10 lessons from my 10 years at Google
Friends,
Greetings from Brooklyn!
Last Sunday was Oscar night so this week, I caught up with some of the nominated films I hadn’t seen yet. I strongly recommend Another Round, Quo Vadis, Aida? and Minari. All three are deeply poetic explorations of the human condition.
10 years ago today was my first day at Google so this week I’m sharing 10 lessons I’ve learned in what has been a wild and wonderful ride.
If you enjoy this newsletter, why not share it with a friend?
Until next week,
Florian
10 lessons from my 10 years at Google
On May 2, 2011, I walked into a Google office for the first time.
I would have never believed that my journey would involve moving from Paris to London to San Francisco to New York. That I would get to build tools to help people have access to electoral information, train governments on how to use the internet to engage with their citizens, fund hundreds of social entrepreneurs, lead Google’s response to the refugee crisis and launch a program to train one million Americans with digital skills.
I could have never imagined meeting the brightest, kindest, most inspiring people and get to call them family.
And I certainly wouldn’t have believed I’d end up at a reception talking about tequila with George Clooney and his father. But that story is for another time.
For now, here are 10 lessons I’ve learned in the last 10 years.
Weekly Wisdom
The Food Timeline: This old school website created in 1999 is a treasure of historical facts about every ingredient and recipe you can possibly imagine. For example, the statement “Let them eat cake” attributed to Marie Antoinette to highlight her obliviousness to the misery of the French people, might have received more notoriety than it deserved. It turns out that 18th century brioche was nothing more than slightly enriched bread.
Up-cycling the New Yorker: I systematically fail to read the New Yorker. But I’m always enchanted by the covers and how well they capture our collective mood. So I decided to pay them a tribute by turning my pile of unread issues into a collage.
The limits of our intuition: Suppose you could tie a rope around the equator and added a meter of slack. How far off the ground would the rope be? Our intuition tells us adding a meter would hardly lift the rope off the ground. What’s a meter across the entire circumference of the globe after all? But that’s wrong. This example is a good illustration of how our intuition can trick us to hold on to wrong beliefs.
30 essays in 30 days: My friend Amit just concluded a challenge called “Ship 30 for 30”. The idea is to publish a mini-essay every day for 30 days. It’s intense. One of his big realizations was that instead of asking “What should I write about?”, a better question is “What am I curious about?”. My favorite pieces he wrote are about how to make a decision by flipping a coin, why reading recipes online is a terrible user experience and why earthworms come out when it rains.
Lateral Thought
You only are free when you realize you belong no place — you belong every place — no place at all. The price is high. The reward is great.
Maya Angelou
Damn Florian. The rope around the equator video really was crazy. What else am I certain about, but wrong?