Becoming a conscious leader: Leading without fear, finding your life’s objective function, and getting better at vision and strategy | John Mark Nickels (Uber, Waymo, DoorDash) | Lenny's Podcast: Product | Career | Growth

Get clear on your objective function.

And one way that I've gotten clear on it is like, trying to think about it from future me because like, five years from now, I'm not going to give a shit if I made the presentation slightly better.

But I'm gonna care a lot about what kind of relationship I have with my daughters.

And like, that means that the next action, the next thing I do today and tomorrow, those will translate into the relationship with her, right?

Not to be like morbid, but just again, most of us just aren't really tuned into an awareness that our lives will come to an end.

We try to pretend like we're going to live forever and just not think about it.

And the horror of it is that we succeed, right?

We mostly manage to just go live our life and eat ice cream and go to work and go on vacation and do what we do.

To me, an awareness and mindfulness that our lives will come to an end punctuates reality in a way that requires me to rethink my priorities.

Today, my guest is J .M.

Nichols. J .M. has been a product leader at Waymo, DoorDash and Uber.

He's also an engineering manager at Groupon, and before that an equity trader at Getco.

At Uber, he built and launched the very first version of UberPool, and then went on to lead the team responsible for the infrastructure and algorithms powering the economic and logistics brain behind Uber's matching and pricing systems.

At DoorDash, he was head of product for DoorDash platform.

At Waymo, he led product for the commercialization of autonomous ride hailing and last mile delivery.

And he recently returned to Uber to lead product for the mobility team.

This conversation is a unique and beautiful mixture of hard skills, soft skills, tactics, and emotions.

I won't give away too much about the conversation, but this is a powerful one.

Tears are shed, stories are shared, and I am confident you will become a better leader and human having listened to J .M.'s insights and lessons.

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 it helps the podcast tremendously.

With that, I bring you J .M.

Nichols. J .M., thank you so much for being here.

Welcome to the podcast.

Thank you, Lenny. Thanks for having me.

I'm thrilled to be here.

I really appreciate your dedication to helping product managers kind of like improve their craft and up level.

There's not a lot of great researchers out there for that.

And coaching and development, as I'm sure we'll get into, is a passion of mine as well.

So we have a lot of shared interests there.

Oh, I really appreciate that.

I want to start with a phrase that came up again and again when I asked people what to talk to you about from your colleagues.

And this phrase is, conscious leadership.

What is conscious leadership?

What does this phrase mean?

To me, leadership is broadly defined as having influence in the world.

And so by that definition, to me, everyone is a leader, right?

Because we all have influence in some way, you know, it's not about whether you're a manager or not, it's like, I have influence on my kids or my partner or my community, right, the world, the way I vote, the way I show up, right?

So we all have influence.

We're all co -creating, you know, kind of influences of each other.

So that's the leadership piece.

So just like the conscious piece then is becoming more aware, waking up, right?

To me, it's like learning more about my interior world, you know, what, you know, my background is, my biases, you know, we all inherit sort of kind of certain belief systems from our parents or our church or community.

And a lot of times they kind of go unquestioned, and then they end up in conflict.

And so it's really just about becoming more aware and then taking responsibility for the influence that I have.

So yeah, taking responsibility for my influence in the world.

As you talk about this, something that came up and something that I thought about as I was preparing for this episode is this idea of soft leadership, the power of soft skills, and just how important that is in success.

There's something there that comes up when I say that, there's the power of soft skills and the importance of those in being successful.

Yeah, yeah. But what was it, Theodore Roosevelt speaks awfully and carry a big stick.

Yeah, I think I've evolved in that department.

I think when I was younger in my career, I thought it was really important that, you know, you got to show up to the meeting and have the right slides and be the loudest, rightest voice in the room.

And, you know, that's sort of the way to have influence.

And, you know, there's certainly a place for, you know, having leadership in a meeting and presenting a point of view and helping guide the narrative.

But to me, it's, yeah, I say I've evolved more towards sitting back.

It's also as I've become a more senior leader, I'm aware that there are power dynamics there.

There's imbalances, right, where junior folks don't feel as comfortable speaking up, or I say something's not a good idea, and I don't want to disagree with JMs.

So it's like, back to being more aware of my influence in the world, like I really try to spend more time being mindful of that and say, you know, I want to hear from other people first, I want to create space.

And like, I don't need to win the argument in the meeting, right?

Like, there can be a follow up, right?

There's like, you know, my last chance to say something.

But that's also more truly a more senior, right?

Because when you're more junior, it's like, well, this is the one presentation I have with Dara for the next six months, right?

I really got to nail it.

And so the pressure is a little bit different.

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There's a couple threads I want to follow here, but first, I was thinking as you're talking, when people think Uber and people that work at Uber, I don't think they imagine people like you.

And I know you were there early, and then you joined again.

Was that ever like, is this a place for me?

Did you ever go through that struggle?

Or is it just, yeah, I don't know.

Yeah, I mean, I would say I have been fortunate to experience probably free Uber at this point.

We joke about Uber 1 .0, the Travis era.

You hear a lot about the media, the kind of bad parts of that.

But there were some really good parts too.

I mean, I think there was a lot of like, when I joined in 2014, there was this mission of making transportation as reliable as running water for anyone anywhere, which is bold, audacious, and maybe a little bit pretentious from a little bit of Silicon Valley edge.

But you could feel the electricity in the air.

There was this energy and excitement.

We're doing something transformational.

Autonomy is coming, and car ownership will change.

And I feel like my vibration.

And then, yeah, the good parts of that era were like, Travis was a very great visionary product leader, and we started ATG and Elevate and these sort of future forward things.

And the way he would conduct product reviews, I learned a lot.

But it was stressful at the time, but looking back, I was like, wow, I learned a lot.

But yeah, I would say it was not a very conscious leadership place.

It was like many organizations that run on fear because you can do that.

Carriage and sticks do work.

But actually, that's kind of how I found this work because it was like in 2015.

And I was a very junior product manager at that point, kind of in over my head in a fast growing place.

And in these weekly reviews, Travis, we were building out Uberpool, and I had a six -month old daughter, my firstborn, and we had just moved to San Francisco from Chicago.

So my whole life was kind of in flux.

And it was a very stressful place.

And I was like, I think I'm going to snap.

I don't think I can handle this.

And that's kind of what led me to start to explore this sort of inner work and meditation and sort of finding a way out of that.

And that's what got me interested in bringing it to teams too, is because I remember I was in one meeting where we were working on this future pricing thing, which is like rider pricing, driver pricing, and incentives and how we bring surge pricing and all that together.

And it gets very, you know, outgo -heavy.

And we have all these PhDs in the room, right?

Some of the best minds in the world, you know, we were able to hire, you know, people like Garrett Van Rysen, who like was, you know, the foremost for our person right from Columbia and other people.

But everyone's like, back to the lizard brain, everyone's like arguing.

They're like, well, no, I think we should do it this way, or this way.

And I was like, huh, it's like, as much as I enjoy the content of this, like, believe me, I'm an outgo PM, in the end, I love that stuff.

But I was like, I don't think this conversation actually needs another, like, you know, PhD, or I'm not even PhD, but content expert, right?

It's like, what we need here is a way to like, you know, like shift, again, back to that, you know, out of that fear threat, righteousness, sort of state into a more co -creative, collaborative, open -minded, curious, trusting sort of space.

And that was that got me interested in kind of, you know, pursuing more skills and coaching of individuals and teams.

So, but yeah, to your Uber question.

Yeah, the Uber 1 .0 was crazy.

Uber 2 .0 was kind of like, you know, Travis is out, the board is feuding, who's leaking to Mike Isaac, whatever, and then Dara comes in and, you know, kind of the peacemaker, and, and then tries to stabilize but the IPO is rocky.

And, and so now I would say we're in Uber 3 .0, which, you know, is it's full pirate ship to Navy, and the offense words, you know, profitable company were printing free cash flow, and this would be 500.

Right? Like, you know, we've, we've kind of established independent contractor model, right in a lot of states and jurisdictions.

And, you know, it's like, there's less kind of, you know, risk of that model changing.

And, and, and yeah, we're, I would say we're in an area, an era now, kind of Cambrian explosion of different types of transportation, you know, the company kind of really just built the Uber X model and scaled it up to the world, that's primarily how we got here.

