Today's episode of the Serial Learner podcast I'll be discussing intentional naivety. Now the word naivety, we generally have a connotation that is negative, we think of being dumb, or being less knowledgeable, things that we wouldn't consider to be advantages. But on today's episode I will be making a case for intentional naivety and even the need to practice naivety. To make my case, I have a few exhibits that I'll be pulling from.
The first one is Steve Jobs Stand for Commencement Speech. This is one of the most recognized, well-known commencement speeches of all time, and for good reason, it is truly phenomenal. During Steve Jobs Commencement Speech, he shares about the whole Earth magazine that he read while growing up. A highly reputable magazine, and the last issue they ever made on the backside of the magazine.
So the absolute last piece of information that they wanted to convey to the readers had to quote, stay hungry, stay foolish. This was above an old dirt road that led off into the distance. Now the words hunger, hungry, and foolish are going to have a generally negative connotation as well, which seems interesting to put those in the same bucket with naivety. But Steve Jobs himself, with conviction, implores the Stanford class to stay hungry and stay foolish.
He hits on this point again when he talks about his experience of being fired from Apple. He had brought on a different partner and was voted out of the very company that he had started, but he talks about it being one of the best things to ever happen to him. He talks about some victories in his personal life as well as starting two companies, one called Next, which was acquired by Apple and helped pioneer a lot of the technology that we now have today. The other was Pixar, which has gone into make arguably the most famous animated films of all time, the first being Toy Story.
Steve Jobs says none of this would have been possible without him having the opportunity to be a beginner again. He talks about being a perpetual beginner, drives innovation, and it is highly important that we seek this in our own lives. My second exhibit is a forum given at Brigham Young University, where I'm currently attending school, and this was given by a former Oracle executive named Liz Weisman. It's interesting that she starts out by saying she's going to make a case for ignorance.
She says she's nervous to do this because she is quite literally saying this on a university campus, a place where people are paying and working for the gathering of knowledge. People are trying and seeking to know more than they did know. To back up her case for ignorance, she shares her own personal experiences about building Oracle University. She was a young executive at the company, and her manager would even joke with her that she was not qualified for her job.
She would joke back that, why would you want to job your qualified for? There'd be nothing to learn. I thought it was quite a clever remark. But she digs into this a little more and says because of her state of being in a position she wasn't qualified for, she continually had to grow, continually had to innovate.
She was intentionally having naivety and actually drove her performance at the company. She later left Oracle and pursued research. She found with her research that when we gain experience tenure, that there's a lot of virtues and a lot of assets, but there's also a number of blind spots. She says this happens because we gain know-how and we start to recognize patterns and even develop shortcuts.
So people who have been working in a certain position for a long time or even a certain industry, they're going to have certain things they don't even think about because it's just so second nature to them. As a luxury to their brain, they don't have to continually think about certain aspects of the job. So someone who is a beginner, someone who is naive, just to use that word with a certain purpose, is going to lack those blind spots and possibly find ways to innovate that the expert wouldn't have found. To be a serial learner through our whole lives, we must practice intentional naivety.
Liz Wiseman describes a quote, rookie space. She says this exists in sports in our professional lives and that in this rookie space, we actually ask better questions. We are more alert. We listen more and we value and seek feedback.
So in this rookie space, this space of beginners, we're actually more able to bring in knowledge from outside sources and have a collectively innovative solution because we know that we don't know. We're in a state where we're not the ones that have to be expert. We don't have to show people we know a certain thing. We can pull from resources and be very precise and intentional about everything we do because to a certain degree, we're naive, we're a beginner.
So we want to really try and draw on this beginnerness even in stages of our lives where we might have more expertise. That's the only way we'll avoid certain blind spots that can be damaging or stagnating to our innovation. The last exhibit I'll use is from the book, The Upstart, which tells the story of the founding of Airbnb and Uber in parallel. This book really does a great job of amplifying the challenges that were faced by both of these companies and the reader just really emotionally engages with the founders of Brian Chesky, Travis Kalanet, and it's just truly incredible what they go through.
It's also great that they tell you stories side by side because you can see a lot of the similarities between the two companies. For example, both Brian Chesky at Airbnb and Travis Kalanet at Uber had to overcome different laws and regulations, right? With Airbnb, there are the zoning laws and the laws of how people can use their residential properties. In the case of Uber, there was a lot of transit laws in the style very directly with the taxi ecosystem, a very old and broken system in many cities of the US.
They also had to overcome challenges with different competitors that arose. Airbnb has Verbo, which is a company we still recognize, but they also had Couchsurfing.com, a company that not many people know about anymore. Uber has the company that used to be called Zimrides, it's now called Lyft, a name that a lot of people are familiar with, but they also had a company called Taxi Magic. That was a concern for a good amount of time.
The point I'm trying to make here with these companies is their level of naivety to the challenges that were ahead when starting out building these uniform companies aided the founders because they didn't get consumed by the overarching challenges all at once. They only had to overcome a challenge at a time. I'm not saying they weren't strategic, I'm not saying they didn't think long-term, but I believe it'd be very hard to look at all the challenges at once that lie ahead and think optimistically or positively like, oh, we got this. That's not what happened.
They had a certain level of naivety. They were idealistic and that's why it succeeded. They kept conquering obstacles, taking that next step forward, and these are two phenomenal companies that we have today. I love that Brian Chesky, Airbnb, on the Diaries CEO podcast, he shared a little bit of an email that he had sent to the entire Airbnb company addressing the importance of culture.
And in there, he says that he wants Airbnb to forever be run like a startup, like a world's largest startup, which to me implies that he wants everyone to really draw on this sense of beginnerness and this intentional naivety, even if they have a certain tenure at the company, because that's where innovation is found and that's where the blind spots are avoided. To close, I just want to share a quote from Walt Whitman, an American poet, that to be totally truthful, I discovered watching a scene from Ted Lasso, and the quote is be curious, not judgmental. I love Ted Lasso that he shares this quote from Walt Whitman explaining that people who underestimated him throughout his life were always judgmental. They thought they knew everything about everyone before they did.
And because of that attitude, they missed out on getting to know him on a more personal level, and you could say that they would miss out on a lot of different things in their lives if this attitude of judgment continues. The attitude of being curious means that you recognize I don't know everything. You can have this intentional naivety, this sense of beginnerness, and that really allows for connection with people, connecting with ideas, and learning on a much deeper level. I implore each of us to be perpetual beginners, to stay hungry, stay foolish, and to be intentionally naive.