always aware of the limitations in their knowledge. But you can help your team clearly articulate questions and begin to uncover answers through conversation.

If you’re able to help others think more rationally and find their own answers just by talking it through, you’re naturally going to get more buy-in than you would by telling someone what to do. It’s human instinct to feel more invested in answers and solutions you’ve helped come up with.

When everyone on your team is engaged, contributing, and learning from one another, the quality of work improves significantly. This skill demands exceptional listening and learning how to ask better questions. If you do it right, you will be able to promote transparency, self-awareness, and better orchestrate the perpetual moving pieces.

5. Consider second and third-order consequences

First-order consequences are those that are immediately evident and often end up in contradiction to long-term gains. Failing to think beyond first-order effects often results in poor decision making. For example, most of us might not enjoy the rain. But we wouldn’t wish away rainy days because the subsequent-order consequences–drought, wildfires, famine–are in direct opposition to our best interests.

While product is slightly lower stakes than climate, tunnel vision is a common struggle when building out a feature that’s intended to drive a key metric. You might be focused on retention, but how is that affecting the bigger picture? What if you’re compromising the experience for customers who are your strongest advocates? What if the strategy contradicts the identity you’re working to create?

It’s important to move fast, but it’s also important to navigate between these different levels so you have fewer headaches down the line. You’re not always going to have a definitive answer, but this thought exercise should help you consider the future implications of your decisions.

6. Value feedback over intuition

This is one of the biggest struggles I see from entrepreneurs across the board. Everyone wants to pour money into their project because they’re convinced it’s a million-dollar idea. But very few have the humility to prototype a product, put it out there, and seek honest feedback. And unless your risk tolerance borders on insanity, this is the cheapest, most effective way to assess the viability and potential market for your idea.

As a product manager, the story remains the same. You want to figure out the fastest, cheapest way to test your concept. This often requires hacking something together, getting it in the hands of your users, and actually listening to what they have to say. Great product managers find creative ways to gather customer feedback at the earliest stage possible.

“Human beings are complex and fickle, so it’s impossible to predict how they’ll react to a brand-new solution. When our new ideas fail, it’s usually because we were overconfident about how well customers would understand and how much they would care.”

— Jake Knapp + John Zeratsky

The momentary discomfort that comes from seeking brutally honest feedback is far less of a risk than taking off in a blind sprint based on intuition. You want to limit the potential downside and wasted effort whenever possible. The earlier you’re able to correct potential flaws in your product or assumptions, the greater your likelihood of success.

7. Be open with your failures

Most people never venture past the surface level of the “fail fast” mentality. We acknowledge that failure comes with the territory when working on disruptive ideas, but we forget to consider the underlying importance of this sentiment.

The goal should never be to force an idea to work, no matter the cost. It should be to assess if there’s a “there” there, as quickly as possible. There’s a fine line between sharing an overall vision and becoming emotionally entrenched in the success of a specific feature. The latter blinds you from objectively assessing outcomes and often leads to bad practices, i.e. “massaging” the data.

As a product manager, your job is to take chances and determine which opportunities show promise. When one of those efforts doesn’t result in the next big thing, there are still positive takeaways. You definitively know that it’s better to allocate energy elsewhere, which is valuable knowledge that will help shape your company’s direction. With the right approach, failure is a sign that you’re committed to pushing the realm of current possibilities–a necessity if you want to evolve your product and position yourself for long-term success.