Good Life Project - How to Awaken Your Genius | Ozan Varol

Episode Date: April 10, 2023

Have you ever felt like you’ve got so much more potential inside you, but you have no idea how to unlock it and share it with the world? If so, you’re not alone. And it’s a question that today��s guest, rocket scientist turned award-winning professor and bestselling author, Ozan Varol, takes us into. How can we unleash our hidden genius, that magical set of capabilities that lies within every person? And, how do we even know what our is, let alone how to release it into the world?In this thought-provoking podcast, we'll dive into the art of embracing curiosity, letting go of our past and future, and stepping into the unknown. His newest book, Awaken Your Genius, explores how to identify and share the magic that lies within all of us.We explore:How the power of curiosity can lead to groundbreaking discoveries and help you overcome fear.The importance of looking where others don't to find unique perspectives and uncover hidden gems.The role of repetition in creating false confidence and the value of exploring different sources of information.The remarkable story of Jimmy Breslin, a journalist who found success by stepping away from the norm.How Ozan experimented with potential futures before finding his true calling and the importance of approaching life with the mindset of a curious scientist.You can find Ozan at: Website | Purchase the Book & Get a Special Free BonusIf you LOVED this episode you’ll also love the conversations we had with Ozan three years ago about how to think like a rocket scientist to solve big problems.Check out our offerings & partners: My New Book SparkedMy New Podcast SPARKED. To submit your “moment & question” for consideration to be on the show go to sparketype.com/submit. Visit Our Sponsor Page For Great Resources & Discount Codes Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

And if you look back on your own life, chances are that the best, most exciting moments of your life were not carefully scripted and planned. Like they happened precisely because you leaned into the magic of uncertainty. You leaned into the unknown. You, you know, took your nose off of the guidebook in a foreign country and you like leaned into the magic unfolding around you. You decided to do something that you were not comfortable with, that you didn't know how this was going to pan out. But inner voice said that you should take this path. You should ask this person out on a date or you should apply for this job.

And you leaned into that. And there was so much uncertainty and amazing things resulted. So have you ever felt like you've got so much more potential inside of you, but you kind of have no idea how to unlock it and share it with the world? Well, if so, you're not alone. In fact, this is an incredibly common experience. And it's a question that today's guest, rocket scientist turned award-winning professor and bestselling author, Ozan Varel, takes us into. How can we unleash our hidden genius, that magical set of capabilities that lies within every person. And how do we even know what ours is? How do we access it,

let alone release it into the world? So Ozan has this fascinating background, a native of Istanbul, Turkey. Ozan moved to the United States by himself at 17 to attend Cornell University and major in astrophysics. He ended up on the operations team for the 2003 Mars Exploration Rovers Project that sent two rovers to Mars. And Ozan then made this really interesting pivot and became a lawyer, graduating at the top of his class and eventually went on to become a professor on a quest to help others make giant leaps right here on Earth. His work has over the years been featured everywhere from the Wall Street Journal to Newsweek, BBC Times, CNN, Washington Post, and so many others. So in this thought-provoking conversation, we're diving into the art of embracing curiosity,

letting go of our past and future, and stepping into the unknown to awaken your genius, which, by the way, is also the name of his great new book, Awaken Your Genius. So we explore things like how the power of curiosity can lead to groundbreaking discoveries and help you overcome fear. The importance of looking where others don't to find unique perspectives and uncover hidden gems and the role of repetition in creating false confidence and the value of exploring different sources of information. He shares a really fun story about Jimmy Breslin, a journalist who found

success by stepping away from the norm. And we also explore how Ozan experimented with his own potential futures before finding his true calling and the importance of approaching life with the mindset of a curious scientist. So excited to share this conversation with you as you explore awakening your own genius. I'm Jonathan Fields, and this is? You're gonna die. Don't shoot him, we need him! Y'all need a pilot? Flight Risk. The Apple Watch Series 10 is here. It has the biggest display ever.

It's also the thinnest Apple Watch ever, making it even more comfortable on your wrist, whether you're running, swimming, or sleeping. And it's the fastest-charging Apple Watch, getting you 8 hours of charge in just 15 minutes.

The Apple Watch Series X, available for the first time in glossy jet black aluminum. Compared to previous generations, iPhone XS or later required, charge time and actual results will vary. We first were in conversation a couple of years back, and you were sort of in this place of transitioning wisdom from a career as a literal rocket scientist or a natural physicist, sort of like using the methodology from that world and really saying, you know,

the things that let us solve moonshot type of problems, big, complex, thorny, seemingly impossible problems, they actually apply to mortals, human beings, everyday life, business, relationships, pretty much anything where you want to just do something big and make something really powerful accomplished. It seems like you've turned your sights on a fascinating new topic, and that is the emergence or the expression of genius in individuals. So I'm curious about your fascination in this topic. It's been a lifelong journey in many ways of awakening my own genius. I grew up in a very conformist society. I was born and raised in Istanbul, Turkey, and I love Turkey. I love the

country. I love the people, but especially the education system was very, very conformist. And going to school there, in many ways, I lost myself. I mean, I'll give you two examples. When we started primary school, each student would be assigned a number, kind of like in the Netflix show, Stranger Things, like 11, but in real life. And our principal would call us by that number instead of our first name. So think about totally stripping down your individuality and branding you as a number. And in fourth grade, all the boys had to have the same short buzz cut. And I thought haircuts were a giant waste of time.

