Chapter 22: The Railway Switchman

This chapter has 2 parallels — tap the highlighted passages to explore them.

Chapter 22 illustration "Good morning," said the little prince. "Good morning," said the railway switchman. "What do you do here?" the little prince asked. "I sort out travelers, in bundles of a thousand," said the switchman. "I send off the trains that carry them: now to the right, now to the left." And a brilliantly lighted express train shook the switchman's cabin as it rushed by with a roar like thunder. "They are in a great hurry," said the little prince. "What are they looking for?" "Not even the locomotive engineer knows that," said the switchman.

And a second brilliantly lighted express thundered by, in the opposite direction. "Are they coming back already?" demanded the little prince. "These are not the same ones," said the switchman. "It is an exchange." "Were they not satisfied where they were?" asked the little prince. "No one is ever satisfied where he is," said the switchman.

And they heard the roaring thunder of a third brilliantly lighted express. "Are they pursuing the first travelers?" demanded the little prince. "They are pursuing nothing at all," said the switchman. "They are asleep in there, or if they are not asleep they are yawning. Only the children are flattening their noses against the windowpanes." "Only the children know what they are looking for," said the little prince. "They waste their time over a rag doll and it becomes very important to them; and if anybody takes it away from them, they cry . . ." "They are lucky," the switchman said.

Parallel 1 ★

Your team's restlessness signals a missing narrative; the leader's job is to make the journey visible, not just the destination.

Scott Belsky Partner at A24, Founder of Behance, Former Adobe CPO

driving our teams across country as product leaders with the windows blacked out in the backseat and everyone's sitting in the backseat. And so, if they don't know what we're doing that we're making progress, this traffic is clearing, we just cross state lines. If they don't receive the narrative, they will

Lessons on building product sense, navigating AI, optimizing the first mile, and making it through the messy middle, Lenny's Podcast, guest: Scott Belsky, 2023-05-18 ↗

Why this parallel

Belsky's blindfolded passengers are Saint-Exupéry's train travelers — people in motion, unable to see where they are going, restless in exact proportion to their ignorance of the journey's meaning. The switchman observes restlessness as a condition of the human animal; Belsky diagnoses the same condition in teams and prescribes narrative as the cure. What the little prince intuits as a philosophical sadness, Belsky reframes as a leadership responsibility: the windows don't have to stay blacked out.

Parallel 2 ★

Define what you care about before you run any test—otherwise data becomes your compass instead of your map.

Sanchan Saxena SVP at Atlassian (ex-VP Product at Coinbase, ex-Head of Product at Airbnb)

tell me the intentionality of the product that you want to create. What do you want to see come true? And then let's talk about the A/B test we can run to measure that we are headed in the right direction. And it's a flipping of the

Sanchan Saxena (VP of Product at Coinbase) on the inside story of how Airbnb made it through Covid, Lenny's Podcast, guest: Sanchan Saxena, 2022-07-05

Why this parallel

The child with the rag doll embodies what Saxena calls intentionality — a prior, felt sense of what matters, from which all testing and iteration flows. The adults on the trains, like PMs who lead with A/B tests, have outsourced the question of what they want to the data itself, mistaking the instrument for the compass. Both the little prince and Saxena are pointing at the same forgotten act: deciding, before you measure anything, what you actually care about.

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