Notes on Roadtrips

Very importantly, this notion of ‘showing up with heartfelt intensity’ is not to be confused with working hard . Probably more importantly, it’s not at all asking people to work longer. It’s singularly about how you show up.

That thing that compels you all to obsess over the details others overlook, and do it with gusto — that’s heartfelt intensity.

Put most simply, heartfelt intensity is a variety of intrinsic motivation. Not the thing a person is motivated to do but the drive underneath it all that makes them tick, so potent it puts a bit of magic behind the eyes.

‘Passion for the road,’ as I’ve come to understand it, is a unique mood or motivation with which one approaches being ‘on the road’ and the specific style that they bring.

For my father, it has everything to do with freedom, also possibility; who you might meet and what you might find out there.

When we build software, it’s an opportunity to make people feel something. It doesn’t need to be anything major. I don’t think we’ll ever compete with desert sunrises. Just that we might make them smile, laugh, see or realize something they didn’t before.

To say it outright, even the most talented person in the world won’t do well here if they don’t have an interest in helping other people grow and succeed. The question you will be held most accountable for isn’t “how have you gotten better” it's “how did you make someone else better?” Better yet, how have you made the collective, the team, better?

On one hand, it’s the respect you give. Being ‘on the hook for the team’ means having a certain dedication to the potential in other people, specifically a desire to help it grow. Explicitly, this looks like being direct and honest in your communication, especially when it’s not easy. As anything otherwise would be a disservice. It’s helping others... See more

The hardest part to strike then, I think, is that you can’t be too careful, but you also can’t be too confident. Somewhere in between the two there’s this specific type of curiosity that we’re after, the key ingredient of which is humility. The kind that arrives at a new place, or a new problem and is willing to assume “I don't know" — but let’s fi... See more

For us, for once, I think the answer is actually very prescriptive. Before you take on anything, you pause and ask what could be? Create the space needed to break apart that everydayness and press on it for a while. Really press on it. Go on and dream a bit. Or as Toni Morrison says it “Dream, then think.”