Letter #282: Liz Tran (2024)
Thrive Capital Executive Team and Reset Founder & Executive Coach | CreativeMornings Speech
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Liz Tran is the Founder and an executive coach at Reset. Prior to founding Reset, she was a member of the executive team of Thrive Capital, where she created and led the Talent function as VP or Portfolio Talent. Prior to joining Thrive, she consulted for a variety of venture-backed startups as a People Ops and Talent Advisor. Before starting her consulting practice, she was a Director of People Operations at Turn. She started her career in People Operations and Talent Acquisition at Say Media.
Today’s letter is the transcript of a speech she gave at the New York chapter of CreativeMornings in 2024. In this speech, Liz introduces the concept of an agility quotient, or AQ, that should be assessed alongside IQ and EQ. She then walks the audience through how she works on agility with clients and herself—a framework called ABCD: Anchors (people, places, and routines that ground you in unsteady times), Bets (an action you take without knowing the outcome), Classroom (everything in life is a teachable moment), Discomfort (a sign you’re growing, changing, pushing yourself). She then emphasizes that this framework can be used for not just the big moments in life, but also the minor inconveniences and changes and surprises that people face on a daily basis. During the speech, she also shares a number of historical and personal anecdotes, as well as actively engages the audience with questions, group activities, and presence.
I hope you enjoy this speech as much as I did! For those who are interested in the idea of “speed,” I would also highly recommend Mike Cassidy’s talk Speed as THE Primary Business Strategy.
[Transcript and any errors are mine.]
Related Resources
Thrive Capital
Investors
Owners
Speed (Tactic)
Note
I will be visiting Europe for a few weeks in June/July, and have scheduled stops in London, Paris, Geneva, and Milan. I’m also planning to stop by a few other TBD cities/countries. If you’re in any of these cities, or have any suggestions for additional stops, please let me know! (DMs on Twitter open, or email me at kevin [at] 12mv2 [dot] com.)
Transcript
Hi everyone. Good morning! So as Tina mentioned, I am a writer and an executive coach. But a more important aspect of my personality that I want to talk about today is my identity as a Buddhist and as a spiritual person.
So we're going to start with a story that I learned when I was studying Buddhism. It starts in 1968 outside of Big Sur, California, where Shinryu Suzuki was talking to a group of students, and one of those students raised his hand and said, Suzuki Roshi, I love your work so much. I have been listening to you for years. But I have to admit, I don't understand what you're saying. Can you please explain Buddhism to me in a nutshell--just distill it into one sentence? And everyone in the audience laughed because of course, this is hilarious and ridiculous. This idea that you could take this 2,500 year old tradition, with so much depth and meaning, and reduce it to a handful of words.
But Suzuki was unfazed. He very calmly turned to the student and he said just two words: Everything changes. That's it. Everything changes. And then he moved on to the next question. And this--Everything changes--this is the fundamental nature of our universe that we live in. And what I mean by that is that no matter how much we want the world to stand still, for us to have this stability and security, and for everything to be exactly as we planned, that's just not how it works, right? The world is always shifting underfoot, and we, in response, are always shifting along with it.
And what's very interesting to note here is that there's more change, uncertainty, and unknown than ever before. Think about when Shinryu Suzuki was giving that talk in 1968, and compare that to life 20 years later, in the 80s, right? Of course, the fashion, music, culture is all different. But the daily experience of being an American, of waking up, having breakfast, going to work, coming home and having leisure time, wasn't really that much different. And think about you here right now in 2024, and consider what life was like 20 years ago. How stark right? The way that you go to work, the way that you work, the technology you use, how you spend your free time, is completely different. And so what that means is that we have to adapt to that and adjust to that.
And I want all of us to sort of experience what this means in our individual lives now. So if everyone can stand up and do an exercise with me just to model this out for everyone, that would be great. Okay, so I want you to stay standing, just keep standing, don't sit down yet, stay standing if in the past couple of years, you read something in the news where you're like, "This is completely unbelievable. I cannot believe this headline. This is insane." Okay, that's everyone, okay, that's ridiculous.
Okay, keep standing if a close friend or family member, someone who you know really, really well, actually surprised you was something that they did. You're like, wow, I was not seeing that. I didn't see that coming. Okay.
Stay standing if a significant financial expense that you did not anticipate popped up. Okay, we're in New York. This happens every day. We walk outside, we're like, where's my $100? It's gone. Okay.
Stay standing if you've learned a new skill or technology. Great.
Stay standing if you've changed a habit or behavior. Very good.
Stay standing if you had a major change in your personal life. Mine is right there. It's a baby. She's right--I guess she's not here. She disappeared. She was crying. Okay.