And now it's like, you know, we're going after all these different new sort of modalities, whether it's reserving a ride in advance or shared rides, or, you know, renting a car or buses, and then different supply types to write with, it's not just contracted, right, we have a lot of fleets in the platform,

we have a lot of taxi drivers in the platform, we've seen we've signed deals with Waymo and cruise and other autonomous players.

So, like, I feel like we're now at the beginning of another era that we were right and transportation that, you know, the next decade or two is going to be like super exciting.

One quick tangent, UberX, like previous guest shared that the name UberX came from, it was just like the internal codename, UberX, and we'll figure out a real name later.

And then they just, it's stuck.

And no one had a better name.

Is that true? Yeah, that's right.

I think that's right.

That's amazing. Before when I joined, we were already scaling UberX rapidly, I joined in early 2020.

But I did help name Uberpool, which I what I'd obviously like to bring back.

It got renamed to share during my external RPM rotation.

Okay, I want to come back to the kind of the thread that we that I pushed us off of, which is you talked about you made this really interesting point about emotions.

And this is something I've been learning myself recently with having a kid and also a couple previous guests.

So you say that when you have so you're in this meeting, you're stressed, there's a lizard brain kicking in something's like, oh, Dara's gonna think I suck, and it's gonna really screw my career if I mess up this presentation.

Your advice there is very counterintuitive, I think for a lot of people, which is accept that emotion.

Because when I feel like stressed and nervous in a meeting, I'm not embraced the nervousness, let it out.

It's more I'm just like, no, it's fine.

Good to be okay. Don't worry about it.

Talk about why that is actually more effective.

Yeah, yeah, it's like, my daughter the other day was, you know, had some nightmares.

And she was like, Dad, how do I stop thinking thoughts that you know, kind of, you know, about the nightmare or whatever.

And I was like, I said, I said, you can't don't try to stop the thought.

Just allow it. You know, as a, let me show you why that doesn't work.

I said, don't think of a pink elephant.

What do you just think of?

He's like, big elephant.

And then I think it's a layer just always just don't think of a pink elephant.

But yeah, I think you're right.

It is a little counterintuitive.

But like one of my first coaches actually had a great phrase, what you resist will persist, and what you fear will appear.

And so in my experience, this is what I let a reason why becoming more aware of my internal world is so important.

I have more agency than I realize on the outcome of my experience.

Right. And so when I think a thought like, dara might think I suck, and I have a thought that I suck that can become a self enforcing negative feedback loop, where I have a thought that creates stress, anxiety, fear, and then that triggers more thoughts.

And we call it cognitive emotive loop, where you're kind of in this cycle of like thinking stressful thoughts and then having unpleasant, you know, anxious, fearful feelings.

And so one way to break that yeah is to just allow it and not try to fight it with other thoughts.

So the advice is, like very tactically, it's you're in a meeting with Dara, you're stressed about something, just allow it, let it be, don't try to pretend like it's not there, or don't try to convince.

Well, that would be the first step is just to allow whatever fear thoughts and emotions are arising.

It's, you know, they come, they go, they're transient, it's not permanent, right?

So there's a lot of wisdom, I think, in the Buddhist lineage around those concepts.

And then the next piece for me, once I can take a breath and relax a little bit, is coming home to the fact that I, this is a little more radical for some people, I don't actually need Dara to approve of me in my presentation in order to be okay, right?

Like what I'm up to over here is trying to force self worth and self love from within.

And so, you know, we talked about approval control and security, it's very easy to look for that from the world, right?

Do you approve of me?

And if not, can I control outcomes to get approval or get security and get, you know, the job, the bank account, the house, whatever it is.

But what I kind of woke up to at one point was that as long as I was going out there looking for all that stuff, to try to complete something inside of me that was missing, it's like I was like a hungry ghost.

It's like it doesn't matter how many Michelin star meals and promotions and money and title and whatever, right?

It's like it's never enough.

It's like you kind of enjoy it for a little bit.

And then you get back to like, you know, so it's like a never ending, like sugar addiction.

And so that's kind of the next step for me is like, allow it, yes, allow the emotion, all the thought, come home to I am okay, even if Garth does think I suck.

And then also, it's not, you know, it's not permanent, right?

Like I mean, it's like, sure, there might be some high stakes things in life where you only get one shot.

But the most part, it's like, you know, if I didn't do a great job on this presentation, you know, there'll be another one, right?

Like it's okay, you know, it's and the other thing is like from the fear, threat state, I'm like, oh, this is a risk alarm bells, right?

You know, like my career could be over.

Whereas if I'm in that trusting, curious open space, it's like, this is an opportunity for feedback, you know, how can I learn how can I get to become a better presenter, you know, it's like the feedback from others is no longer a threat.

It's actually a gift.

It's like, you know, it's like, you know, information, right, that I can use or not use to, you know, alter how I show up in the future and the skill I developed on the good stuff.

I imagine some people may hear this and feel like if Dara or Travis, whoever is like thinks I suck, my career is at stake, and that really matters and everything's going to fall apart in my life because I get fired.

You know, there's like stakes involved messing up.

Is there anything that helps you get past that and not worry so much about just like this trickle effect of all the things that could go wrong if you mess something up in an important high stakes meeting or presentation?

Yeah, again, maybe it's a little paradoxical.

But what I found was, the more I focused on, yeah, the how I show up and optics and having a good deck and all this, the less I got promoted, and then the more I dropped focusing all that because like, for my first few years, we were, I was, okay, I was in your PM.

And then I finally got my groove and started kind of, you know, moving through the product ladder.

And it was really like, correlated to me at least, maybe causal with, yeah, dropping a lot of the focus on the on the presentation and how I show up and whether you know, people like this or not, and just really focusing on the work.

It's like, you know what, I am here to be a conduit to from what wants to happen in the world of transportation and mobility and shared rides is like one that I've always been particularly passionate about.

So it's a good example.

And then how can I kind of, you know, get present and listen to like, what wants to happen next in the world of shared rides, right?

And there's lots of different ways we can take the product and all that.

And it's just it's really about I want to make a fucking awesome product, right?

And it's like, whether people like me or think I'm a good PM or presenter, as long as I manifest, you know, a great product into the world that makes riders better off drivers better off cities, better off less congestion, all these things like that, to me, is the reward.

And sure, in order to manifest that, it is often helpful to communicate things, present a line, all this sort of things.

But those are a means to a more powerful and transformative end than just my career.

I'm tapping into a larger purpose and sense of belonging and identity and sort of meaning.

And from that place, it's like I'm just I just dropped the kind of egoic self centered focus on, you know, whether I did go in the presentation or not.

And then, yeah, maybe paradoxically, by doing that, it actually goes better.

And we do great work, and it gets recognized.

Wow, that is fascinating.

To make that work, you need to really connect with the mission of the company you're working at, like you really need to believe this is very important and very meaningful.

So maybe that could be an issue for people if they don't really care about what the company's doing, it's going to be hard to allow for that approach.

Totally, totally. It's interesting that you say that optics aren't as important.

I think the reason I think about this, you talk about a lot of people feel like there's the work, and then there's like, talking about the work, making the work like the optics of what you did, is really, really important.

And I love to hear like, nobody wants to do that.

But they always get this advice.

So important optics, how you share the impact you've done, how you represent yourself, I guess, is there anything else you can share there about just helping people relax about that aspect of their job?

And that being so critical?

Yeah. And to be clear, I do think it's important.

Like, it can't be all work and no optics or all optics and no work, right?

Like, there does need to be a balance there.

And I think it does change depending on the size of the company and this level of seniority, right?

When you're an IC, you're probably hopefully getting more actual work.

And leaders are supporting them and presenting and communicating that work so that they get, I mean, the optics does matter, right?

Like at some senior level, you do spend more time on that.

And it does have influence back to the influence piece, right?

Which is like, how will I communicate an idea and the need for engineering, resourcing and so forth might mean that team gets more engineers or doesn't get more engineers or we do this project or we don't, right?

Because at the end of the day, executive kind of resource allocation is largely based on the quote unquote optics layer.

So it does matter. I want to be clear, I'm not saying it doesn't matter.

