Tony Fadell says pick a startup for what you'll learn, not the brand name. He frames your career as versions of yourself: form opinions, test them by doing, turn them into data. At General Magic early on, he took the lowest job and worked 80 hours a week to figure out what he actually wanted.
Questions this video answers
December 16, 2023.
General Magic.
About 80 hours a week.
Chapters
What is it you want to learn and who is it you want to learn from? Just like you pick a university, you're like, I want to go here for this expertise. I've heard about these programs, especially graduate, graduate studies. You go for a certain program with a certain set of people. Why don't you do that? When it comes to a, you know, a job, you just don't go. Or in a career, you just don't go and say, I just want to go work at Google, or I just want to work at Apple. You want to go to a certain team with a certain set of people and work with them on something that you're really committed to, curious about, and you want to learn about.
That's such. I just want to sort of comment that. It's such a. It's a subtle but a brilliant framing of just ask the question, what do I want to learn? And then see what career path is going to maximize that. That's so interesting.
It's the first question I ask anyone who interviews with me when I say I'm going to bring somebody on the team. First question is, what do you want to learn? I don't want the expert, like we talked about earlier, says, I'm the expert in this. You're going to hire me as the expert. We're doing something new. You're not an expert because we're not an expert either. What is it you want to learn?
And on the topic of learning, what is the best way to learn? Starting you go into this new place, into this new world, into maybe v1. You said you're building v1. I mean, the whole world is full of v1s or v zeros waiting for the v1 to come along. 0 to 1, 0 to 1. What. What's the process of that look like? What's the process of learning? How do you learn?
Well, let me put a framing and then we'll talk about that last piece I have now, looking back, especially writing this book, I have a version one of myself, a version two, a version three, a version four. I had a lot of opinions about myself and what I wanted to do. Sometimes those opinions, for certain people, those opinions are formed and they get the data from their parents and they go do what their parents told them to do or their surroundings. My opinions was like, I want to go and learn this. I'm curious about that. I made the 0 to 1 move. And then over time, by doing, I was refining those things and learning what I was really curious about and what I was really good about. Because I was getting data, and then I was like. Then I had another set of opinions to create version two of me, and then I would go and do that. So I was learning by doing. Starting with the opinion. You're not going to get any facts. You know, most people like, where do I make the most money for my position? They're trying to start with data, start with the why, what's your curiosity? What do you want to learn? And then follow that. I took the lowest job on the totem pole at, you know, at. At General Magic because I wanted to get in there to work with the right team. I didn't even know what they were doing right, but I thought that it felt right, right? I. I was barely living above the poverty line, working there, working, you know, 80 hours a week because it was so amazing to learn. Just like a college student, right? That's what I was doing. And then that's that. And then I learned more from that and then changed those opinions into data, and then I found other opinions. And so it's the same thing, but it was by doing right? The way you find out what you want to do in life is by figuring out what you don't want to do.
And the only way you find that out is by doing a bunch of.