And then stay standing if you have had a major change in your professional life. Okay.
And everyone is still standing, by the way.
Stay standing if you have felt uncertain about job security.
Stay standing if you thought seriously about changing or quitting your career. Okay. People are like not just standing, but jumping up and down also.
And then stay standing if you felt unsure about what the future looks like for you. Okay.
Thank you. You can all sit down. But that's pretty, pretty extreme, right? This statement, feeling unsure about what the future looks like for you. I mean, I'm still standing. I feel that all the time. And what's interesting is that the rate of change is no longer linear, but it's actually exponential, as we discussed before, right? The difference between 1960 and 1980--linear. The difference between 2000 and 2020--exponential. And so if we feel this amount of change in our lives right now, how will we feel in five years from now? Right? Are we all just going to be running around in circles? So what do we do about this, too, as creative people? How do we continue to build, dream, and create in these times of incessant change?
The answer is agility. And agility is defined as the ability to handle change, uncertainty, and the unknown. And what I want to stress here is that agility is not just this kind of nice to have skill that we can lean on when things get hard. Agility is actually a standalone intelligence, similar to your IQ or your EQ. It is all encompassing. It touches every part of how you live. We're going to call it your AQ, your Agility Quotient.
And your agility quotient actually matters just as much, if not more, than your IQ or your EQ in these times of persistent change. And we define your AQ as growth mindset, right? We've all heard those buzz words before. It's about managing change skillfully, and also just as important how comfortable you are with just kind of dangling in ambiguity and unknown. And of course, IQ and EQ are also important, but just to illustrate how much AQ matters, I'm sure all of us can think about very smart, very talented people who we know, with very high IQ or very high EQ, who just seem to struggle with making life happen because they are too rigid. They do not have the agility that it takes to deal with this world that's always shifting underneath us. I am one of those people. Was, am. I struggle with this all the time, and I want to tell you a story that illustrates the interplay between these three intelligences.
So two years ago, I was writing my book The Karma of Success, and I was really leaning on my IQ and my EQ to do it. I was working full time--it was very hard. And so I read all these books about how to write. I read all these books about deep work, productivity, and focus, and I got so organized. I basically was like, Okay, I'm gonna work all day, I'm gonna time block all my meetings, I'm gonna put focus time on my calendar, I'm gonna listen to brain supportive music, and I'm gonna go, go, go--like, work, write, work, write, sleep, read more books. And it kind of worked, right?
I also had a good EQ situation going. My friend Carla, who is here, she got a group of writers together, and we would talk about what we were experiencing, and they were sort of my support system. And by the time I was about six weeks out for my deadline--so when you write a non-fiction book, you get a whole year to write it after you've sold the concept--so I had spent more than nine months doing this, and I had successfully written about 80% of my book. And to celebrate, I went to Carla's house in California, where she convened our group of writers. And this is a picture of us there. And as you can see, it's just a beautiful setting, and underneath these cotton candy colored skies and these vistas--and what you don't see in this picture are jackrabbits and road runners hopping all around Carla's property. And I actually had the time to reflect, because I had been Go, go, go, do, do, do, for more than nine months. In that moment of reflection, I could step back, look at my writing--and I realized something very important. And that was that my book was not very good.
It was actually terrible. It was horrible. There was like no underlying premise, it didn't make any sense, and then it was not compelling. You read the first chapter, and you just think, Who cares? I don't want to read this anymore. I wrote it. It was about my life. So that's how uncompelling it was for me. And I think I knew this--I actually knew it, I could feel it. But when one is on that hamster wheel of life and just running, running, running, running, running, not questioning if what they're doing is adapting to the situation, and that's where you get stuck, and that's where I was. And so that night, it was 10pm, I was getting ready for bed, I had this revelation. I woke up the next morning, went up to my friends, and I said, I'm gonna change everything. I'm gonna throw out this book. I'm gonna change the title, change the premise, it's all done, I'm gonna get rid of all of it, start fresh.
And I was so clear about what I wanted to do, but there was so much doubt that crept in. First, I wondered if I might be self-sabotaging.It's like this big goal--I dreamt about writing a book for years--and I wondered, Is this me just making up obstacles in my own path, preventing me from getting this thing I really want, because I don't believe secretly that I'm good enough? Could that be it? I also thought about my editor and my publisher, who had purchased a certain version of this book, and now I was going to hand them something else, potentially, if I could write it in six weeks, and I wondered what they would say about that.
And so at that juncture, I had two choices. There are two paths diverging, and I could either stay rigid, continue down the path where I was going--I had written 80% of the book, I could do the rest in a couple weeks. I just had 10,000 more words. Did I keep going that direction? Did I keep going with this book proposal that I worked on for two years and sold? Or would I become agile, and use this new reflection, use this new information to change course?
