Good Life Project - Ozan Varol | Think Like a Rocket Scientist
Episode Date: November 23, 2020Ozan Varol is a rocket scientist turned award-winning professor and bestselling author.A native of Istanbul, Turkey, Ozan Varol grew up in a family of no English speakers. He learned English as a seco...nd language and moved to the United States by himself at 17 to attend Cornell University and major in astrophysics. While there, he served on the operations team for the 2003 Mars Exploration Rovers project that sent two rovers–Spirit and Opportunity–to Mars. He built stuff that went to the red planet and wrote code that snaps photos of the Martian surface. He was on track to built a powerhouse career as a literal rocket scientist.Leaving Cornell, though, Ozan pivoted and went to law school, graduating first in his class, earning the highest grade point average in his law school’s history, then became a law professor, teaching at Lewis & Clark Law School in his twenties, becoming the youngest tenured professor. While teaching law, there was always a deeper driver, the rocket scientist in him was on a mission to share the scientific process and mindset to influence others to make giant leaps on Earth. He shares philosophy in the wonderful book, Think Like a Rocket Scientist: Simple Strategies You Can Use to Make Giant Leaps in Work and Life (https://tinyurl.com/yyr3g6kf)You can find Ozan Varol at: Website (http://weeklycontrarian.com/)-------------Have you discovered your Sparketype yet? Take the Sparketype Assessment™ now. IT’S FREE (https://sparketype.com/) and takes about 7-minutes to complete. At a minimum, it’ll open your eyes in a big way. It also just might change your life.If you enjoyed the show, please share it with a friend. Thank you to our super cool brand partners. If you like the show, please support them - they help make the podcast possible. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
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So a native of Istanbul, Turkey, my guest Ozan Virol grew up in a family of no English
speakers.
He learned English as a second language and then moved to the United States himself at
17 to go to Cornell University and major in astrophysics.
And while he was there, he ended up serving on
the operations team for the 2003 Mars Exploration Rovers Project that sent two rovers, Spirit and
Opportunity, to Mars. He built stuff that went to the red planet. How cool is that? And he wrote
code that snaps photos of the Martian surface. And he was on track to build this powerhouse career in the world of scientists, a literal rocket scientist. But leaving Cornell, Ozan pivoted and he ended
up going to law school, graduating first in his class, earning the highest GPA in his law school's
history. Then he became a law professor, teaching at Lewis and Clark Law School in his 20s and becoming
the youngest tenured professor.
And while teaching law though, there was always this deeper driver.
The rocket scientist in him was on a mission to share that scientific process that challenged
everything and opened minds to possibility and helped cultivate a mindset to influence
others to make giant leaps on earth.
He shared this philosophy in a really wonderful book, Think Like a Rocket Scientist,
Simple Strategies You Can Use to Make Giant Leaps in Work and Life.
So excited to share this conversation with you.
I'm Jonathan Fields, and this is Good Life Project. The Apple Watch Series 10 is him. Y'all need a pilot. Flight risk.
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So you've been in Portland for a while right now, but originally from Istanbul.
Yep.
Grew up there, I guess in the 80s and 90s, which is a really interesting time to be there as well.
It's a place I've never yet been,
and I'm always curious when I get to talk to somebody
who's actually not just been there for a while,
but grown up there.
What was your sense of spending your formative years there?
Especially at a time where there was so much transformation
in the country.
Oh, for sure.
I mean, Istanbul is such an interesting city.
First of all, it's such a beautiful city.
I mean, I've traveled to so many countries
and I know I'm a little biased having been born there,
but it's such a breathtakingly beautiful city.
And I love that it sits at this intersection,
both geographically and I think culturally as well, between the East and the West.
And you can see that everywhere.
I mean, you can see that in the buildings.
You can see that in the people.
You can see it in the culture.
There's such a mix of sorts.
And so it was a really interesting place to grow up for that reason, I think.
And it's a huge city.
It's now about 17 million people.
It was interesting growing up there. to grow up for that reason, I think. And it's a huge city. It's now about 17 million people.
It was interesting growing up there.
I think the education system leaves a lot to be desired.