But to me, again, it's more about that's a means to an end.

It's not about the optics itself.

It's like don't say what the Buddha say don't mistake the finger pointing at the moon for the moon, and the finger pointing at the moon to be the presentation, the OKR, whatever.

And it's like, that's not the actual outcome we care about, right?

Like that's an input to the output that really matters, which is the work, the product.

Okay, I'm gonna shift this to hard skills and another kind of direction.

So another thing they came up a bunch when I was asking people what you're amazing at and what you're really good at is strategy and vision.

I had this quote from one of your colleagues, Brent Goldman.

Jam thinks big has lots of great ideas.

Well, yes, and to others, people's ideas will inspire everyone around him to be more creative, ambitious and hardworking.

He doesn't climb hills, he finds bigger mountains and will bring you there.

So along these lines, say someone comes to you and wants to build these skills, wants to get better at strategy, wants to get better at vision, which is something basically every product leader is trying to get better at and every leader wants to get better at.

What advice do you generally share?

How does one improve in these areas?

Yeah, thank you. I appreciate the compliment.

Thank you, Brent. That was a great quote.

Wow. Yeah, I mean, there's no like magic toolkit or manual, you know, I've long ago given up on the notion that I'm one book away from the perfect elusive answer to whatever, you know, plays you in life.

And there's obviously lots of books about strategy and, you get into all that.

I guess for me, a couple of things have been helpful.

One is, you mentioned earlier, finding a mission that you're really passionate about.

Like, I think it would be hard for me to come up with a strategy for improving the healthcare system.

Like, it's like, sure, it's important.

I hope someone does it and figures out how to deal with HIPAA and whatever all stuff, but it's like, it's just not for me.

It's not my purpose, mission and vision in life.

And so step one is like, am I working at a place and in a product area, in which I have a tremendous amount of passion, right?

Because for me, that is the fuel and the motivation that helps me break through to getting the strategy that's like the first step.

So that's where I feel enormously lucky.

Because again, like this, you know, revolutionizing transportation and car ownership and what happens with autonomy and foreign factors and future cities is something that I'm super excited about.

I think about my daughters growing up and having a, you know, a different world to live in that's safer and more environmentally friendly, all this stuff, right?

And like, I get really jazzed when I think about, wow, the work I do could actually impact their future lives and other people.

And it's like, whoa, I can feel the chills right now.

So it's like super motivating.

So that's the first place just getting myself fired up.

And then the next thing I guess it's been helpful is, you know, I've deeply immersed myself, you know, I have it's also, you know, I haven't really jumped around between, you know, crypto and gen AI, other stuff.

And a lot of people do that's great, nothing wrong with that.

But you know, I've been in this, you know, largely focused on mobility, you know, space for 10 years now, with some stents over in the restaurant tech and delivery side, but very related in terms of last mile logistics.

And so, you know, I think it's hard to come up with a great strategy, if you've only been working in an area for like six sponsors, you know, it's like, it's sick, especially things like this, which have been nuanced, like shared rides is another good example where it's a super hard problem to crack.

And like, you know, it's going deep on that for a long time is, is a precursor to being successful.

The other thing I would say, though, is like, you know, people always talk about first principles thinking, but if there's truth in it, I think, you know, that's like, you know, like, when Elon's like, well, why does the rocket cost, you know, the billion dollars to launch, and, you know, there's no reason they

have to throw away the materials, and, you know, it's all about, you know, one example might be, why do we need a 4000 pound vehicle to move a human three miles?

Okay, well, or even a couple of humans, right, we do a new rapport share, right, you move to humans, agree on even then, like, that's pretty inefficient, right?

If you think about like the, just the physics there, like the energy expenditure, right?

It's like, and that's where I think, you know, you might come up with bikes and scooters and little other things, right?

And sure, it's not always it's raining, or do you want the car, but that's the example of like, questioning, like, why are things the way they are?

And then are is the way they are, like, super inefficient, or like, not optimal from in some sense, right?

And that is often a doorway to opportunity, right, to see, okay, well, maybe things could be different.

And so I kind of extend that, you know, at a larger level to the future, you know, my general thing is just like, yeah, that's the mountain thing is like, I try to just close my eyes and imagine the future as far out as I can.

Yes, like five years, about 10 years now, whatever.

And it's like, develop a really salient picture of what that looks like.

You know, it's like, it's like, oh, we can do this right now.

It's okay, you know, 10 years from now, what could San Francisco look like, or some city, what happens to the parking spaces?

Are there still parking garages?

Are those parks now?

What are the modes of transport?

Are there like, bus like things that are autonomous, that are connecting people to bikes and scooters?

And you know, how are people living?

Do they live in the far suburbs even more because autonomy, and they have a nicer house and they come in, or, or is all the space repurposed?

And actually, it's cheaper to live in the city because compact things, blah, blah, blah, you know, it's not about having the right one, it's more just like, kind of developing some sort of, you know, picture of the future that gets you fired up, right?

And then, yeah, you got to go like, you know, articulate that and communicate it and get people to come on the journey with you.

But like, from that picture, it's like, well, what first principles?

What's going to be true?

You know, 10, 20 years from now?

Well, autonomy is like given, I think most people would probably agree with that.

And, you know, we'll probably solve with just cameras and multi -light arc, as humans don't have light arc.

You know, the cost of vehicles and sensors will come down, remote support will come down.

And at some point, it'll be super cheap.

And it's like, okay, like an extrapolate, that will be a thing separate from which player wins, I'm not saying I can predict, you know, the ecosystem of companies that will win here.

It's more about just the underlying dynamics, right?

And then, you know, that would be one, and then that would be, yeah, sharing a way, it's like, well, a lot of people are like, Oh, well, once we have cheap autonomous cars, like everyone can just have their own super cheap Uber, Tesla, or whatever it is, you're on the city.

And you're like, well, that doesn't work, because then we're going to hit this induced demand concept, right?

Which is like what economists call it, when like, yeah, you used to win text messages cost 50 cents a piece, how many did you send?

Right? Versus now, with its griefs and the same thing, when they add a lane to a highway, right?

The traffic just as bad as before, because more people drive and so forth.

So if we flood the streets with super cheap autonomous cars, with single occupancy, we're just going to have even more gridlock than we do right now.

Maybe we'll do the boring company thing and big tunnels and see the like, right.

So so then for me, it's like, well, from first principles, shared rides is is going to continue to be an important part of the future transformation.

And other modalities, where yeah, back to the model thing, it's like, well, probably will be various form factors of bike scooters and little mini golf cart things and whatever we end up building.

Right? And so that's kind of an example of how I kind of think about like, what are the likely things to be true in the future?

And then how does that lead to a potential kind of ecosystem and strategy around what we might build, you know, towards that future?

This is great, because this is something everyone can do.

And there's all this talk of like creating a vision, painting a vision, communicating a vision.

And what you're describing is how to actually sit there and think about what it might look like, like sit there, close your eyes and in your head visualize in the next five or 10 years, what does the future actually look like?

And do you do this in a state of if we were to do this product and change?

Or is it just even if we're not around, here's where the future is going to go most likely?

Which which direction do you usually take?

Yeah, that's a good question.

I think you could probably do either.

I typically like to start with the former, which is just like, what will the world move towards absent of me just trying to pick out, you know, kind of bird's eye view of what I think is the trajectories are and trends and what's going to happen.

And then yeah, you could apply a lens of, okay, if we were to build product XYZ, or have this strategy, how might we influence outcome or benefit from it?

Or, you know, is it in congruence with that?

Or is it, you know, rubbing against that and trying to change that either could be good, right?

You might say we're gonna the tailwind or a headwind, you know, both are overcomeable, but like having some awareness of the relationship between those things is good.

Yeah. And I think like, you know, transportation over way modes, like, in theory, it might be easier to visualize that future.

And how exciting that might be versus B2B sass payroll app or some likes photo sharing thing.

But on the other hand, not not necessarily right there.

But in the future, 10 years, how are people going to be paid?

How do people work at companies?

Like, I think there's an opportunity to do that, no matter what you're building.

How do you actually is this something you actually do?

You just sit there in the office, close your eyes and just imagine is this more of an iterative process where you get with your team?

Like, how do you actually practice this?

