REINVENT CAREER

“I look at my career as a spiral, not a ladder. I started as a French horn player, then became an economist, then led a think tank, and now I'm a professor of happiness. Each turn of the spiral allows for reinvention while carrying forward the lessons of the previous legs into a more expansive and meaningful context.”

“If you talk to product leaders three years ago, their day was largely moving information. The information mover is essentially going to become a dinosaur. Let me frame the way that my team is presenting the information to my boss so that that person can frame it to their boss' boss. Generally the function had become extremely focused on responsibility without authority.”

“You can't savor something that is infinite or always available; scarcity makes savoring possible because it forces you to pay attention to the present moment. If you have everything all the time, you end up with a kind of emotional numbness that prevents true satisfaction and the ability to appreciate the marginal value of your experiences.”

“The skills that used to be really valued in product managers are changing substantially. You have to find ability to increase pace. You've got to find that reserve. The next two years requires a lot of fire in the bell. The best people tend to be feeling great right now, but our industry is very much in stress.”

“In the next 12 to 24 months, we're going to see massive shedding of staffs and then massive rehiring. You might see a company shed 30,000 and hire 8,000, but the 8,000 people are going to all be AI first. The builders are going to have the time of their lives, but if you don't love building stuff, you're in trouble.”

“Twin studies show that about 50 percent of our baseline happiness is genetic, which some find depressing. But that actually means 50 percent is under our control through our habits and our choices. It is like being dealt a hand of cards; you can't change the cards you're born with, but you can certainly learn to play them more effectively.”

“Happiness is not a feeling; it's a combination of three macronutrients: enjoyment, satisfaction, and meaning. Most people mistake pleasure for enjoyment, but enjoyment is pleasure plus people plus memory. You need all three to have a balanced life, otherwise you are just gorging on the wrong ones in an age of emptiness.”

“I chose Catholicism over Orthodoxy because of the deep intellectual tradition and the way it fits into a rigorous philosophical framework. Religion shouldn't just be a vague feeling; it should be a commitment to a community and a set of practices that align with your reason and help you face the reality of death with clarity.”

“It's going to be chaos. Our industry is very much in stress. Nothing's constant. Everyone's in a state of alert. If you don't stay up in the next three months, they'll be like, oh, you're doing that thing that we stopped doing that three months ago. We don't do that anymore. Everything feels like everyone's in a state of alert.”

“What's changed is people are having fun again, particularly product folks, because they're able to build. They don't have to rely on as many people to have impact. There's much more of a direct connection to their ideas and their ability to test and connect their product instincts to their customers. In many ways, this is a complete renaissance for the product industry.”