So I would skip them frequently. And in fourth grade, my school principal, who was a bulldozer of a man really better suited to be a prison warden than an elementary school principal, he spotted my longer than standard hairdo. And he pulled me up in front of the entire school during an assembly, grabbed a hair clip from a female classmate, and he stuck it in my hair to shame me publicly as a retribution for nonconformity. And shame for Turks is worse than death. So I never skipped a haircut again. Once I began to see the punishment that I could get for nonconformity, for not fitting in, sort of like turn into an octopus of sorts, I would obsessively observe what was normal

and I would change my own colors to blend into the background in an effort to fit in. I actually even changed my own favorite color. When people would ask, what's your favorite color? Instead of telling them the truth, which would have been purple, I would say blue because blue is what normal boys were supposed to like. And I really, really want it to be normal. So I coming from that very conformist background where I very much lost myself, it's been this lifelong journey of getting in touch with who I really am, stripping myself of layers and layers of masks that I had picked up to figure out who I really am and what I really think. So I wanted to write a book about that called Awaken Your Genius. And

genius, I picked for a very specific reason in the title. Genius is most often used to mean most talented, remorse, intelligent, but that's not how I use the word. The word in the book title harkens to a quote from Thelonious Monk. He says, a genius is the one most like himself. And a genius in the Latin origin of the word actually means the spirit present at birth in each and every person. So each of us is like Aladdin

and our genie or our genius is inside of us waiting to be awakened. And I wrote a book on how to do that. I've always been fascinated by the distinction between liberation and transformation. I have some background in Eastern philosophy and where the term liberation is actually much more centered and it's positioned not as a becoming type of experience, but as stripping away of that which creates illusion and delusion. So you can actually let that's always been there emerge more purely, more cleanly. And there's this assumption that it's there, it's always been there,

it's always going to be there. It's just that life piles on so much stuff that makes us tuck it away, that the process is really about freeing what's there rather than changing it to something else. And it sounds similar to the way that you describe the notion of genius. For sure. And that's why the first part of the book is called the death. And it really represents the death of those parts of you that are not you. So you're eliminating who you are not so you can discover who you are, which is really hard because we pick up all of these layers and we then end up confusing them with ourselves, right? Like we pick up all these identities, various ways of thinking they're actually not us, but because they've been there for so long,

we assume that they're us, even though they're not us. So you got to get rid of that. You got to get rid of those layers first to be able to discover who you really are. Yeah. So let's talk a little bit about the season of death, because I would imagine a lot of people hear that phrase and the immediate association is pain. Like, oh, that's going to cause pain and grief and potentially so much that I would rather just keep on keeping on in the life that I have.

It's not great, but it's not awful. Rather than literally watch dismantle sort of like my identity and the life that I know it in the name of hopefully being able to figure out how to really step back into my existence in a way that's much more fully expressed. I know you've thought about this and this resistance a lot in your own process. So talk to me a bit about this. There's definitely some pain involved, and I don't think we can gloss over that. The loss of what once was, the decay, the rotting, the shedding of skin, all of that is uncomfortable and can be painful. But that short-term pain

is then succeeded by this liberation that comes from having gotten rid of what you thought was you, but wasn't you. And it was actually holding you back. There was this parable I share in that first part. It's a Buddhist parable about a man who builds a raft to cross this raging river. And he gets it across to the other side and he picks up his raft and he starts walking into this forest. The raft starts getting in the way. It's like snagging into the trees and impeding the man's forward progress. But the man refuses to let go of the raft. I built this, he says. This is my raft. It saved my life. But to survive today, he has to let go of what saved his life yesterday. And so, so many of us are carrying out around all of these rafts in the form of career choices, in the form of patterns of behavior, in the form of relationships that helped bring us to where we are today, that may have served a function at one point in time, but that are no longer necessary or useful and in many ways holding us back. And it can be really

painful to let them go. And so most recently I experienced this with leaving academia. I was a professor for 10 years and I had tenure. Tenured professors don't leave their jobs. Right. That's like the golden ring. Yeah. It's the ultimate safety net. You're not going to get fired unless the whole college shuts down, which is a highly unlikely scenario. And you've got a guaranteed paycheck for life. And I remember back in 2016 or 2017, and at that point I'd been teaching for six or seven years. And every time I got up in front of the classroom, I was energized and engaged and I loved my job. There was one day I walked into the classroom, stood up behind the podium, and my whole body sank. My shoulders sank,

my heart sank. And it was this feeling of not again. Like, I can't believe I'm about to teach this case and this class again for God knows how many times. And I was like, oh my God, is that a fluke? And it kept happening. I think a previous version of me would have shut that down. I would have said, look, I have my five-year plan. I just got tenure. I'm going to do all of these things now that I have tenure. But I was at a transformative point of my own life too, where I actually paid attention to that signal and leaned in. Letting go of that particular raft was really, really difficult.

One, because I had totally wrapped up what I was doing around my, like, that was my identity as a professor. I had professor in front of my name. Like that was, I was professor of our role. And to let go of that would have meant losing the title, losing everything that meant, all the credibility that brought. It meant potentially losing everything I had worked so hard to build. But then I remembered, you know, letting go can be an act of love. There's actually birth and death.

As Joseph Campbell writes, the earth must be broken to bring forth life, right? If the seed doesn't die, there is no plant. If wheat doesn't die, there is no bread. Life lives on lives. And so I could take in what economists call sunk costs, like the time, money, and resources you spend into building this raft, they're actually not costs. They're gifts from your former self to your current self. And so you can take what you learned from building this raft and carrying it around. And I could take what I learned from academia. And I learned so many valuable lessons in terms of teaching and storytelling and writing

that I could bring into the next chapter of my life. But the thing that really allowed me to let it go was realizing that I could not fully step into who I was becoming without letting go of what I once was. So I said thank you to the raft and let it go. And I let what was dying serve as fertilizer for what was coming alive. Yeah, it's such a tough thing to do,

especially when that whole idea of sunk costs, I've always been fascinated by that concept too. And because a multi-time entrepreneur, it's so easy to say I have sacrificed so much. There's so many years where I have literally not slept for days on end trying to build this new thing, trying to create a vision and you're years into it and still not doing exactly what you wanted to do. And it's so tempting to say, but I've invested so much. It would just be a quote waste if I walk away now rather than saying, no, actually I had stunning experiences that have formed and shaped me and will inform me in everything that I do from this moment forward to be wiser

