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Erik: What role has reflection played in shaping your personal growth?
Ken: You know, there's that line about a self-reflected life is not worth living. I take some of that
to heart. When I have a challenge, I try to think about what role I've played in creating
it. Do you know what the fundamental attribution error is?
Erik: Tell me more about that.
Ken: Sure. It's a psychological phenomenon, right, that many people experience. And the
notion is that when something good happens, it's because I'm great. Right? And when something
bad happens, it's because the world is against me. Right? Or you know, it's your fault, basically.
Right? So you blame good things on yourself—Or you take credit for good things, but for negative
things, you attribute to the rest of the world. And that's one where, you know, when I think
about something, I really try to separate that out. I really try not to take too much
credit for the good, nor try to put so much of the bad, some of the negative factors on
the external world. I try to kind of have a much more balanced—I try to—because
I know about this I'm biased. I try to think about how to have a really honest assessment
about what my role in whatever the challenge was, was. And I found that helpful. And I
actually—it's actually my—almost my talking point for the year has been to tell people
about this. Because I have been in a situation in business where it happened with a vendor,
where they were blaming something on us that was—like their product failure. They're
like, well, you're not using the product right. Look guys, it's your product. Right? Like,
you know, why would you not take ownership of your product, and like blaming your customer
is not a good way to go, right? But—So I'd say that's kind of the—how I think about
reflection. I guess it's an empirical question if I do it enough or not, it's certainly it
seems to be okay but I think that you have to—especially as you get more senior, as
you get more senior, you really have to think carefully about what your role in things are.
And to make sure that you're having the appropriate amount of influence, how you're doing that
influencing, where you use more direct power, right? I used to be accused of being a bit
-- my elbows were too sharp. My elbows are probably always gonna be too sharp for the
level I'm at, but I think that my use of the elbows is much more surgical. Right? I'm not
like whacking them around, I'm more like—I'm more just going... And it was funny, I have
a staff member who works for me and he's—I—Do you know this notion in a—like World of
Warcraft in a multimassive, multiplaying—massively multiplayer role-playing game, you have roles,
right? And one of the roles that people have is they're called tanks, and a tank is basically
like a character that is designed to take abuse, right? So that while everyone else
is running around stealing the vorpal sword, you know, the enemy is beating on the tank.
Right? He is that guy. People just beat on him and he just takes it and takes it and
takes it. And he's—has much more—much higher emotional intelligence than I have,
right? His EQ is much higher. I think. Because he takes that stuff and he takes it with a
lot of equanimity, right? He's just like really cool about it. And somebody was taking advantage
of him. And I said, dude, they're taking advantage of you. He said, I know, what should I do?
I said, you gotta throw the elbow, man. Like so there are times when like being the calm
voice, right -- the tank, is not always the right thing, right? Sometimes you gotta go
a little bit on the offensive. So I've tried to be more—I've tried to kind of take actually
from him the "be cool," right? And I've tried to be a little more tank-ish. But I'm much
more surgical about my use of my elbows.