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Kevin Weil: Better People Make You Better

Name: Kevin Weil: Better People Make You Better
Uploaded: 2017-05-12T17:23:18+00:00
Duration: 1 min 55 s
Channel: GHION.AI
Description: In this solo reflection, Kevin Weil emphasizes that no achievement is created in isolation; success is fundamentally a product of the people and teams…

12 May 2017 · 2 min

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1:55

In this solo reflection, Kevin Weil emphasizes that no achievement is created in isolation; success is fundamentally a product of the people and teams around you. He argues that surrounding yourself with individuals who are smarter, more skilled, and who challenge you is the most effective way to improve. Drawing on his decade‑long experience at Twitter, Weil describes how each new role brought unprecedented responsibility and rapid growth, which felt intimidating at first. By seeking out mentors and peers who were already handling similar challenges, he gained confidence and perspective. He credits his personal and professional development to continuously learning from others, exposing himself to diverse ways of thinking, and deliberately positioning himself among people who are better than him in various dimensions.

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People are everything. You— no one actually creates anything in a vacuum. No one actually does anything on their own. Everything that you accomplish, you accomplish with teams. And success is surrounding yourself with other great people who are smarter than you, who push you, who are better than you at lots of things. I think academically maybe I realized that, but you don't, now we've lived it for 10 or 11 years, everything you accomplish you do because you're surrounded by great people. So finding ways to surround yourself by the best people you possibly can, the smartest people, the people that push you to be better, is probably the best thing you can do. It's also like as I grew within Twitter, every job that I had was the biggest job that I'd ever had. I was managing more people than I'd ever managed. I had more responsibility than I'd ever had before. And it was happening really fast and it was intimidating. It's always that question of, well, I figured out how to do this job, but now I've got this responsibility. Uh-oh, I'm not sure I can do this. You go talk to other people and you realize you're doing this job, but there's somebody up here who's like doing this, and if they can do this, I'll figure this one out. So people also give me, personally, people give me a lot of perspective, and they, I don't know, I feel like the more I've been exposed to different ways of thinking, different approaches to the world, realizing, I don't know, I don't think I would have been able to do the things that I have if I hadn't, like, focused so much on learning from other people and being around people who are better than me in every possible way.