and do it differently and more inspired with what I do and more creative. This was basically just continuing education for me. But instead of the form of an MBA or PhD where I'm paying money to another institution, I'm investing in myself. And there's sometimes a cost to that, but I carry that wisdom forward with me. And so I love your frame around this because I think a lot of people get tripped up with that concept. And if we can learn to say like, it's okay to close a door, even if you've been doing it for a long time and you've invested a lot in it, because the sense of possibility on

the other side is much more expansive. The world would be better off and individuals would be better off and probably a whole lot of relationships would be better off too. thinnest Apple Watch ever, making it even more comfortable on your wrist, whether you're running, swimming, or sleeping. And it's the fastest-charging Apple Watch, getting you eight hours of charge in just 15 minutes. The Apple Watch Series X. Available for the first time in glossy jet-black aluminum. Compared to previous generations, iPhone XS or later required, charge time and actual results will vary.

Mayday, mayday. We've been compromised. The pilot's a hitman. I knew you actual results will vary. It's interesting because in this sort of like conversation around that, the early part of the process in your mind, also you sort of take aim at the world of education, which I thought was really interesting because as you shared, you spent a lot of your professional career in that very world. Granted, that's sort of like, you know, like a higher ed level. And part of what you talk about is more of the earlier days, but talk to me more about your lens on this. Yeah. I think the education system, unfortunately, does so much to obscure students' genius. Because in school, what we're taught from a very young age is that the answers have been determined by someone far smarter than you are. And your only job is to memorize those answers and then spit them back out on a standardized

test somewhere. And so we're playing this game of let's pretend. Let's pretend that the answers have been figured out already. Let's pretend that there's only one answer to every question asked. And let's pretend that the answers in this exam are actually important. And so you get questions like, who discovered America? And then the response is typically a Eurocentric response like Christopher Columbus. But the far more interesting question is like, how do you discover who discovered America?

Weren't there millions of people who were already living here when Christopher Columbus arrived? How did they get here? Questions like that rarely get asked. Instead, life becomes a series of one-dimensional yes or no, wrong or right answers. And there is no room for curiosity. And what breaks my heart is seeing students who walk into the education system as question marks leave us periods. So who come in with just inherent creativity and inherent curiosity and have that be robbed from them. And as you said, yeah, I spent much of my life in the system and embarrassingly, you know, looking back, like I excelled in the system. And when people, I do a lot of speaking and they introduced me on stage and, you know and I graduated number one in my class from law school. And I cringe because that honestly means one thing, which was that I was really good at conforming.

You know, when the teacher said, go read that book, I would go read that book. I was very good at doing what my teacher said. And I was very good at thinking what they thought, anticipating what they thought, anticipating what they would ask, and then answering the exam questions accordingly, which is why I excelled. But it didn't mean I was the smartest or the most talented or the best lawyer that my law school would ever produce. I mean, I quit law after two years. So, yeah, there's so much of that in the education system, unfortunately. And I worry primarily about the elementary and middle school when children are at a really formative age and they're coming in and they're excited and curious and creative.

And unfortunately, the way that the system is structured, a lot of that fades away. Yeah. And talk about fading away. And this is something that you talk about. Part of it is built on the notion of plenty of people have written about this before, education originally being essentially to train people for certain types of professions, which were fairly rote types of professions where conformity a notion built into it that said, well, academic success in that context, which came from conformity, would translate to the types of behaviors and thought processes that would lead to, quote, real world success. And maybe for a certain season in our history, for a certain demographic of people, it did. But that's not our world or our life or our workplace or our realities anymore. Yeah, absolutely. The industrial age is over. And

so we're training students to thrive in a system that just doesn't exist anymore. Instead of encouraging their inherent creativity and the word educate, I'm always curious about the origins of words too, like genius I mentioned. It comes from the word adduce, which really means to draw out what is latent in somebody. So you're not doing what education systems do, which is like to impart knowledge, to shove knowledge down someone's throat. But education is actually supposed to draw out what is already latent, what is, you know, bottled up inside of them waiting to be awakened. But unfortunately it does the opposite. And as you said, children leave school perfectly thrive to function in a world that does not exist anymore,

where we're now, you know, all of us are required to be artists. All of us are required to be creative and to lean into our useful idiosyncrasies. But unfortunately, education systems teach us the opposite. Yeah, it will be interesting. We're having this conversation during a particularly interesting moment in human history where the explosion of AI is changing everything so much faster than so many people imagine. And the world of education is getting rocked by it. And it's going to be really interesting to see how that entire paradigm changes because of it, because it will have to change and how just individuals respond to learning and

growing and acquiring knowledge along the way. One of the other things that you talk about in this early phase, and then I want to bounce to some of the later ones, is this notion of detoxing. What you use in a really interesting, different way, more in the context of tuning out the noise that stops you from being able to really hear the signals, both the external signals and the internal signals. Yeah, exactly. We are, I mean, we're moving from minute to minute where we're constantly being bombarded by notifications. You know, we, the smartphone is the first thing most of us reach for in the morning, turn it on right away. We have dinner with our phones we talk with them, we have this really deeply intimate relationship with our smartphones and the noise that comes from them in the form of notifications and emails and social media distractions and whatnot, make it impossible to hear the wisdom

within. And so one of the best practices that I've adopted and probably led to the most creative moments in my life has been this practice of putting myself on airplane mode from time to time, taking the time to just sit with my thoughts and daydream. And daydreaming has this negative connotation because, you know, chances are that you're probably chastised for daydreaming at some point by a teacher. But daydreaming is essential to creativity. Letting your mind wander. Letting your subconscious to connect the dots and marry the old with the new to create new associations. And this is why when you ask most people, you know, where do you get your best ideas, they'll say it's in the shower.