It was really conformist.
I mean, I think education,
public education is conformist
pretty much everywhere in the world.
But the Turkish education system took conformity
to a whole new level. I remember our primary school principal. So you would each get assigned
a number when you first started primary school and our principal would call us by that number
instead of our name. So it was like, you know, branding livestock basically for
identification purposes. Like I wasn't Ozan, I was 154 and that was my number. Um, as not my actual
number, but that was, that was what, what the, the culture was like. And that was, that was hard
for me. And I think that sort of brought me to a place where I couldn't fathom a future there,
primarily for that reason.
And I started to develop interests outside of the education system, just as a way to
escape that enforced conformity.
Like I fell in love with science fiction books and fell in love with astronomy.
And that sort of became my escape from the realities of the education system that I found
myself in, which was just at odds with the way that my parents had raised me.
And certainly at odds with the way that I think I was built.
Because I love to imagine, I love to create, and there was no room for that.
Yeah.
It's sort of, I mean, just the knowing that you had an identifier that was a number, that
one fact speaks so much about the entire ethos
and the value set around conformity and control
rather than, okay, so let's sort of plant seeds
and let people start to figure out
what is fascinating to them
and how do you move into the world
and do something with that,
which is not exactly the school system that exists to a great extent in this country either.
But it sounds like that really took it to the extreme.
And I mean, I should say you're right, Jonathan, that like even in this country, I think the
education system stifles curiosity.
Because if you look at children, children are naturally driven.
Children are naturally curious about the world.
But once they enter this
education system that's very much influenced by the industrial age, where you've got this
authority figure in front of the classroom, and the job of the authority figure is to
impart knowledge, and the job of the students is to just sit there, absorb knowledge, memorize it,
and then spit it back out on a standardized test somewhere.
And so all of these facts get etched into your brain.
And of course, you forget them after you take the exam.
But it's so out of touch with the way that the world works.
In the real world, memorization doesn't get you far.
The real world is all about finding your own problems, defining problems, reframing problems, asking
questions that nobody else has asked before. But in schools, you get a problem set, for example,
even in college, right? You do problem sets as in the problem is already set. The problem has
been defined for you by another person. And your job is to solve it. And so wildly disconnected
from how the real world operates, or your job is to not it. And so wildly disconnected from how the real world operates.
Or your job is to not just take problems, but create problems yourself, reframe them,
redefine them to be able to illuminate answers that other people haven't seen.
Yeah.
I mean, it's so fascinating, right?
So much of what we do on a day-to-day basis, once we get out into our quote productive
life is about problem identification.
And when I think about a lot of the most common thinking systems that have sort of emerged in the world of design and innovation
over the last decade or so, design thinking, human-centered design,
the first step is always empathy.
And what they're looking for is before we start to even conceive
of potential solutions,
do we even, are we even focused on the right question? And that is something that
is so rarely taught. I feel like actually in the world of design, there's a huge focus on that.
But outside of that, I wonder what other domains sort of academically even sort of like plant that
seed. There's one
example that came to mind from the academic world. It's from a class, a Stanford class in
entrepreneurship that I think her name is Tina Selig. She does this $5 challenge. I don't know
if you've heard of this, but it's a really interesting way to, I think, illustrate what
we've been talking about here in terms of the importance of defining or redefining the problem. She walks into the classroom, she divides the class into teams,
and she says each team gets $5 in seed funding, and your job is to make as much money as possible
in two hours, and then give a three-minute presentation to the class. So you've got five
bucks, as much money as possible in two hours, and then a three-minute presentation. In most teams, the teams that don't do well, they do the sort of the typical thing.
They take the $5 and they buy materials for a car wash, or they buy stuff you need to do a
lemonade stand, like you're six years old. Those teams don't do very well. The teams that do better
reframe the problem more
broadly. So instead of asking, you know, how do we make the most amount of money with $5? They say,
how do we make the most amount of money if we start with absolutely nothing?
Because just because a $5 bill is sitting in front of you doesn't mean that it's an effective
tool for the job. It's like that saying, right? If you're a hammer, every problem looks like a nail.