Yeah, it's not like something you can just schedule 30 minutes for in the middle of your day of packed OKR reviews and random one on ones meetings, you know, it's like, I like to do it on my own first.

If I you know, what's it something that already have a kind of outline for and I'm ready to move into a team space.

So for me, it's like, Yeah, like, can I get into a quiet, contemplative space, right?

Yeah. So yeah, I like to go for a run.

And that obviously gives me ideas or I'll go for a hike up in, you know, Marin, and sometimes I'll just like think of stuff or drop something down or make a voice note while I'm doing that, you know, it's kind of get things going.

But yeah, like the first step for me is just getting out of the craziness of the day, like to me, it's still insane.

Like how many product manager leaders of all kinds, right, just run the schedule like back to back meetings, you know, 30 minute reviews, a big meeting topic, you run out of time, run the next thing, answer a bunch of emails, and then cram some PRDs in there.

And it's like, you know, it doesn't work.

Right. And so I'm a big fan of carving out time.

Again, first for myself, a couple hours, you know, whatever, where I can just like get out of the day to day craziness and, you know, get into that ed space of 510 years from now, right, it's just a different place.

So you need to transition to that.

And then, yeah, bring that to teams.

Like if I have like an outline of that kind of future of transportation in my head, I might share that with with a group of folks.

And, and we'll come together also for some extended period of time.

Like we recently had an all day Monday thing where eight of us came into the office to talk about future marketplace, and it was super productive.

It's like, you know, laptops down, we're gonna spend all day together on a whiteboard.

It's like a lost art.

People tell people to use the whiteboards anymore.

So but yeah, and then from there, it's like getting more people and then and then you can kind of iterate on it, right?

So I had some vision of the future.

And someone points out something that, you know, is a little bit, you know, off with it, or it has a better idea, or you know, you kind of your then you move into co creation.

But I love that I said, you know, the Pixar calls the brain trust, right?

When if you read that kind of moles book, right, where they're like how they come up with Toy Story and inside out all these things, right is like they have this group of people that just sits around riffing on ideas.

And again, there's there's no judgment, there's no attachment to being right.

There's no, you know, they're in a co creative sort of space where they're just like co exploring and riffing with each other.

And I love to be in that space with, you know, with other PMs and engineers and data scientists.

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That's VA mta .com slash Lenny.

Something I've started to do, which is hard, but I find really valuable is when I'm driving to not play anything on the radio not listen to any podcasts.

And it's so unnatural.

And it's like, this is hard.

Like I just I don't want my brain to just go like you don't want you don't trust your brain to go to a place that's fun.

But always does always ends up being like, Oh, that was so interesting, just to like, think of this idea that just came up.

So I've been trying to do that.

And that's such a simple thing to do.

Just don't turn anything off.

It's not really good for your podcast business to tell people not to everyone.

We're cutting this.

What I find really helpful is playing Lenny's podcast every time I'm out and about.

No, but there's something to what you said, which is, there's always a lot of content out there to pursue.

And I've been in that mode where I'm like, Yeah, more content more.

And then, but yeah, actually, somewhere, you spend a lot of time now, like, not listening to anything, you know, going on a hike, where you don't listen to a podcast or music or your commute and see what happens.

You might be surprised.

Yeah. And it always ends up being like, Oh, that was cool.

And you know, that's where shower ideas come from.

And all these things.

Maybe just to see if there's ideas in brainstorming meeting.

Is there anything that came out of that?

That was like really surprising or new from a recent experience?

Is there anything that are just like, oh, wow, we really uncovered this potential wrinkle of the future that we really need to think about differently?

Well, it wasn't maybe a specific wrinkle, but one of the things that we're thinking a lot about, I'm fortunate to be involved in trying to help develop and articulate kind of a multi year, three year product or even overall starting tech strategy for the mobility business super.

And one of the, I guess, big ahas for us is, you know, where as we move away from the kind of in some ways, some poor world of Uber X, right, being the predominant product, which is, you know, it used to be pretty simple, right?

You it's kind of like a taxi meter on the driver's side, right?

There's a time and distance rate that everybody gets.

And then on the rider side, it's like, sure, there's some search pricing based on supply and demand, but, you know, it's one product that's pretty straightforward.

And so, you know, this future of multimodality and on the both demand side and supply side is what makes marketplace like even more complex and challenging to build.

And so it's kind of all around like, okay, well, you know, now that we have taxis in the platform, and we have fleet providers, and we're starting to add waymos and cruise and other things, you know, we have to have a marketplace that's aware of those different types of supply.

And, you know, which one might be available for what trips and how to think about cost and quality and kind of allocation of trips and all that.

And then on the demand side, it's like, yeah, we've got all these different products like shared rides and reserve rides and, you know, comfort and X and, you know, priority.

And it's like, how do we think about how to price those all to each other?

Right? How do we think about which one's to show which user, you know, how do you think about the ranking and so forth.

And then that all has, you know, feedback loops into the pricing and matching itself as well.

So the dynamics of the thing when I think about the future of marketplace Uber is like, whoa, it's like, I only ever built that.

That's the super cool thing about it.

I think we have the best logistics marketplace tech on the planet.

And we built something that no one else has ever built.

And, you know, relative to like digital marketplaces, for example, just different physical world requirements.

And then this next arc of what I described of thinking about, you know, different types of supply and different kind of demand channels, just adds even more compaction to that.

So yeah, but the all hall was like, I guess, yeah, we got to think about all that stuff and think about how the supply and demand relate to each other.

And oh, my god, yeah, it's gonna be cool.

It's just a infinitely cited marketplace.

Now, that's wild. One last nugget I wanted to just reinforce that you shared about how to become better at strategy and vision developing great and interesting and innovative strategy vision is going really deep on a topic.

So you've been in the space for a long time.

There's this idea that Paul Graham talks about, I think, call it your top idea or something like that that when you have one, like whatever your top ideas, the more you can just think about that and keep that top of mind as you go about your day and just have one core focus, the more likely it is you're

going to come up with new interesting ideas because your brain is going to keep working on it when you're driving around listening to Lenny's podcast.

Just kidding, or going on hike.

So I think that's a really important point is like, if you're finding you can't, you're not coming up with a great strategy or vision and just like having struggles.

Part of it might just be you're not spending enough time in that space.

You're not going deep enough in the problem area.

One approach is just spend like a decade in that space.

Is there, is there anything else just comes up as I say that I've just had to do that?

Yeah, well, there's also that's at the macro level, maybe spending 10 years in a situation, but the micro level is back to kind of like don't defrag your day.

Don't just do the 30 minute meetings, you know, 20, 30 minute meetings on, on 20 different topics.

Like it sure, sometimes you've brought first and like you got to do that.

You have large team, like I do obviously review the press team.

I'm not saying I don't do that on some days, but it's like, yeah, like what are my top few things, right?

Like I think, like you're, I think it was Peter Cheeto or some early PayPal guys talked about that too, right?

Like going really deep and having a person or a leader, like really responsible for one core deep thing for the company.

And that's like something they immerse themselves in.

And so in the micro that, that to me even translates to, yeah, I don't have a two list of 20 things, right?

I try to have a two list of three of the most important highest leverage things that could, you know, kind of have impact broadly across the company and then try to just like you said, like, but that one top thing marinate and chew on it.

I love that. And I find really helpful is at the beginning of each day and also the beginning of each week, just write down, here's the one to three things that I need to do and get done and everything else.

Like I might have this really long list, but here's the three things.

If I get done, life will be good.

I've done a lot. I've accomplished really great important things.

Totally. I tried to do the David Allen GTD thing once, you know, the super complicated, uh, you know, organization system.

And it's like, it was too much structure for me.

Like I couldn't do it.

It's like, it didn't day when you says, right.

So there's basically three things that I need to do next.

And then there's like, just some random backlog that I can just scan through periodically.

And that's that that gets you most of the way.

It's crazy. I read that books like 20 years ago at this point.

And there's this like elements that still make things like I leverage and benefit from like, even if you don't do the whole thing, like that book I recommend people read, because there's just like, if you pick a couple things from there, uh, your life gets better.

The things that have stuck with me, the main one is this waiting for concept of if you're waiting, if you like email your designer and like, Hey, I need you to review this product.