Because the shower is one of the few moments of your day where you're just there with yourself. You don't have any notifications, no hundred decibel sirens screaming for your attention. You're just there with your thoughts and you're letting your mind wander. And all of these ideas just bubble up to the surface. Imagine what you might be able to do if you replicate those shower-like conditions more frequently throughout the day, right? So putting yourself on airplane mode and shutting out the noise without so that you can tune into the wisdom within. Because so many of us, this included me for a very long time, just look externally for answers and assume that the answer must be in an online course or a book somewhere. And there's certainly value in knowledge, but we also forget that there is this inner being within us who

already knows the next chapter in our story and the next melody in our symphony. And there's so much value in hearing what that inner being has to say. Yeah. So agree with that. The noise in our lives and just culturally all around us, both internal and external has reached a fever pitch where I think we don't even oftentimes know that our own signal exists anymore. And we're just sort of like we're controlled by the noise. And I think the bigger concern for me is that increasingly we think that that is the signal. We think that that's the important thing and that that is the voice of intelligence and wisdom and insight. So we follow it only to find sometimes many years or decades down the road that wasn't it. From this early season, you move into a period of rebirthing in your context.

And you share this concept that you describe as first principles. Talk to me about this a bit. First principles are your basic Lego blocks. So these are the Lego blocks of your talents, interests, preferences, whatever makes you you. And I share a number of ways to discover what they are. And I'll talk about one or two of them here. One is, there's this quote from Anthony Gowdy in the book, The Catalan Architect. He says, originality consists of returning to the origin. And so reconnecting with your curiosities as a child, like what made you weird or different as a child when you were growing up can make you extraordinary

as an adult. And if you can tap into those faint memories and use them as inspiration for what you do now, you'll be able to discover some of those basic Lego blocks. And so one of my first principles is storytelling. And when I first learned how to read and write, I would write stories. My grandfather had this old typewriter and I would just sit in front of it and just write like screenplays and stories. There's actually a typewriter over my right shoulder here. I don't know if you can see it as a testament to that. And the theme of storytelling has been constant for me, regardless of what I've done. So as a lawyer, I was telling stories on behalf of my clients in academia, as a professor, I was teaching to all of these students who were taking

these required classes and they didn't want to be in the classroom. So I had to entertain them somehow. And so I would tell captivating stories. And then I use a lot of storytelling in the books that I write. And so looking back on my life, that's been one core theme that's been there. And it's hard to identify it because often, if you're listening to this, you were probably shamed for some of those useful idiosyncrasies, some of your first principles, because they made you different from other people. So you learn to conceal them. You learn to suppress them. And you learn to lean into what others thought was important. So it can be difficult to reconnect with them, but there's so much power in it. I recently saw Bruce Springsteen in concert for the very first

time. Now here's a 73-year-old guy and he's like- So you went to church, by the way. Yeah, exactly. When I saw him, he had played what was then the longest show on the US side of things until the next night when he played a longer show. But it's a stunning experience. It's amazing. He's now 73 years old and he's jumping and dancing and sliding across stage. He played for three hours nonstop in like just very brief breaks between songs. And I was just stunned. And he's been doing this since 1965. I mean, he's had the kind of longevity that most musicians dream about. And I was sitting there thinking about or standing there captivated. And I was thinking briefly about

what makes him extraordinary. It's not his voice. His voice is fine, but it's not amazing. He can play the guitar, but he writes in his memoir that the world is filled with guitar players, his match for better. And so instead of trying to out sing or outplay other musicians, he leaned into one of his first principles. He leaned into one of those basic Lego blocks, which for him was the ability to write song lyrics. So he became a sensation for writing lyrics that capture the blue collar spirit, that show the distance between the American dream and the American reality.

And the same man that bandmates, agents, critics, audiences, just about everyone else had initially dismissed eventually became a rock and roll sensation because he leaned into that first principle that made him different from others. But that's now the reason why a lot of people are gravitated towards him. Yeah, I love the idea of revisiting what made you weird as a kid or what made you different as a kid. I saw that problem from you. I started thinking about that myself and I'm like, there was more stuff that made me weird that made me mainstream. I'm like, how do I pick actually? Which weird and what level of weird should I really lean into? But you're so spot on in that those very idiosyncrasies as a kid that I wished I could have wished away so I fit in more. So I just, those are everything that allows me to be differentiated or distinct or have a different

voice as an adult in a world where so many people are still trying to play the game of fitting into the mold of what society or work culture wants you to quote be. So I love that sort of like the inside of like, take a look back in time because that has a lot of hints for you. There's some other really interesting ideas within that sort of like rebirthing thing, but I want to drop into the season that you call the inner journey. And you started to kind of tease us a bit earlier in our conversation, this notion of seeking wisdom, sure, on the outside, but also really paying attention to how do I unlock what's already in there? How do I release it? How do I actually even know what's in there in the first place? So talk to me more about this. Yeah. One of the concepts I cover is the importance of thinking before you do any research. So often when we have a question in our heads, when we're puzzled about something, when there's a problem, the instinct is to jump on Google, to dream up some search or to go read a book or to take an online course, whatever it might be, or to go seek advice. But there is no room for actually that inner journey of thinking like, what do I actually

think? And I think we reverse the order. And if you research before you think, or if you seek input or advice before you think for yourself, you become anchored. So you become anchored by what you read. You become anchored by what you heard. You become anchored by the well-meaning advice that a mentor gave you. And so your thinking then deviates only marginally, if at all, from what you heard.