So they reframe the problem more broadly and say, how do we make the most amount of money
if we start with absolutely nothing?
Because the five bucks is basically a worthless resource.
So one team that did particularly well, they made reservations at popular Silicon Valley
restaurants and then sold the reservation times to wealthy executives who wanted to
skip the wait.
And they made a few hundred dollars in just two hours. But then the team that came in first place framed the problem
even more differently than that. They realized that both the two hours and the $5 were not the
most valuable resource in their toolbox. Rather, the most valuable tool was that three-minute
presentation time they had in front of a captivated class. So they sold that three-minute time to a company that was interested in recruiting
Stanford students and walked away with like $700. And so I love that example because it is a rare
example from the education system where students are being asked to quote-unquote, and I hate that
phrase, the cliche of thinking outside the box, but really
step outside the box and see the problem in a different light as opposed to having the problem
defined by somebody else. Yeah. I love that. I remember first hearing about Tina doing that
experiment. And the other thing that popped out at me that I thought was fascinating about it was
the sort of the use of a decoy constraint. It's sort of like she throws this $5 bill in really knowing,
like you said, it's, it's kind of just, it's like what magicians do with wands, you know, it's,
it is a way to just distract your attention rather than saying, okay, you know, it's like,
what do we do with the $5 rather than, okay, so the universe is available to us.
Just what do we do?
But when you create this sort of like fake constraint,
all of a sudden it just binds you,
and it just, it shrinks everything
that you would conceive of.
It's fascinating.
So you grew up in Istanbul.
You ended up like a 17-ish coming over here and landing in Cornell, studying astrophysics.
And while there, I guess, end up also working on the team that sends the rover to Mars,
which must have been, as a kid in your teens or early 20s, to be working on a project that
you know is literally leaving the planet and going somewhere else must have been just a really amazing experience for you.
It was incredible.
And especially the transformation from my perspective.
Here I was daydreaming about astronomy from our small apartment in Istanbul.
And then fast forward like four weeks and I had front row seats to the action.
Before I arrived at Cornell when I was still in Turkey, I was just researching what the astronomy department was up to and found out that a professor, his name is Steve Squires,
was in charge of a NASA-led mission to Mars. And there was no job listing, but I just
emailed them out of the blue and expressed my burning desire to work for him. I taught myself
how to do computer programming in high school. And so that came in really handy. And
he invited me in for an interview and I got the job on the operations team and did everything from,
you know, help select landing sites to design things that went to Mars. My senior thesis was
programming the algorithms that the rover, the cameras on the rover would use to snap photos of the surface.
So it was just, it was, I mean, to be able to go from again, where I was to that was just incredible. And then seeing the, the path that the rovers took to initially the plan was to send just
one rover, which ended up being two, going back to our discussion from earlier about reframing the
problem. The administrator of NASA at the time just asked this question that none of us had Ended up being two, going back to our discussion from earlier about reframing the problem,
the administrator of NASA at the time just asked this question that none of us had thought about asking.
He said, what if we sent two rovers instead of one?
Up until that point, NASA had just been sending one rover to Mars every two years and crossing
their fingers that nothing bad would happen along the way.
And two out of three Mars missions had failed when I started working on our project.
And that simple question, we ended up sending two rovers instead of one. And we had designed
them to last for 90 days. And I still get goosebumps when I say this, but Opportunity,
so their names are Spirit and Opportunity. And Opportunity ended up roving the red planet
for 15 years into its 90- day lifetime, which is really incredible.
So it was such a gem to be able to work on that mission at a relatively young age.
Yeah.
I mean, on so many levels to be brought into that, but also even the way that you ended
up with that opportunity.
I mean, there's something clearly inside of you that is willing to risk yourself
socially um because it was just fascinating because for you know like a guy who we started
the conversation you shared a bit about how you were sort of more on the introvert side of the
spectrum and yet it didn't stop you from seeing something that sounded fascinating to you looking
and realizing there's no listed opportunity to do this, but still saying, but maybe that's not real. Let me just go out there and completely put myself out there and see,
because who knows? And I have to say, I almost did not send that email. I'm glad you raised that
because I wrote the email and then this voice came up in my head. You know, the voice of the
inner critic who basically said like, who are you? You're a
skinny kid with a funny name from a country halfway around the globe. What can you possibly
contribute? And I almost did not attend. And then I asked myself two questions, which I still ask
myself on a regular basis. The first was, what's the worst that can happen? And the worst that can
happen, of course, is that just never hear from him again, right? He just ignores me and that's that.