Just like note waiting for Dan to review design and just having that thread written down and not in your head really helped me.

Totally. Yeah. Anyway, I'm not going to go into that.

Like the not whatever structure you use, the most powerful takeaway from that book for me was if it's in your head, you're screwed because it's like you're trying to keep track of stuff and be creative and come up with future transportation and remember to pick up something from the pharmacy is like,

it's just not, it's a recipe for disaster.

Like this whole idea of like empty mind, you know, beginner's mind, what will you have to empty the mind of all the two views.

First it was get that out of the head.

Absolutely. I think it was mine like water.

That's the one that stuck with me.

Yeah. Where nothing you need to remember can be in your head and needs to be written down.

Anyway, and let's not go into a whole productivity podcast here.

So we talked about vision strategy.

So there's kind of like classically two problems people have with vision strategy.

One is how do I get better at it?

The other is just like, I need to actually get shit done.

I can't spend all my time thinking about vision.

You have a really good take on how to find this balance and you've seen it work well and not well, just vision versus execution.

When do I go big vision?

How much I spend vision versus just get shit done.

Execute, execute, execute.

What can you share about just what you learned about how to find that balance and what you've seen work and not work.

Yeah, I think you can go too far either direction, right?

It's like everything in life is about balancing the polarity between two opposing forces.

And so in this one, it's like, yeah, you go too hard in division and theory land.

I've seen that go off the axle at early Uber, where again, back to the future pricing, it's like, we have all the data scientists and PhDs walked in a room for two weeks.

There's a beautiful whiteboard diagram, what it looked like.

And then it's like, why don't we actually build this thing and engineers are like, like, this is like boiling the ocean, you know.

And like, you just get wrapped around the axle of like, well, sounds really good in theory, but I have no idea how to even start executing on this.

So that's probably an example of like, we tilted a little too far towards, you know, the vision theory land.

And this was you're describing like the original plan to make a really good search pricing algorithm.

Yeah, this was a plot plan to try to bring together, you know, say how we do driver pricing, you know, time and distance rates.

But also, you know, we do in census for drivers, which like, if you drive this many hours a week, you get a bonus.

And there's also third pricing, and like, how to tie all the systems together in a brief, sophisticated sort of way.

This was, you know, you're back in 2017 or something, and it was just, it is a winged a little too hard into theory land.

And we still have that bias sometimes, you know, we joke about marketplace, you know, especially when we talk about with other teams, you know, they're trying to integrate in the marketplace.

Like say they add, you know, fleets or, you know, teams with a big new product, right?

And then marketplace people will be like, well, have you thought about this one random problem that could happen two years from now, if teams become this much of demand, and blah, blah, blah, you know, whatever.

And it's just like, we do get wrapped around the axle on that, on that sometimes.

But yeah, so the future price is, for example, rewingle too far in the 3UN.

But you get you can probably go too far into execution land too.

And I'd say, you know, Dordath, in my experience would do that sometimes where we used to actually even have joke there.

Some of us leaders would be like, it's like, ready, fire, aim.

And it was like, people will be like, I'm just gonna run through a wall.

I have no idea if that's the right wall to run through.

But at least I know I'm running through a wall.

So yeah, I think it's about balance.

And it's, you know, can you can you adjust again, it's dynamic.

I think there's times where you're soul searching, sort of, what is our product strategy?

You know, we got a pivot, maybe your startup, but you're not working, and you want to think about, and then it's like, okay, well, off the pull off the gas a little bit, ease up on the execution, and let's lean into, you know, the strategy vision piece.

And there's times where the strategy vision is pretty baked, at least for the next whatever six months, year.

And it's like, okay, pedal to the metal, let's just go execute, let's get it done.

I just went to this, acquired podcast event at the Chase Center within Zuck was there.

And the CEO of Spotify was there too.

And there's two quick anecdotes that you remind me of.

One is Zuck talked about how once Facebook and Zuck and the team align on, here's where we're going, no matter how many walls appear in front of them, there's going to be a mark shaped hole in the wall very soon, because they're just going to run through and get things done that they need to get done.

And I really love that mentality of like, once we're sure we're going, we're going to bust through these walls.

That's awesome. The other is a really interesting value at Spotify.

So Daniel Lek shared this, he said, he said, at Spotify, we have this core value, talk is cheap.

And when you hear that, you think it's saying talk is not valuable.

And it's actually they look at it as a virtue, talk is cheap, we can talk and it costs us no money, very little money compared to building something.

So they actually spent a lot of time in Spotify refining their ideas and discussing until they're really sure something is right.

And I guess any reaction to that, because I thought that was really interesting.

Yeah, I love that. It's almost a different flavor of I think the Beethoven saying, you know, he's like, I like a crisp, a crisp doc and a messy meeting, right?

The whole Amazon thing, you have the you know, the three page or seven page narrative that's, you know, written with the clarity of angels singing from on high.

We, you know, describe any other problems, they better future or whatever.

And so it's like super crisp and organized and you know, well articulated.

And then you might have a meeting where you pick it apart.

And you talk a lot, you know, what made me think of that.

So yeah. Awesome. Okay.

A couple more things I want to spend some time on.

One is you've worked at a lot of really interesting, successful hypergrowth companies, doordash, Uber, Waymo, you're also in finance for a while.

I want to pick on a few of these and just see what's a lesson you took away or what's an experience from that time that might be interesting or helpful to people.

Sure. So you talked about doordash a bit.

What did you take away from your time at doordash?

What's something you saw there that either is like, wow, that's a really cool thing I want to do in the future.

Or here's something they weren't amazing at that I learned not to try to avoid.

Yeah, yeah, it's really amazing to get to see different places and kind of pick the best of what you like.

And also the other thing is back to like, for me, the right or wrong, it's just like, differences like have pros and cons, right?

There's always like two sides of the coin, right?

So like, what's interesting, I think about Uber and doordash is first back to mission and the strategy, they started with different DNA, right?

So like, you know, Uber started with, you know, it was still like utilize block cars, you know, at the airport that were like not doing trips, but it was more about the riders, right?

It was like whatever, or in story bleed, you know, Travis and whoever, you know, can't get a ride in Paris, right?

And so then it was about like, you know, better than taxi and all this stuff, right?

But it was very rider centric, it was consumer centric in that sense, right?

And so, you know, for a long time, I think Uber kind of took that too far, we actually have various like drivers are commodity, you know, blah, blah, and they had to flip that back and start, you know, really investing more on the driver side of the marketplace.

But you look at doordash, and it's like, you know, Tony grew up in his parents restaurant kitchen, and, you know, the doordash thesis was how can we help small businesses be more successful and delivery with just the first instantiation of that sort of meta purpose of doordash, right?

And so they're much more merchant centric, as opposed to consumer centric, right?

By the way, the consumers interest is some of Uber that started with rides, then translated to eats, right?

I think when Uber started with eats, it was like, well, we just want Lenny to have some great Thai food and, you know, sushi and have some options.

But selection is, is a means to Lenny having a great, you know, your experience, whereas doordash with their merchant focus is like we want every Thai restaurant in the city to be successful and beyond doordash.

So their motivation for selection is we want all of the merchants to thrive and survive.

And so that happens to give you better selection as a result, but the motivation was very different, right?

So the analogy I use is like, Uber is to Amazon as doordash is to Shopify, that makes sense, right?

Amazon more consumer focused, Shopify is obviously very merchant focused.

And by the way, either of those, again, there's no right or wrong, is a fine strategy.

They're both great companies.

And I actually don't know if you could do both, right?

Like, consumers and build all the merchant restaurant tech and, you know, maybe with enough resources and time, but that would lose focus.

So it's like, there's a trade off there.

Yeah. Yeah, that's like Airbnb, there's always this, should we optimize for host?

Should we optimize for guest?

And there's always this like, this time guests are most important.

All right, right now host more money and make these trade off decisions in marketplace.

So it's interesting that at Uber, your insight there is Uber is always very rider focused and doordash from its DNA was very merchant focused.

You also talk about a doordash, there's this mentality of just like going before figuring out where to go.

Is there anything more there that might be helpful either as a cautionary tale or is a lesson?

Yeah, I think it's, it's a balance.

It's back to like, I don't want to deliberate and pontificate for weeks on end about which door I could run through.