It's much more beneficial to begin with the inner journey. So to think about what you actually think on the subject and to jot down ideas and thoughts on your own before you start researching. And of course, reading is really important and getting different perspectives is extremely important. And I talk about that in the book as well. But if you reverse the order and if you begin with the external journey first, then a lot of the ideas, the really creative ideas, the unreasonable ideas, the type of ideas

that can really make a difference remain concealed because they deviate from the norm and the norm is what you're going to find when you jump on Google. Yeah. And the idea also of starting the thinking process within the constraints that somebody else has already established for you because of their own thinking or their own limitations in thinking. When you think about it that way, you're like, why would I ever want to do that? And yet that is really the, and I'm raising my hand here. That's the default for so many of us, including me. It's like the first impulse is, Ooh, I know some really smart people who have more experience than me. Let me go ask them what they think rather than, well, I'm still going to ask them what they think, but what if I just sit with this myself first for a bit and see

what emerges? And then maybe I'm going to end up asking very different questions too. Yeah, exactly. And that's so important too. The types of questions that we ask can completely change the answer. And to harken back to the education discussion for a moment, there's something else that schools don't teach. Schools only teach how to come up with answers, but they don't teach how to come up with good questions or how to reframe a question that's been given to you to come up with a better answer. And often breakthroughs actually don't begin with a smart answer. They begin with a smart question that no one has asked before. go immediately into advice seeking mode, we're not taking the time to pause and ask, like, is there even a better question to ask here? Because we want a quick answer right away

versus, yeah, stepping back and asking if there's a better problem to solve. Yeah. That's one of the reasons why I've been so drawn over the years to thinking models like human-centered design or design thinking, because they start assuming that they don't actually know the right question. They say, well, we think like this is the question at hand, but the early part is about question identification. It's like, what is the real question here? Because you could be amazing at running experiments, gathering information, coming up with answers,

but if it's the answer to the wrong question, it's all wasted. So it's a really interesting thing to be able to say, what if we spent more time focusing on that? You know what the difference between me and you is? You're going to die. Don't shoot him. We need him. Y'all need a pilot. Flight risk. The Apple Watch Series 10 is here. It has the biggest display ever. It's also the thinnest Apple Watch ever, making it even more comfortable on your wrist,

whether you're running, swimming, or sleeping. And it's the fastest-charging Apple Watch, getting you eight hours of charge in just 15 minutes. The Apple Watch, getting you eight hours of charge in just 15 minutes. The Apple Watch Series X, available for the first time in glossy jet black aluminum. Compared to previous generations, iPhone XS or later required, charge time and actual results will vary. One of the tools that you talk about for eliciting better self-wisdom, inner wisdom is free writing, which it's funny. This is something that I've done very little of in my life, which is weird because I've

been a writer for something like 15 years professionally. But I found that the short windows where I do drop into that mode, it helps me so much understand what I'm thinking about, how I look at the world. And yet I don't consistently drop back in there. It sounds like you see this as a really powerful tool. Absolutely. You know, we walk around with all of these thoughts in our heads, a lot of them unexamined. And so they exist in this like jumble.

And free writing is a way of just sorting through the mess and discovering what you actually think. It's like the closest thing to opening up your brain and seeing what to figure out if there's a better question to ask, or maybe something kept me up the night before, and I'll just drop in and write and see what comes up. And, you know, some days nothing comes up. Other days, I would say 90% of what comes out is utter junk. But I find that you have to get the junk out for those gems to bubble up to the surface. And free writing is, I think, one of the best ways that I know how to do that. And then recently also, I've gone back and I have this program that I use, Rome Research. And I pull up the notes that I took like six months ago or a year ago, just to see what I was struggling with and what I was questioning, what I was thinking about. And that's been really helpful in like identifying patterns, identifying recurring

issues and recurring problems. If something was isolated, you can ignore it. But when you see something expressed consistently, like I'm having the same struggle, same problem, or the same idea for a book keeps presenting itself, which is the book that's coming out soon. And so then it becomes something that's hard to ignore. I found it actually really hard at the start when I first started doing this. And I would write this, I'll be honest, I found myself lying to myself. I would write like a curated account of what happened, like the polished things up, or if I failed, I wouldn't call it a failure. There was an audience for what I was writing.

Like someone was going to discover these notes and, and figure out that I was a fraud. And that is not the way to do free writing. Like for free writing to work, you have to be honest with yourself. You can't lie to yourself. And it's amazing how easy it is to fool yourself. And actually, even that realization was a really helpful one for me, like knowing that I'm like, oh my God, I'm lying to myself and I'm trying to cover up what happened or frame it differently to make myself feel better, even though I would actually learn a lot more if I call this thing a mistake or a failure and then look at it through a learning lens. So yeah, once honesty came into the picture and once I felt free to just like literally write whatever crazy, unreasonable thought I had in my

mind, then things really started to open up and it became a lot more useful exercise for me. I love that kind of nodding along because I've actually caught myself doing the very same thing when I've sat down, like the times that I've done it. Yeah. I find for me also, so some people may be listening to this and saying like, yeah, I could totally check out free writing. That sounds good. There are a whole bunch of different ideas. For me, the place where my inner wisdom tends to unlock the most is when I am moving my body in solitude. So I'm incredibly blessed to be living in a mountain town right now, or seven minutes out my back door. I'm in some of the most beautiful trails and the most gorgeous mountains. And I'm there on a regular basis during the week. And I'll spend an hour and a half. You can't even imagine how many voice memos I have on my phone

from those walks. I don't listen. Generally, I don't listen to things when I'm out. I don't want any of the stimulation. I want to be just immersed in nature. I most often am on my own. And just all this stuff comes to me, answers, ideas, insights, when I'm out there. And it's different. I've also found there's a qualitative difference between just stationary solitude and actually moving solitude and moving solitude in a natural environment. It does something to me that just frees up stuff that's inside of me in a very different level. So I think everybody's going to find their own unlocked keys and I think just run the experiments to try and figure that out.

