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The next philosophy came off of a flier I saw here
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that just really struck me.
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It was in actually in one of the dotcoms had a flier up in the basement of Gates
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that said, "You're brilliant, we're hiring."
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And this slogan works actually really well as a job ad.
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Like in the early days of Google they had this - when we were trying to hire people,
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our VP of engineering threw out this opportunity
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where we could all run an ad, and he had a competition
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for who could come up with the best hiring ad, and I just
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ripped off this slogan and put it on the top of the result page,
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and I think it's really funny, because people - it had the highest click through rate
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of all the ads we put up there, like a factor of 5.
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People just see it and they're like, "I'm brilliant, click!"
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And so it was really sort of like, you know, flattery really does get you everywhere, so....
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But, you know, the thing that I want to point out here
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is that it's really wonderful to work in an environment
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with a lot of smart people.
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One, because I think it challenges you to think and work on a different level.
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And the analogy I use for my own life here is that I had a piano teacher
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when I was in high school, and she had a daughter
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who was two years older than me, named Laura Beckman,
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and this interesting thing happened with Laura when she was a junior in high school,
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which is that she tried out for the volleyball team,
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and at the end of the trials the coach came to her and said,
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"You know, Laura, we have a tough case. You're really on the borderline of being varsity,
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so we're going to give you a choice: you can choose to be on the varsity team,
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but you're going to bench the entire season, or you can chose to go
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on the JV team and you can start every game."
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And most people, when they are faced with that choice,
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chose to be on the JV team and start, because everyone wants to play more games,
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and interestingly Laura picked the counterintuitive choice, and she said,
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"You know what, I want to go and play on the varsity team.
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"I remember everyone kind of scratching their heads at that.
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But what was interesting is a year later when everyone came back to try out for senior year,
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Laura made varsity with flying colors and actually ended up being a starter
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her senior year, and all the people who started on JV their junior year
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ended up benching on varsity their senior year.
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Which I think you guys can all relate that, you know, benching your senior year
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of high school is a lot worse than benching your junior year.
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And I remember talking to Laura afterwards.
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I said, "You know, well, what made you make that choice?"
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And she just said, "I just knew that if I got to play with the better players,
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that it would make me better, and that I would ultimately be able to grow
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and learn a lot."
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And I think the same thing happens on an intellectual level as well,
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and I just feel really lucky to be at Google where there's
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a ton of smart people to learn from, because I think it makes -
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they challenge you to think and work on a different level
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than you really thought possible, and the types of perspectives
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and interesting intellectual arguments they make really give you
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a whole new way of thinking about things.
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And it also has a lot of other nice properties, like I referenced earlier,
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which is that you can give them a lot of empowerment, and you
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don't have to have a lot of management or bureaucracy in the organization.