And then I want to go to the other extreme and just like, you know, spend 30 seconds thinking about what to do and then just go, go, go.

So it's like finding that that kind of happy medium.

If I had to pick one, I'd rather bias towards running through a wall than not doing anything, because you still get learning from that and you either make progress or you don't.

And that gives you feedback and you can run through another wall as a result.

So I think the biggest failure case is probably erring on the other side of deliberating too long without action.

What about Waymo? What's something that you took away from that experience as a thing that you want to do more of or something you want to try to avoid?

You know, Waymo is, you know, you've probably seen people in San Francisco, right?

They're, they're quite prolific now in terms of, you know, they're all over San Francisco and you see them all the time.

And I'm not sure I can't remember the last time I saw one toad.

So, you know, they I don't want to say that, you know, they've solved self driving, but they are, you know, obviously driving at scale with very minimal, at least real world intervention, like, you know, you can't tell by looking at the cars, how many humans behind the scenes might be, you know, helping

provide guidance to the car or whatever.

But, but yeah, I would say what's really interesting about Waymo is they've, they've largely solved the self driving piece, right?

However, they've done that, right?

And we, and in a complex environment like San Francisco, and they, you see them driving in fog and rain and puddles and like, you know, it's like, wow, that's pretty cool.

But I think what, what Waymo was learning, and I was trying to help them learn is that, you know, building a self driving car on a test track is a very different problem statement than scaling a fleet of thousands of cars.

And how do you operate them, clean them, charge them, maintain them?

And then how do you build a right share network?

Okay, we got to build an app and, and we got to acquire users and do classic growth stuff.

And, you know, think about that marketplace and matching and pricing.

And, you know, those are like very different skills, right.

And so it's like, you know, warning that those are different things and trying to hire for that and build culture around that, it was probably, was hard, honestly, you know, it's just like, you're kind of a different, you know, thing than the host organism, you know, most of the host organism is just

obsessed with like, perception and planning and, you know, kind of all the core autonomy pieces.

And you're like, the commercialization people are there, it's like, well, I'm gonna make money with this thing.

So I think, you know, it's that that's an example, right, your overall vision would say Waymo is to build Waymo one, you know, it's like, you got to just be mindful that it's more than just one, there's multiple pillars of that, right?

There's the self driving piece, there's, you know, getting a lot of cars at scale, financing them, operating the fleet, getting the demand, filling the cars with people, right?

And then, you know, it has to all come together, right?

Right. So yeah, it's so interesting that you were your, your title is lead product for commercialization of autonomous autonomous ride hailing at Waymo.

And now come full circle, we're at Uber.

It's that's going to be, in a sense, the way that people call Waymo.

And so it's so interesting that you've seen both sides of this.

Yeah, well, we'll see what happens.

I think, you know, the yeah, Uber got out of the autonomy business, right, when it divested autonomous technologies group, our advanced technology group.

And right now, you know, our costated, you know, strategy is to be an aggregator, right?

So it's like we are partnering with Waymo with cruise, emotional others in China, etc.

And then, you know, the idea is to have every vehicle on the platform, really, right?

So it's Thomas or not.

And then, yeah, use the power of the platform.

We have this big demand base, we have a lot of riders.

And so I think, you know, what you're seeing is, you know, Waymo and crew and others are like, okay, now that we've developed autonomy, you know, what's the path like to, you know, profitability for us, right?

And so they can go it alone and try to build a rideshare network.

And you know, Waymo is doing that with Waymo one.

And, but you know, it might, it turns out it takes a while, you know, it's funny, people, I feel like engineers too are always like, skeptical of why other people's engineering problems take so much work, right?

Like, you know, there'd be engineers at Waymo, like, why does Uber have so many thousands of engineers?

How hard can it be to a ride share app?

But you know, when you look at what made Uber successful, you know, what we've been perfecting for the last decade, a, the marketplace tech that I alluded to earlier, but also, yeah, like how we manage a large rider base and doing rider support and driver support and logistics and, you know, all the,

you know, helping finance electric vehicles and working with regulators and cities and making sure we have safe and accessible pickup points and like, on and on and on, right.

And it's like, you know, those are all the depth of the iceberg that you don't really realize or think of when you're like, Oh, I just pulled the right share out, right?

You know, Tesla publishes their stigma design and some, you know, earnings report and everyone goes crazy.

Like, wow, okay. Well, I don't want to bet against Elon because that sounds scary, but, but there is more to it than just the app and the autonomy.

So yeah, I think these companies will have an interesting question, right?

Like, do they go along, build their own ride share network to capture all the value, or do they say, well, I could just work with Uber and, you know, you know, have a faster path to, you know, high utilization of the vehicles, which unlocks financing and more vehicles and right, like that gets them

to scale faster. And so, you know, if you look at the landscape right now, it's a bit of both, right?

Like Waymo is obviously working with Uber in Phoenix, and we just announced cruise, we'll come back to some city next year, I think.

And then wait, but Waymo is also still building their own thing, right?

So they're kind of edging their butts at the moment.

I want to take us to a recurring segment on the podcast that I call Contrarian Corner.

I feel like you're gonna have a good answer here.

What's something that you believe that most other people don't believe?

One is back to kind of being aware of your internal state and allowing emotions and thoughts is, you know, emotions in the workplace, you know, a lot of people have the thing of like, well, there's, there's no need for emotion in the workplace, right?

We're going to be logical.

We're going to be data driven, you know, like, you know, keep your feelings at home.

Just, you know, show up and presentation in JM mode.

And I guess, in my experience, there's this thing around like whole body intelligence and like whole body yes, which is yes, there's signal from the head and logic and data and, you know, left brain reasoning are amazing, and it could be great.

But there's also like, like heart and like gut, right?

And like there's, you know, to me, what is an emotion, it's just energy moving on the body, right.

And often, it's correlated with a thought too, as well, like, you know, I might have a thought that creates fear and so forth.

But like, to me, there's wisdom and emotion, right?

And I can, I can start to access like noticing the more like, where do I feel sadness in the body?

I notice I feel fear, you know, in the kind of center of my chest, and then sadness is like a sinking delay in my stomach.

And I notice when I'm angry, my jaw gets tight, my eyes furrow a little bit, right?

And so, you know, those are common ones, but you may have your own little signatures of like you pick up, you know, where Where is joy?

Where is creative energy?

Where is fear or sadness, anger, and then noticing those in a meeting or in a conversation review, and actually, if you're if you're willing, even just voice of other people, it's like the next step.

Let's start with just, you know, acknowledging it to yourself.

And so for me, the wisdom of emotions is, you know, fear is something wants to be paid attention to, right?

Like if there, there can be the saber tooth tiger, you know, is not really Dara disapproving of me, whatever, I shouldn't be afraid of that.

But there are times where fear is applicable, there might be fear around, like, you know, let's say back at Waymo, you know, you're, you want to be really intentional about safety, and you want to be super, you know, they're, that's one of the things I love about Waymo is they're very committed to having

a super strong safety record.

And so there might be fear around that we really consider all the edge cases of what might happen if the dog runs in the street or a ball or a child or whatever.

And you might see, wow, fear, it's like, great, that's the wisdom of that is something wants to be paid attention to and listen to.

Great, right? Sadness for me is something wants to be let go of, right?

There's a morning, there's a letting go of like, I had an idea or vision for the future that will no longer be because, you know, whatever, something happened, other people don't want to do it, just do that.

But it could be a vision of a relationship, it could be a vision of, you know, what you thought your life would look like, you know, whatever, we all go through those sorts of things.

And, there might be micro moments of sadness of like, wow, that feature didn't work, you know, it's like, I really wanted it to be successful.

I just let go of that to welcome the sadness, right?

Anger to me is something is not of service to me, or my people or my mission or whatever I'm up to.

And enjoy is like something wants to be celebrated, right?

Like, you know, we had a great win.

We nailed the OK, are we had a great product launch?

Like, you know, it's a lot of times we spend too much time moving back into the next, okay, let's set another goal, you know, it's like, it's okay to stop and celebrate.

And then like creative energy is like something wants to be born into the world, right?

It's like what it's almost like, I'm gonna burst an idea or vision or, yes, a new product thing.