And what's the best that can happen? And then the best that can happen is what actually ended
up happening, which is that I got a pinch me now job working on the operations team for this Mars
rover mission. And so those two questions stayed with me,
but I almost did not send that email. If I hadn't sent that email, we wouldn't be having
this conversation. Yeah. I'm so fascinated by the concept of sliding doors in moments like that.
You know, what's interesting also is that you say yes to the education, you say yes to this
opportunity. You devote yourself to a number of years at a great university studying one particular
area.
And it's an area where normally people stay in that field.
The quote usual path would be to then go get your master's, get your PhD, and either work
in industry or teach.
And a lot of people, I think, who start out in that path, especially who expressed a genuine
interest in it, which it seems like you did, well, they're all in. They're all
in on one of those two paths. You took a really divergent next step. I did. I went to law school.
And I think you're so right. And this is the sunk cost fallacy at work, right? Once you've devoted time, money,
resources into something. And this is where I think some of the underbelly of the dark underbelly
of grit comes about as well. I think grit is really important, but if you're persisting on
doing the wrong thing, the thing that's not right for you, then grit is not good. And for me, it was a realization that as much as I loved working
on the Mars mission, I did not love the classes I was taking. They were way too theoretical for me,
which is really interesting. Astrophysics is supposed to be about how the world works.
And it was so disconnected from reality in so many different ways, in a way that the Mars mission
wasn't. The Mars mission was as practical as things could get, but my classes I really didn't like.
And so going and getting a master's or PhD would have been tortured for me. So I started to look
elsewhere and ended up taking a class that was taught by a Cornell law professor, but he taught
it only for undergrads. And we read real cases and he used the Socratic method. He taught it like a real law school class. And I fell in love with
it. It was like a breath of fresh air, you know, reading about these disputes between two real
people, two real businesses in a way that, you know, theoretical physics was not. And so I ended
up switching paths and going to law school. And I think that, as you said, it strikes a lot of people as odd.
And I don't view it that way
because for a number of reasons.
One is I think human beings change.
So I could start with this deep founded interest
in astronomy and then just lose interest over time
and wanna go try something else.
Our lives are short.
And if I can live multiple lifetimes in this one
and dabble in different fields,
it just makes life more interesting.
And in this way too,
I can take concepts from astrophysics
and apply them in seemingly disconnected fields.
Like, so I went into law school
and at least that first splash on the surface,
law and astrophysics seem like as different
as two fields can be from one another.
But there's actually quite a bit of overlap.
You know, the critical thinking skills I picked up in college were directly applicable to
the law.
Being able to, you know, one of the things that scientists do is see the problem from
different perspectives and try to falsify themselves, create an hypothesis, try to falsify
it, which requires you to see that hypothesis from multiple perspectives, which is an invaluable skill
in law because the best lawyers know the opposition's argument better than the opposition
does. And that requires you to see the issue from multiple perspectives. And so my astrophysics training came in handy there as well.
And then the final bit of this is,
I also approach life as a series of experiments.
You know, I'll come up with a hypothesis
about what I might enjoy, and then I go try it out.
And if it doesn't work, I change the hypothesis
or I abandon it altogether.
And I've done that in a number of junctures.
I've went into law school, practiced law, and then left the practice of law to go teach
and become a professor, which I've been doing for the past 10 years.
And this will be my final year as a law professor because I decided to leave academia, shed
that old skin one more time to make room for the new to emerge.
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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 Series 10,
available for the first time in glossy jet black aluminum.
Compared to previous generations, iPhone Xs are later required.
Charge time and actual results will vary.
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Y'all need a pilot.
Flight risk.
Yeah, I love that approach.
Super similar to the way I look at it.
