Brian Armstrong on the importance of disagreeableness if you want to do important things

Hook“What I’ve realized about a lot of people who I think are building important things in the world is that they’ve developed this high disagreeableness muscle where they’ve recognized that they’re not going to make everybody happy and they’ve made peace with it.”

He gives Mark Zuckerberg as an example.

“They realized at a certain point that whether I do the thing that I think everyone’s going to like or the thing that is more authentic to me, someone’s going to be pissed no matter what .So at the end of the day, I’m just going to do the thing that I think is right. And they’ve leaned more into authenticity instead of trying to say what they think people want to hear. And that does require you to have thick skin and some kind of high disagreeableness. And then they can actually do even more interesting stuff because they’re being themselves instead of trying to be liked.”

This is something Brian himself is even trying to work on. And of course there are limits — you don’t want to get to a place where you’re listening to nobody. You want people around you have your best interest at heart and to listen to them. But for people who don’t have your best interest at heart, you need to build the ability to ignore them.

“It’s a real superpower to care less what other people think — at least people who don’t have your best interests at heart.”

Full video: The Diary Of A CEO “Coinbase Founder: The Crazy Journey Of Building A $100 Billion Company: Brian Armstrong“ (Jul 2022)

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