One of the things that you explore also, which I thought was really fun, was the notion of play, the role of play in this process. Like a great story about like R.E.M. and losing my religion. Take me there a little bit more. Yeah. Play is, a lot of people see play as this superfluous, you know, you do it when you're not working thing, but man, play is essential to creativity. You can't create new things if you're not playing. And so there's a chapter called play the power of play. And as you said, it opens with a story of losing my religion when the guitarist for REM is just, you know, he's bored of playing the electric guitar. He's been doing it for 10 years and just on a whim, he

puts the guitar aside and picks up the mandolin just to play. And his other bandmates also switch instruments. And so he starts playing this chord on the mandolin and that strikes a chord with the rest of the bandmates and they join in the playground. And then the lead singer, Michael, he would normally sing songs or write songs with a political theme. He starts experimenting and playing around with themes of love. And with no script, no plan, total improvisation, losing my religion is born. And there's so many stories like that where there's this obsession with deliberate practice. And deliberate practice is important, right? If you're trying to perfect one way of

doing things, like if you're trying to perfect the golf swing, for example, you have to do it over and over again. But if your goal isn't to repeat what you've done in the past, it's not idea execution, but it's actually idea generation. It's to break the rules, bend the rules, to do things in a way that they haven't been done before, then you have to be able to set aside your version of the electric guitar and pick up the mandolin. But when you do that,

you sort of like get in touch with this inner creative, this inner artist, the inner child that lives within each of us. For me, my best writing happens when that inner child comes out to play. And so if i can incorporate ways of play in my life and i do this in various different ways like i've got back to the future figurines here on my desk one of my favorite movies of all time and like i changed

the name that i give my i would call this room my office and then i like one day i was thinking about it i'm like god, I hate the word office. It just reminds me of water cooler conversations and fluorescent lights and politics. And offices where good ideas go to die. So I was playing around. I'm like, oh, I'm going to change the name of the room from time to time. And I'm going to call it my innovation lab or idea incubator. And then that playful attitude just brings a completely different mindset into the mix. If you're listening to this and thinking, well, what I do is too serious or too complicated for play, be careful because

it's not that you can play when the stakes are low. It's that you must play when the stakes are high, because that's how the best ideas are born. And why this is why, by the way, astronauts play more than any other profession in the world. They are constantly in simulators, not for deliberate practice purposes only, not to like, repeat the same things that they're going to do in space, but to be ready for whatever curveball the universe throws at them. And they do that. They learn that through play by just playing around with different scenarios and seeing what comes up. And that's true, whether you're an astronaut or rocket scientist or a business leader. So talk to me about the relationship between play stakes and uncertainty then, because the way you describe it is the things where the stakes are highest want to be able to access that play state the most because that's where the big, new, innovative, creative, paradigm-shifting ideas are going to emerge. When you're not just doing the rote work of replicating what you've done before and optimizing it and trying to make it just a little bit better, right? You're trying to blow it up and create something bigger

and better and cooler. Yet at the same time, the higher the stakes go, when there's a high level of uncertainty, I have no idea if this thing's going to work with when I'm just messing around, I'm playing, I'm trying things. We as human beings tend to be shut down in that context. So what's your take on how to navigate that dynamic between uncertainty, paralysis, play, and stakes? I think part of it is knowing that we are in many ways genetically wired to fear uncertainty because the unknown could present a potential danger to our ancestors. And so those who were not afraid of the unknown, who were not afraid of uncertainty, probably didn't live long enough to pass their genes on to us. And then that gets reinforced by the way that we're raised. And in schools, we're taught that everything has a right or wrong answer. And there's just a lot of stakes attached to certainty. And then we get into the real world and everything is uncertain. We don't know what's going to happen next. We don't know what, you know, cosmic banana peel is waiting around the corner for us.

And so we get paralyzed. And this is why the status quo sticks in many ways, because everyone can agree on what the status quo is. There's certainty in the status quo. It's so much more certain to look back at the rearview mirror and say, we're going to do what we did yesterday than to step into a completely unknown future. And this is why people stagnate. This is why businesses die.

Uncertainty. And if you look back on your own life, chances are that the best, most exciting moments of your life were not carefully scripted and planned. Like they happened precisely because you leaned into the magic of uncertainty. You leaned into the unknown. You, you know, took your nose off of the guidebook in a foreign country and you like leaned into the magic unfolding around you. You decided to do something that you were not comfortable with, that you didn't know how this was going to pan out. But inner voice said that you should take this path. You should ask this person out on a date or you should apply for this

job. And you leaned into that. And there was so much uncertainty and amazing things resulted. So in moments when I am afraid of uncertainty, I think back to those moments in my life where I was afraid of making a leap. And I made the leap anyway. And, you know, there was no mushroom cloud, nothing bad happened. And I think thinking of life also as a jungle gym and not a ladder, I find as a useful construct, like a ladder means, you know, you're climbing it in a very linear fashion, but life is so nonlinear. Life in many ways replicates nature. Like there is, I'm looking at all these beautiful trees outside my window. There are no straight branches in a tree. Everything is nonlinear. Life in many ways replicates nature. I'm looking at all these beautiful

trees outside my window. There are no straight branches in a tree. Everything is nonlinear. And life also works out that way. And if you can lean into that, lean into the beauty of not knowing and lean into that, the reality, which is what happens often is what life gives you sometimes. You've got your five-year plan and you've got your script. You're like, this is what life gives you sometimes. You've got your five-year plan and you've got your script. You're like, this is what I'm going to do. This is how life is going to pan out, which is what I thought with my academic job, for example. I'm like, I got my 10-year plan. This is it. And then I leaned into the uncertainty of it all and life gave me things I never could have even dreamed about. I love this quote from Rumi, and then I'll pause. He says, as you start to walk on the way, the way appears.

The implication being that the way is not going to appear until you actually start to walk. There is no flashlight powerful enough to illuminate what's to come. As you take each step, you go from not knowing to knowing, from darkness to light. But the only way to know what comes next is to actually start walking. Yeah. I have learned that lesson so many times,

often in a really hard way in the world of business. If you're genuinely trying to do something new and different, you can't think your way there. You have to do your way there. There's just no other way. At some point, you have to get out of your head and just try and see how the world responds to it. So we've been talking a bunch about the inner journey, but the outer journey also comes into play in your model of awakening genius. You start out the conversation with it by saying, okay, so not everything you hear is going to have any value at all. You got to learn how to actually detect that stuff. Yeah, exactly.

