The A-Side and B-Side of Life

Hello! This is your 170th Heuton Letter. Last week in Seoul (where I'm from), it snowed like crazy—even before the autumn leaves had a chance to fall. It was quite awkward seeing snow piled up thickly on the maple trees. ⛄️🍁

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A few days ago, I stumbled upon a great story in a YouTube video titled Scaling Duolingo, Embracing Failure, and Insight into Latin America’s Tech Scene. As you can probably guess in the title, it’s mostly about Duolingo and stuff.

This video was posted on Lenny’s Podcast channel, which is very popular among IT product managers like myself. The guest for this episode is Gina Gotthilf, who shares some really practical insights on how she grew the Duolingo app. So if you’re not a PM or marketer, you might not find it that interesting, so I wouldn’t really recommend watching the full video.

However, something Gina mentioned really resonated with me, so I wanted to share it in today’s letter.

Duolingo?

You’ve probably heard of Duolingo—it’s the #1 language learning app in the world. Personally, it’s almost like a role model for Heuton. To give you a hint on how impressive the app is, as of Q1 2024, the app reached 31.4 million DAU (Daily Active Users). Yes, “31,400,000 people” every day!

If you’ve used it, you’ll understand why it’s so popular. I’ve been practicing my French on Duolingo for 307 days in a row. And after all this effort, I can now perfectly say one sentence: “Je ne parle pas Français.” It means “I don’t speak French.”

Anyway, Gina Gotthilf joined Duolingo when they had about 3 million users and helped grow it to 20 million by the time she left. (How incredible is that!) Before Duolingo, she worked on growth at Tumblr, which was eventually acquired by Yahoo. In 2020, she handled marketing for Mike Bloomberg’s presidential campaign.

I mean, Duolingo alone is already jaw-dropping, but all these? It's quite a resume.

Story of K's life

Let me go sideways for a moment. It's a life story of someone we'll call "K" from now on.

K was born and raised in Brazil and originally wanted to be an actress. However, facing strong opposition from her parents, K gave up that dream and focused on studying. She wanted to attend an Ivy League school but ended up not getting into any of her top choices, so she went to a different university instead. However, K struggled with severe depression and eventually dropped out. Feeling lost after dropping out, things looked bleak.

After some time, K managed to get back into school and eventually graduated. But around graduation, a career counselor at the school said something greatly humiliating:

“What have you even done with your life? There's nothing to show for it.”

After graduation, K applied to dozens of companies to find a job. Most applications were rejected, but she landed an internship at a small-to-mid-sized company. Since she has been dreaming of living in New York, she took the job.

However, the company forgot to apply K’s visa on time, which made K go back to Brazil. Not discouraged, K tried to land another job in the US but got fired again soon after. Back in Brazil, K got another job but was laid off again. Even writing about this story makes me depressed.

Fortunately, K soon moved to a pretty decent startup. Thinking things were finally looking up, she faced another hurdle: the startup was still in its early stage and didn’t know how to wire her salary to Brazil. As a result, K didn’t get paid for six months, had to borrow money here and there. After some time passed the company was sold, leading to some layoffs—including K's. At that time, she was around 26. Man, what a life full of setbacks and layoffs.

You might have guessed it, this is Gina's own story.

The A-side and the B-side

Gina explains that life is like a CD with two sides. We have our great aspects (A-side), but we also have the not-so-great parts—the struggles, embarrassing moments, and things we want to hide (B-side). Naturally, we tend to show others our A-side, the highlights, to impress and attract attention.

But between those highlights are the “B-side moments.” Many people hesitate to talk about this, but Gina believes we should openly discuss it because most people's lives have more B-sides than A-sides.

Another key point is to recognize B-side as moments. You need to understand that while you have your B-side moments, they’re only temporary. Otherwise, you'll get too focused on B-side and can’t see your A-side, and might fall into a negative mindset and just give up.

Gina uses Latin America, her home region, as an example. When we think of Latin American countries, it’s easier to recall the negative aspects: poor security, underdevelopment, corrupt governments, and so on. However, there are also many positive sides to these countries, and Gina emphasizes focusing more on those. This applies to life in general as well.

Someone else's A-side Vs. my B-side

Social media is the main cause that exaggerates the gap between someone else’s A-side and your own B-side. We all know it’s silly to compare someone’s Instagram highlights to our own lowlights, so let's not discuss about it here.

Still, when your life is on the B-side at the moment and see someone else’s A-side, it’s hard not to feel something growing inside you. It's only natural. When that happens to me, I always tell myself something. Let me elaborate it with Gina’s concept of A-side-and-B-side perspective:

What we see as someone else’s A-side is just the result. Before that result, there was a process. But we rarely think about that process because the result is more immediate and eye-catching.

Let's say someone achieves great success in a single year. However, us as observers from the outside can never know how every single day must have felt to the very person who is going through the three hundred-and-sixty-one-days themselves. People standing on the outside can only see that year as “that person’s past,” as simple as that, not as their own first-hand experience.

So, feeling jealous or distressed when you see someone else’s A-side is not just foolish—I think it’s disrespectful. Because it means you're ignoring the time they struggled in their B-side moments.

Wrapping up

The bottom line is: if your life is currently on the A-side, remember that you have come through B-side moments, and it could return at any time. So stay humble. Conversely, if you’re on the B-side, which is more often than the other, remember that anyone who seems to be living their A-side has also gone through their own B-side moments.

Most people lead pretty ordinary lives, but when we compulsively consume others’ highlights, we can’t help but feel a huge gap between our own A-side and B-side. And we may feel unnecessary distress from the obvious and inevitable fact that our lives have B-side moments.

The more we recognize this, the more important it becomes to stay sharp and maintain a wise perspective, avoiding falling into foolish viewpoints.

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See you next week.