And obviously, you know what I did, because I'm talking to you now about agility and not rigidity. And so I went home and I started working on a brand new version of this book. Six weeks from my due date.
And this is what my house looked like at the time. So we didn't have very many walls, but we also had very little internet too. So we had bought this house, we're like, This is a great deal. And then we realized that the person who owned it was still on DSL, like, literally, connected to the phone system. And so we were able to have Comcast come in and install a little bit of internet very close to the road. But unfortunately, there was not a domicile on that patch of grass that one could sit in. There was not a house there.
So my husband went on Amazon, and he ordered me this tent, and then he put a desk in there, and he woke me up, and he was like, I've got an office for you! And I went inside, and I was like, oh, okay. It's very sunny in here, so when the sun shines directly on it, it actually--the light color magnifies the sun, and then you're sitting in a sauna. And there's obviously no heating and cooling, because it's a tent bought off of Amazon. And then on top of that, too, we had to run these extension cords, 200 feet of it, to be able to get power. You can also see a porta potty in the background, behind those trees. And because it was a shelter in the middle of the forest, this family of daddy longlegs moved in, and I was like, Okay, great. These are my co-working space people right now. And I wrote. And I wrote and I wrote and I wrote.
And even though the situation was unideal, I finished the book in six weeks, which is amazing. Thank you, thank you. And then I sent it to my editor, and I may have downplayed what I had written, but I was like, Hey, small shift. Tell me what you think. And then she wrote me back, and she said that it was one of the best manuscripts she had ever read from a first time author, which was very sweet.
The moral of the story is that agility is not fixed. You can grow your AQ, because if I can do it, and I'm an extremely structured and naturally rigid person--ask my husband, like that is just the way I am. I'm very hard headed, I have strong opinions, and I stick with them. But if I can do it, then obviously you all can do it. You can definitely do it.
And I'm going to talk to you about how I work on agility with my clients and for myself. So it's actually very simple. There are four skills that I'm going to teach you today: Anchors, Bets, Classroom, Discomfort. They're very simple.
The first one is anchors. Anchors are people, places, and routines that ground you in unsteady times. So think about a boat. What does a boat do when it's in turbulent water and rough seas? It drops an anchor, and that grounds it. And we all do this naturally. We pick the people who help us feel safe. We choose the places that feel like home. And we create routines for ourselves that help us feel a semblance of control in this crazy life that we live in. But the issue is, that when things get all wild and everything is changing and uncertain, we sometimes forget to do this. We drop our anchors. We forget about them, and we lose track of our people and places and routines, and sometimes we withdraw. And so this skill is about simple awareness and recognizing, Hey, actually, in these unsteady times, maybe I need to balance out all this turbulence with some grounding.
When I was writing this book, I obviously had my people. I had my husband who got this tent for me. I had my friends, Carla, and the people who were in that writing group with me. I had the place. It was that tent. And even though it was so imperfect and so impermanent, it was this haven amongst all this stress of construction and noise from my own mind.
And then finally, I had routines. Every morning, before I would write, I would wake up, I would do 15 minutes of yoga, I would do 15 minutes of Pranayama, and then I would read one chapter from my favorite writing book. And that very simple 45 minute routine enabled me to feel like I had something--I had something steady.
The next agility skill are bets. And just like when you go to Las Vegas and you go to the roulette table and you're like, Okay, I'm gonna put $50 down on black, a bet is an action that you take without knowing the outcome. And when things feel like they are changing around us, we tend to not want to bet on ourselves. Because we want things to remain steady and stable, because we cannot bear more change than we're already experiencing our lives. But actually, what we need to do is the opposite, because bets are actions, and actions propel us forward. And so the only way to move through change is to keep betting on yourself so that you can move to the other side. That story that I told you about the book is, of course, an example of a bet that I took. I did not know how it was going to go, to toss out 40,000 words I had written over nine months. But it worked. Sometimes bets work. Sometimes they don't. But bets can even feel as simple as being in a meeting, and you're not certain about what you're about to say, or you're not sure what the reaction will be if you speak up, but you do it anyway. So bets, big and small, we can take them every day, and we should.
The third agility skill stands for Classroom. C is for classroom. And essentially this means that everything in life is a teachable moment. I think about this quote from Pema Chodron--does anyone know her? She's a Buddhist nun. Okay, great. Very spiritual room. So Pema Chodron said something that I think about all the time, and she said: Nothing goes away until it teaches us what we need to know.