To sort out misleading or misinformation from what's actually useful to determine what signal and what's noise. And one of the examples I give in that chapter is around this Mars rover that I worked on. We sent two rovers in 2003 to Mars. Their names were Spirit and Opportunity, and we designed them to last for 90 days. And I still get goosebumps every time I say this, but Opportunity ended up roving the red planet for over 14 years into its 90-day lifetime. And so when the rover died back in 2016, this tweet from a journalist went viral.

And the tweet said, you know, Opportunity's final words were, my battery is low and it's getting dark. The tweet went viral in part because I think, you know, we all feel from time to time like our batteries are low and it's getting dark out there. And to have the same sentiment expressed by this non-human robot gave us all the feels. The problem is, of course, the story is false. Right before it died, Opportunity beamed a bunch of routine code to Earth that reported, among numerous other things, the outside light reading and the existing power levels and then a journalist who didn't let facts get in the way of a good story then took a short portion of this random code paraphrase it into english and then tweeted

to the world that these were the rover's final final words and then millions of people at the retweet button and you know hundreds of media outlets published stories on the rover's supposed final transmission, all without taking a moment to pause, reflect, ask, how does a remote-controlled space robot spit out fully-formed English sentences designed to tug at people's heartstrings? And I have to admit, I worked on this mission for four years, and for a brief moment, even I fell for the story. I was reading that supposed to final transmission. And my initial instinct was to go off and then I started reading more until the timeless words of Richard Feynman came echoing to me from the depths of my subconscious. You must not fool yourself and you are the easiest person to fool. And so there's so much value in doing what so many people don't do, which is to pause and ask, is this right? And it's not enough to be skeptical because it's really

easy to express skepticism, to just say that's BS or to shoot down somebody else's ideas, but it's harder to express skepticism in a more constructive way. And so the idea that I call, one of the ideas in that section, I call skeptical curiosity. So yeah, being skeptical, but also curious about the underlying truth. So marrying the two together. And so a skeptical or somebody approaching the Mars rover story from a lens of skeptical curiosity might ask questions like, how does a reporter know what the rover said? And that would lead to additional questions like, how does a Martian rover communicate with Earth in the first place?

Does it speak in fully formed English sentences? How do we know what the rover is doing at any moment? Those questions are guided, yes, by a skepticism of the reporter's claims, but more importantly about curiosity about the underlying truth. And they'll lead you to places that few other people dare go and reveal gems that few others see. Yeah, which almost brings us back to the earlier part of our conversation around curiosity. And if our formative years sort of drilled that out of us, then we lose the impulse to actually question things and not question in the name of vitriol or attack or like, I want this to be false, but just really? Okay. It would be cool if it was true, but I need to actually understand this more and just

ask more questions, especially these days. This is something you talk about also when it's so easy to fall into an ecosystem of external inputs and media and social channels and news where it's algorithmically driven. And it's basically just perpetually feeding you more of what you've already shown that you've interacted with. So it's sort of like reinforcing only the thing that you've seen and heard. And that can lead to, through repetition breeds belief, that can really shrink our worlds and lead us to think that, well, we were curious because we've looked on here and here and here, but not realizing that they're all running similar algorithms, feeding us similar things,

just reinforcing the same stuff. We need to actually step out of that ecosystem to really get curious. Yeah, exactly. And so the same story breaks with a different headline from different news sources. So your confidence in its accuracy increases when you're seeing the same thing repeated across different channels. And then your friends are probably reading the same channels as you are. So then they're telling you the story. So now your confidence increases even more because you're hearing from the same story

from your friends as well. And so then it, yeah, it leads to this repetition breeds false confidence. And so there's so much value in looking, and there's a whole chapter dedicated to this in the book of ways to look where others don't look. So you can see what others aren't seeing. So like, give me an example of that. I tell the story of Jimmy Breslin in the book. He's a journalist and he was tasked with reporting the assassination of John F. Kennedy. And he shows up at the White House press briefing room, the White House, and there's

hundreds of reporters there. And they're all being fed the same information from the same official mouthpiece of the executive branch. And so he looks at that and he says, I can't make a living here. Everyone's going to have the same thing. And so everyone's going to write the same thing. So he decides to leave the White House and he just goes across the river to the Arlington National Cemetery. And he finds the grave digger who was digging the grave for JFK that day. And he interviews him and he writes this masterful column. I highly encourage everyone to look it up and read it, telling the story of JFK's assassination from the perspective of the person who's preparing his final resting place. And he

ends up winning the Pulitzer Prize. And I love that story because all of us are operating in our own versions of the White House press briefing room where we're looking at the same sources that everyone else is looking. And so we're thinking what they're thinking as well. And there's so much value. And by the way, this is inconvenient. It's inconvenient to say, I'm not going to watch or I'm not going to read what the Amazon algorithm is spitting out. I'm not going to look at the New York Times bestseller list. I'm going to intentionally do the inconvenient thing, go across the river to the Arlington National Cemetery and find the

person, find a source that no one else is looking at. And so one of the things I do personally to implement that mindset in my life is to walk into a bookstore and look through the shelves, the older books, they're not the best sellers, but the books that have fallen outside of mainstream awareness and just follow my curiosity. Don't let me lose in a bookstore with a credit card. It's a dangerous thing. And I'll just browse the shelves and follow serendipity and curiosity. I'll just pick random books off the shelves, the titles that sound interesting. I'll just flip to a random page and start reading. And so many of the stories in the book I found from those random explorations. I didn't know where they were going to lead me, but I was playing around and I was following my curiosity.