And then, you know, that, you know, just tuning into that.

So yeah, I would say welcome emotions, maybe even talk about them, God forbid, in the workplace, you know, like, I imagine it instead of having an OKR review, where like, you're behind Target, and everyone's like blaming other people, and like, you know, you could tell everyone's kind of fearful.

If someone was just like, Wow, I, I noticed that I just feel fear around this, everyone was like, Wow, I feel fear too, right?

Like, I would just totally change the tone of the conversation.

So the advice here is bring your emotions into work.

Like don't let emotions that can the what most people believe is leave your emotions at home, don't bring emotions into the workplace.

And what you found is they actually can make you more effective and makes like your teams more effective.

And even talked about it helps you make decisions, and more challenging, right?

Because your gut and lizard brain almost tells you things that you should pay attention to.

Totally. I love that.

Okay, so I want to close with a question that is rooted in something that you shared with me when we were chatting about this podcast that I think is going to be helpful to a lot of people.

What have you found to be keys to a successful, impactful, rich, fun life?

It's a great question.

And I think lots of people have, you know, different prescriptions for that.

And I don't claim to have, you know, the one truth around that.

But the first thing I would say as a meta observation is, you know, I spent a lot of time thinking about objective functions, right?

We design algorithms to do matching and pricing and think about short term effects and long term effects.

And, and so I really ingrained in this idea of like, we have an objective function for our life.

And then like, the problem is that a lot of us aren't conscious of it.

It's just kind of like an implied OF that you, you know, inherited values from your church or community or what your parents valued or what you kind of learned to be good at.

And, you know, I do this for work and blah, blah, blah, I'm just kind of bobbing along.

That's why I love like Ray Dalio's principle thing where it's like, hey, write down your values, and your principles and get, you know, clear on what they are.

And, and, you know, or like Clayton Christensen wrote a great book, he's less known for he'd obviously known for everybody's dilemma, but he wrote a book called How Will You Measure Your Life?

And he was like, he was trying to answer this question of like, he teaches whatever, you know, MBA students at Harvard, and he's like, Wow, all these executives are super successful, they're like fortunate 500 execs, they're like, you know, most super successful.

But they're all like divorce, and their kids hate them.

And when their personal lives are like, very well, what's happening, right?

And so like, you know, one of the key insights he comes to is like, it's Sunday night, and you have the choice of, you know, playing with your daughter, you know, when you're reading a book or playing a game, and and you have a presentation to Dara, you know, on Monday, and he's like, Oh, I could make

the slides a little bit better.

And you know, to go practice, or you know, knock out some emails or whatever it is.

And so the way he basically found was like the type A exactly, you know, successful people are very short term OF driven, they're like, well, presentations tomorrow.

And that can either go great or okay, based on Sunday night.

Whereas like, my daughter will be here, I'll play with her next week.

And that's, and the problem is, is in the cycle, or it's like, okay, you start working every Sunday night, and then years and years go by, and suddenly you don't have a relationship with your daughter who's not a teenager.

And it's like, but like, I think we're just not conscious of that.

So to me, the first piece of advice would be get clear on your objective function.

And one way that I've gotten clear on is like trying to think about it from future me, right?

Because like, five years from now, I'm not gonna give a shit if I made the presentation slightly better.

But I'm gonna care a lot about what kind of relationship I have with my daughters.

And like, that means that the next action, the next thing I do today and tomorrow, that those will translate into the relationship with her right like that.

And I think a lot of us are just tuned into that, you know, this, you know, I love the stoic stuff, you know, you know, being mindful of death, you know, Seneca Marcus Aurelius, all those great ones, not to be like morbid, just like, again, most of us just aren't really tuned into an awareness that our

lives will come to an end.

And we kind of avoid that, right?

We try to pretend like we're gonna look forever and just not think about it.

And the horror of it is that we succeed, right?

We mostly manage to just go live our life and eat ice cream and go to work and go on vacation and do what we do.

And that can lead us to doing things that ultimately don't matter in the long run, right?

And like, you know, focusing on the wrong things.

And so to me, it's like, you know, an awareness and mindfulness that our lives will come to an end punctuates reality in a way that, you know, requires me to rethink my priorities, you know, stop wasting time on things that don't matter with people who matter, you know, like, this relationship, this,

this, this journey, it will come to an end.

You know, I'm actually just tearing up and feeling tingly just saying that it's like, even right now, come back to it.

How am I gonna spend my afternoon?

Am I gonna hug my daughters?

Am I gonna spend time with them after work?

Or am I gonna do email all night?

What would I wish I had done when I'm in my last breath?

There's a there's a quote that I heard once that really stuck with me that I think is gonna hit a lot of people really hard, which is the the only people that'll remember you working late every night is your kids.

Wow. Yeah. No. An important reminder.

Um, jam. We've covered a lot of stuff.

Is there anything else that you think might be helpful for people that you want to leave listeners with?

We just are, we're gonna have a lightning round coming up.

But before we get that we ended in a really powerful, impactful note.

Is there anything else along these lines that you think might be helpful for people that you want to leave them with?

The one thing I'd encourage folks to do out of all of these we talked about is to see if you willing to commit to breaking out of victim consciousness and mentality, right?

And it's not to say there aren't victims of the world.

There are real justices and things happening, but most of us, you know, I've experienced, you know, I often can fall into a trap of living my life at the effect of, right?

I'm at the effect of other people and what they do.

I'm at the effect of circumstances like COVID or Trump or whatever.

I'm at the effect of, you know, the conditions and circumstances of life.

And I feel like life is happening to me, right?

And so to me, the most empowering and radical kind of transformation that I've been able to cultivate and develop is shifting from that to a state of I am willing to take responsibility for how I see the world.

And I may not be able to change the weather or the election or all that, but I can change how I'm being in relationship to it and choose to see it as a growth opportunity, learning, how am I co -creating it?

Even things that I play a small part in and justice in the world, how am I perpetuating that and being willing to see the world as, you know, I am the painter of my existence, right?

Like I think, you know, Viktor Frankl's Man's Search for Meaning is probably the best example of that.

Like he's in a super oppressive, you know, situation that is very horrific and tragic.

And the way he described his relationship with the people in the camp and the guards and he was given, he talked after he was freed and the amount of compassion, empathy he had for his oppressors was like just like amazing.

So I'm like, well, if he can do that in the face of those conditions, I can show up differently in a product review or in a conversation with my partner meeting or whatever it is.

Yeah. Yeah. I think just that skill alone is such a powerful unlock for a lot of people instead of here's all the things that I don't give and here's all the things that are setting you back and all the things that are hard for me versus other people.

Shifting to here's like I need to take responsibility for my own success and no one else will.

And just taking agency is a really powerful thing.

It's easier said than done.

You know, there's a lot of hardships.

People have a lot of things that they don't have that other people have that are hurting their career and hurting their ability to be successful.

But still, the more you can take responsibility and have agency and unless you have this victim mentality, I 1000 % agree.

There's so much power there.

So that's an awesome lesson to end on.

With that, we've reached our very exciting lightning round.

Jam, are you ready?

I'm ready. Let's do it.

Okay, first question, what are two or three books that you recommended most to other people?

In the realm of the soft skills and conscious leadership, the best one is The Fifteen Commitments of Conscious Leadership.

I'm Daniel Chapman and Jim Duthner.

And those were my kind of early coaches and teachers, I'm you know, almost 10 years ago.

And I still, Diana is still my coach.

So I think that's a fantastic book that will go into more detail about some of the things we talked about around, you know, fear and threat versus trust and drama triangle and all that great stuff.

That'd be one that definitely recommend first.

Another one more on the content world is I think you had Nancy on your podcast at one point.

Yeah. I love her book, Resonate.

I know she has some other ones, too on slide design stuff.

But like, what was so cool about that, I gave it to PMs all the time, when I'm trying to help them develop their communication storytelling and presentation skills.

Yeah, she goes through like those TED talks.

And Martin Luther King, I have a dream, and I go to the moon and basically, you know, make the spark line against it to understand, you know, this constant of resonance with the audience, right.

And it's actually a great skill for like, you know, back to vision and North Starring, you know, she said what all these things do is right, they alternate tension between the world as it is, and the world as it might be.

