One of my claims to fame at Facebook is starting our Bootcamp program in 2008. When engineers join (now) Meta, they don’t start on a team right away. They spend six weeks fixing real bugs with the help of a mentor while attending sessions that cover our tools, systems, and culture.

But there’s a catch.

When I started Bootcamp — and was, for the first year, everyone’s mentor — I didn’t teach the culture as it was. I taught the culture as I wished it were.

The new engineers didn’t know the difference. They had no baseline for what was “true,” only for what was taught. And because the company was growing so fast, within a year more than half of the engineering team had learned about the culture from me.

By then, the story I had been telling about our culture had become the culture.

It was self-fulfilling.

I oversaw the program directly for years and saw the same thing happen again and again: the narratives we give to new people define the reality they create. The beliefs they start with become the practices they normalize.

That’s the quiet power of onboarding in a high-growth organization. You don’t just teach people how things work—you decide what kind of company they believe they’ve joined. And belief scales faster than behavior.

So tell the story you want to be true. Eventually, it will be.