And you end up discovering things, ideas, stories that other people aren't seeing because they're really inconvenient. Yeah. And it's all about just acting on the curiosity and realizing you've got to go outside of the normal places that you go. And that kind of brings us into the final phase of your model of awakening genius transformation. And it also brings us back to the beginning of our conversation in an interesting way, which is, you start out with death, which is basically, it's letting go of your past to a certain extent.

And now when we get to sort of like this final part of your model, like we've done all these, we've been through these phases, now you're inviting people to say, but now you also have to let go of your future. Exactly, you're letting go of your past and you're letting go of your future. And we talked about some of the ideas in there already about stepping into uncertainty, you know, letting go of your five-year plan. I think it's fine to have an idea of where you want to go. Like if you want to start a business or write a book, I think that's totally fine, but you should

not be wedded to exactly how that idea is going to materialize, like exactly what's going to happen. I like to think of this as like potential futures and going back to something that you said, experimenting with potential futures and not saying this is the path I'm going to pick and I'm going to walk down it in this very specific way, no matter what happens, but being open and present to the information that you're receiving both from the inside and the outside. And so, you know, going back to my own life, when I decided that leaning into the signals that my body was very strongly sending me that academia was not going to be a forever thing for me,

I didn't just quit cold Turkey. I decided to experiment with potential futures. And I tried a number of different things. I don't talk about this in the book, but I launched two things, one of which was a failure. Initially, I was like, well, what do I know? I'm a law professor. I know how to teach law students. And so I'm going to do an online course on helping law students do better in law school. Didn't find an audience. And, you know, that potential future was a failure. And I didn't enjoy that much anyway, doing that particular thing.

It was just too close to what I was already doing. And then I tried coaching. I was really into productivity at the time. And I was like, well, you know, lawyers. And again, like not really deviating from the path that I was on in hindsight, like lawyers need to be more productive. Their time is really valuable. Maybe I'll do productivity coaching for lawyers. And I, that one actually found an audience.

I had a few clients, but I hated it. I really did not enjoy coaching. And I really did not enjoy the focus on my focus at the time on productivity. I was like, this isn't me. This is some layer, a mass that I picked up from wherever, but this focus on trying to do more in less time and trying to squeeze productivity out of every second of your day, that is not me. And so I did that for about six months and I stopped. And one of the other futures I tried was writing. And I started writing online and I started a blog and I really enjoyed the writing process.

And an audience started to form and people began to share what I was writing. And I leaned into what was bringing me alive and what was bringing a good segment of my audience alive. And the intersection of that eventually ended up culminating in my last book, Think Like a Rocker Scientist, and then launched this path that I'm on as a writer and speaker now. And it happened because I was like, I'm going to approach my life as a curious scientist

might. I'm going to run some experiments, play some little bets to see what works and what doesn't. Yeah. And it's interesting also that you didn't take the burn the ship strategy when you're doing it. Also, you said, look, I'm a grownup. I have a certain life and lifestyle that I like,

whatever responsibilities you have. It's sort of like there were two decisions. One is I know this path that I've been on for the last decade. This is no longer it for me. But I'm not ready to basically just completely blow it up and then feel the time and potentially the security pressure and the uncertainty pushing me to make a decision. Let me see how I can actually keep on keeping on, but take the other time to run the experiments,

to try different things on to see not just our people lining up for but has it make me feel until you finally found you know like that that product market fit and product maker fit you know and that coincidence gave you something that made you say oh okay this is it like this is enough for me to actually like make the bigger step and i think sometimes the mythology for people is you have to burn the ships is the only way to make it work. And maybe for some people with certain psychology, it is, that's the way that they're wired. But I found for most people that actually creates so much anxiety and stress that it shuts down the desire to experiment and it shuts down the anxiety, shuts down creativity and

insight. And it actually doesn't give you the answers that you want. The more humane approach that you took and that so many people take, I think is fascinating way to go about it. And I love just this notion of like wrapping your model and saying like it going back to the beginning, like we basically hold it all lightly. The whole thing is a series of exploration, curiosity, and experimentation. And that feels like a good place for us to come full circle in our conversation today as well. So in this container of good life project, if I offer up the phrase to live a good life, what comes up?

To live a good life is to embrace what is making you come alive, the useful idiosyncrasies that make you come alive. And I'll bring this full circle by completing that story about my own life. You know, where I said, I changed my favorite color. You know, I would say blue when people asked instead of saying purple. And I shortly after my now wife, Kathy, and I met, it must have been our third or fourth date. She asked me, what's your favorite color?

And I was about to blurt out blue, but I swallow my words and return to myself. Purple, I said, I really love purple. And she looked at me and smiled, one of her gorgeous, infectious smiles. And she said, funny, ever since I was a kid, I thought I'd marry a boy whose favorite color is purple. And I knew I finally belonged. And yeah, I think that embracing, finding your purple, embracing it, knowing that showing your purple is going to attract the right opportunities, the right people into your life. That to me is a good life.

Thank you. Hey, before you leave, if you love this episode, safe bet you'll also love the conversation we had with Ozan about three years back about how to think like a rocket scientist to solve really big problems. You'll find a link to Ozan's earlier episode in the show notes. And of course, if you haven't already done so, please go ahead and follow Good Life Project in your favorite listening app. And if you found this conversation interesting or inspiring or valuable, and chances are you did since you're still listening here, would you do me a personal favor, a seven second favor and share it?

Maybe on social or by text or by email, even just with one person. Just copy the link from the app you're using and tell those you know, those you love, those you want to help navigate this thing called life a little better so we can all do it better together with more ease and more joy. Tell them to listen. Then even invite them to talk about what you've both discovered. Because when podcasts become conversations and conversations become action, that's how we all come alive together. Until next time, I'm Jonathan Fields, signing off for Good Life Project. We'll be right back. Flight risk. The Apple Watch Series 10 is here. It has the biggest display ever. It's also the thinnest Apple Watch ever, making it even more comfortable on your wrist,

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