And it's like, you know, here's that beautiful future of transportation, San Francisco, blah, blah, blah.

And then, but here's why it sucks today.

Like, all the problems and this and that.

But here's how I could look in a few years.

And then, you know, you're creating that tension in the audience at the end, it's like, sweaty palms.

And like, I want to build that future.

You know, what do you need?

You need money, time, resources, you need money to join your company, like, great, you know.

So anyway, Resonate, Nancy Duarte, great book.

Those would be some of the top two that I recommend.

There's not one specific book, but I really love Alan Watts's books.

If you're into like, you know, he was one of the first people to articulate and kind of import Buddhism and that sort of Eastern thinking into the west.

And he just has a very satirical, comical sort of not thinking myself too seriously style.

And it's like the way he explains a lot of those concepts.

So that'd be another one.

He also has an amazing voice if you listen to recordings of him with music.

It's just just so fun.

Totally. Actually, Sam Harris is waking up out, you know, that has the entire, he worked with I think, I would want to sign.

So the waking up out has all like 80 or 100 hours of recorded hours lectures.

Oh, yeah. I've been there's YouTube videos.

There's some awesome YouTube videos of him that are worth watching.

We'll link to some of those in a minute.

Nancy Duarte, she shared exactly that lesson on the podcast that she had that we had together.

So if you don't want to read the book and listen to her give this tactic of this way to communicate a vision, you can listen to that episode willing to it.

Next question. Do you have a favorite recent movie or TV show you have really enjoyed?

Yeah. The last movie I really enjoyed was Inside Out 2, My Kids, which is very consistent.

I can see why you'd love that.

Yes, consistent with the emotional awareness and allowing the different emotional parts.

And I don't want to spoil the movie maker, no one has seen it, but it's a very simpatico with that lesson of like, you can't just let one emotion run the show.

They all have wisdom.

You know, the first one, right, sadness, joy learning that sadness is necessary, right?

It's all about integration and kind of, you know, but it's beautiful the way kids can understand it.

And it's like, it's a way to teach emotional literacy to your kids.

So I think what they've done there with those Inside Out movies is just like brilliant.

Do you have a favorite product you've recently discovered they really love?

It could be an app could be some physical.

Yeah, so H sleep, you know, as a smart mattress company, they're on their third or fourth route now.

But it has like, it's like a temporary mattress, or you can put their cover on any mattress.

But it has a cover that has little like tubes of water.

And then it has like a little computer thing.

And you fill water in an app.

And basically, what you do is you program it and it learns as sensors, it can measure your heart rate, your HRV, body temperature, all that.

And it you're basically trying to program a temperature curve to help you maximize your REM sleep and deep sleep and get more value out of the sleep that you do have.

And so for me, it's like, you know, super cool early for deep sleep.

And then it warms you up as you want to wake up, which is like, you know, jolter mental arm and all that.

But it's, you know, back to my thing about like wanting to, you know, show up with, you know, the right mindset and energy and aliveness, having really high quality sleep is a really key part of that is like, if I don't sleep well, you know, they didn't get enough sleep or didn't sleep well, like you're

already starting off a bad foot.

So yeah, if you haven't checked out each sleep, great product, no, no endorsement fee for me.

And what's cool about it is it tracks your sleep, it gives you all these stats, like instead of wearing a ring, it gives you all the stats about your sleep quality.

And there's a guy Brian Johnson, if you follow him, he's like this help that get this guy that's trying to stay alive as long as possible.

And he, he had a perfect sleep score for six months in a row.

Set the record. Yeah, he's, he knows what he's doing over there.

Okay, two more questions.

Do you have a favorite life motto that you often come back to think of find useful and work or in life?

Yeah, I probably have had different ones of the years.

The one right now that really serves me is there's a there's this track track called sit around the fire.

If you john Hopkins, but it's on is on Spotify, Apple music, but it's basically music with one of Ram Dassa's talks, what's right now knocks.

And so the monster that's been really serving me recently is the very first part of that, which is he says, beyond all polarities, I am what the judgments and opinions of the mind, be the judgments and opinions of the mind.

And you exist behind that.

Awesome. So sometimes I have a abbreviated version of that where I'm noticing I'm activated, I'm clinging to an opinion, I'm arguing with somebody.

And they're like, I'm just like, beyond all polarities.

Just a brief version for my kids and they walk me, Daddy is so weird sometimes.

Beyond all polarities kids.

So funny. Oh, man, I there's another Ram Dassa line that I often use with my wife be her now which is the title of his book that everyone sees with the blue cover.

And I do that when she's like on her phone and we're doing some I'm like be here now.

Which is like, okay, okay, I'll put my phone away.

Yeah, yeah. Final question.

I was going to ask you about the line tracking and what you learned from that and you already shared an awesome lesson from that time.

So let me ask you something else.

I'll ask you about Travis any crazy fun, memorable stories of working with Travis.

Cole Kalanick, every saves last name Kalanick Kalanick.

Travis Kalanick. Yeah, yeah.

I'll share a quick one that's short, but but sweet, or hilarious to make.

Maybe less we've known.

So what we used to have the Uber office at 1455 Market.

Right. And so there was a one conference room we often do reviews with Travis and there wasn't the war room, whatever I was taken on those interior and no windows, but so this room had windows overlooking, what was that 11th Street, right?

So kind of 11th and Market.

And so we'd have like a presentation up on the projector, you know, some big screen, you're about to go through some of Travis and reliably every time he'd come in, he would close the blinds of the windows and make crowds we doing like it's not because there was glare like they were orthogonal to the screen.

And I want as like, why are you doing that?

He's like, I'm pretty sure Lyft has drones outside the windows of our office and they're spying on our presentation.

Well, whoa. Your parent, your competitor, paranoia runs deep, man.

Okay. Yeah. Yeah. Anyway.

It starts to mention a Lyft doing that I could see Uber doing that to Lyft.

Old Uber. Uber 1 .0.

Old Uber. Yeah. Wow.

That's amazing. It's like coaches and, you know, an NFL that are covering their lips always when they're telling and giving plays, just like, I wonder if people actually do that.

That's amazing. I look like, yeah, I get that.

You know, it's like high stakes.

You never know, might be a drone out there.

Great. Amazing. Jam, what a roller coaster of a conversation.

We covered so much ground.

I can't even name all the things we covered.

So let me just ask you two final questions.

Where can folks find you online and reach out if they want to work with you.

I know you work with folks.

Talk about that. And then finally, how can listeners be useful to you?

Yeah. Yeah. So I am occasionally on Twitter at nickelsjm, but I'll tweet a lot but maybe I should start.

But the best way to find more about my kind of thoughts and thinking on the soft skill stuff is a website called rhythm of being .com.

And, you know, I've got some blog posts up there that go into detail on some of these things.

And yeah, I do a little bit of coaching on the side with folks.

I do very little now.

My day job at Uber and my night job with my kids takes up most of my waking hours.

But, you know, for the right person and if you select spots, I can make time.

But yeah, that's the best place to find me is rhythm of being .com.

And then how can listeners be useful to you?

Well, in the spirit of welcoming and embracing feedback, you could most be useful by, you know, yeah, reaching out, telling me what resonated, what didn't, what was useful.

Where did your energy go up when I talked?

And where did your signal of where I'm, you know, back to tracking the life, right?

Where is the juice?

And then that way in the future, when I do other versions of this or other conversations, I'll pay more attention to the energy up stuff and kind of go more there and the energy down was like, okay, maybe that was interesting or didn't resonate.

Right, no problem. Jam, thank you so much for being here.

Thank you. Thank you for having me.

Bye, everyone. Thank you so much for listening.

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[Conscious Leadership: Navigating Strategy, Emotions, and Life's Objective Function]-[Becoming a conscious leader: Leading without fear, finding your life’s objective function, and getting better at vision and strategy | John Mark Nickels (Uber, Waymo, DoorDash)]

📋 Summary

Conscious Leadership: Navigating Strategy, Emotions, and Life's Objective Function

The Philosophy of Conscious Leadership

Embracing Emotions as Data

Strategy, Vision, and the "Mountain" Metaphor

Balancing Vision and Execution

Redefining the Life Objective Function

🎯Key Sentences

📝Key Phrases

📖 Transcript