Nothing goes away until it teaches us what we need to know. What that means is that we will continue to experience the same chaos, the same change, the same churn, until we learn the lesson that it's trying to give to us. And I had an argument with my brother the other day. Obviously, we're siblings, so you know how siblings are--sometimes we get along, sometimes we don't get along, and it's not unusual for us to disagree. And I felt myself pulled into the same pattern of being annoyed at him, blaming him. And then I realized, No, there's something here that I have not learned, and that is why this keeps happening over and over and over again. And so when we think about this agility skill and when we actually learn that everything is a teachable moment, then it shifts. Our relationship to change, uncertainty, and the unknown goes from one of fear to one of actual excitement, like, what can I learn here?
And finally, the last agility skill is discomfort. This is everyone's least favorite. No one likes to feel uncomfortable? No one wants to feel challenging feelings and sensations. We want to be happy. We just want to feel meaning and happiness in our life. Is that too much to ask? But something that is really important here is that we need to reframe discomfort in order to be agile. And when you feel that pop up, where you feel uncomfortable, you feel like you're not good enough, you feel over your skis. It's not a sign that you're deficient or bad. It's actually a sign of the opposite, that you are really good. You're growing, you're changing, you're pushing yourself--to the point where you feel uncomfortable.
I went to yoga class yesterday, which seems like a very simple, basic thing, but I haven't been in months because I just had a child, and it's taken up a lot of time with work. And so I went to yoga class, and I used to be great at yoga--I studied yoga at an asharam for two months of my life, and I went to this class, and I was really bad, like the teacher kept coming over and being like, Are you okay? I was like, Yeah, I'm fine. I was sweating profusely, and I was so uncomfortable, and I was so annoyed that I was there. I was like, Why am I here? I should be working right now. But then I remembered, No, this discomfort is a good signal. This is signal that I'm growing and I'm changing. And so this is actually the agility scale that I dislike the most, but that I use the most, because I often do feel uncomfortable--and I remember, Oh, wait, this is a moment to celebrate myself, not to critique myself.
So these are the agility skills: Anchors, Bets, Classroom, Discomfort. And we can, and should, use them not just for these big moments of change in our lives, but also all the minor inconveniences and the minor changes and surprises that fall in our laps every day. Because, why?
Because everything changes. This is the fundamental nature of our universe. And what I love about these two simple words, is that when you see them, your reaction to these words dictates everything about your agility. So when you see the two words, Everything changes, you have three options.
One, on the red column, you could say, Everything changes. I'm just going to ignore it. That's actually what I did with the book for the first nine months. I knew it was not working. I knew that my vision was changing when it was put on paper. But I just thought, I already have a plan. I'm just going to keep going. I'm going to ignore all the signal. And it put me in a pretty precarious situation, until I went to California with Carla.
The middle road is to just deal with it. Things are changing in your life, the unexpected happens, and so you just say, Okay, I'm gonna just handle it. Gonna problem solve my way through this. But I'm not gonna enjoy it, I'm gonna complain about it, and it's not gonna be fun. I do that a lot.
And then the final path, the one that we're talking about today, is embracing it. You see that everything is changing. There is so much unknown, so much uncertainty, so much ambiguity, and you just accept it. Say this is great. Let's go.
So let's all practice, together now, shifting into this mindset of Everything changes and I embrace it. So I'm going to count to three, and then after I say three, I want everyone to say together with me, Everything changes. 1, 2, 3. Everything changes. Beautiful.
Okay, now we're going to say--we're gonna do the same thing, but we're gonna say, Everything changes, and I embrace it. 1, 2, 3. Everything changes, and I embrace it. Perfect.
Okay, so now we're gonna do the last one. And you're gonna say, I love change, and change loves me. Okay, 1, 2, 3. I love change and change loves me.
Yay. Okay, thank you. That's all I got. Thank you very much.
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Wrap-up
If you’ve got any thoughts, questions, or feedback, please drop me a line - I would love to chat! You can find me on twitter at @kevg1412 or my email at kevin@12mv2.com.
If you're a fan of business or technology in general, please check out some of my other projects!
Speedwell Research — Comprehensive research on great public companies including CSU, META, CPRT, CSGP, AXON, ABNB, and interesting new frameworks like the Consumer’s Hierarchy of Preferences and the Piton Network.
Cloud Valley — Beautifully written, in-depth biographies that explore the defining moments, investments, and life decisions of investing, business, and tech legends like Dan Loeb, Bob Iger, Steve Jurvetson, and Cyan Banister.
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Compilations — “An international treasure”
Memos — A selection of some of my favorite investor memos
Bookshelves — Collection of recommended booklists.
I’ve long loved what Liz has put out into the world. Reading this was a reminder to send her a note and make sure she knows :)