You know, when you just look at it as a series of experiments, then you forgive yourself
when the reality doesn't prove out to match the assumptions,
even if it takes years to do,
or just when you kind of reach a point where you're like,
you know what, I'm good.
I remember years ago sitting down with Helene Godin,
who had this fabulous 22-year career as a lawyer.
And great job in New York, power, fascinating,
really interesting research.
And she walked into the work one day,'s just like i'm i'm good i'm done and and and she told the
boss she was quitting and her boss said what do you need you know it you know money what whatever
it is a different and she said no no it has nothing to do i love you this is a great place
it's inter i'm just good like i'm done it's time for me to move on to my next chapter.
And I feel like when you set the intention early on, that look, I'm going to see what this feels
like. And if it feels good, I'll keep leaning into it. And if it starts not to, then I'm going
to keep myself open to the possibility of moving
somewhere else. You brought up the notion of grit and how it's kind of been held, especially in the
world of business over the last decade as it's the thing everybody wants to cultivate. But
I completely agree. There's a really interesting dark side to the concept of grit because so much good stuff happens when you get two steps into a 10-step process that leads you to a goal that you thought you really wanted. And you realize the assumptions that led you know, that, that, because that's the appropriate thing to do and to build this tool of grit. Um, it's interesting. I recently actually,
um, sat down with Angela Duckworth behind grit and, and I was asking her, I said, you know, the,
the original research that she did on it was, um, she speaks about it as a state, but the actual research is written up describing it as a trait.
And I said, how do you view what this thing is now?
She kind of said, neither.
She said, I look at it as a tendency.
And like any tendency, it can express itself in a healthy and constructive way and not so much so it's i think it's a fascinating evolution
and um i'm kind of fascinated with how people have have latched on to this word as well um
i also see you know the way that you were saying that there's this really interesting
flow between studying science and practicing law um so i went to law school uh practice for about
four or five years and similar you, the way it taught me
to look at arguments, to look at the world, to deconstruct facts and circumstances. When I decided
to leave, people were like, well, how could you do that? You went to law school, you did well,
you have this amazing job. And I was just really happy with the tool set that I had accumulated.
And I knew it was
time to move on.
And it goes back also to that sunk cost fallacy is so life-stifling in so many ways.
Yeah, for sure.
And then I think one component that also goes along with this, and I think why people are
reluctant to do what you did, Jonathan, and be the practice of law or why I decided to
leave academia is ego.
I think we tell ourselves a story, a story of our significance. And I told this story to myself.
I think I stayed in academia for longer than I should because I was telling myself or my ego
was telling myself the story about what serious law professors do and don't do. And it took me so
long to start a blog because I
thought I would be ridiculed. And I was actually ridiculed by some of my colleagues, you know,
this like sort of extracurricular activity that I was engaged in that wasn't publishing articles
in peer review journals and law reviews. And so shaking that off, because I've had professor attached to my name for 10 years now.
And so when I thought about shedding that particular skin and shedding that title, my
ego was kicking and screaming and saying, like, what are you doing?
You know, what are you going to, who, more importantly, who are you going to be when
you're no longer a professor?
So I think ego plays a big role.
There's a poem I love by Donna Markova.
It's called, I Will Not Die an Unlived Life.
And there's a line in there that I particularly love.
She says something like, I choose to risk my significance so that what comes to me as
seed can move on as blossom and what
comes as blossom can grow as fruit. And so that phrase, particularly, I choose to risk my
significance. Whenever I feel like my ego is getting in the way, those words come to me from
the depths of my subconscious. It's reminding me that I've got nothing to lose.
That is such a beautiful sentiment. Yeah, I love that. I'm kind of letting it land reminding me that I've got nothing to lose. That is such a beautiful sentiment.
Yeah, I love that. I'm kind of letting it land on me right now as I'm thinking through some big moves.
Yeah, I mean, when you think about the role of ego in controlling all of our sort of like
quote next moves, it is so at the center of so many things and so constraining
to possibility and to really to just fully coming alive throughout the course of life.
You know, one of the things that I'm fascinated by in your work also is sort of like you seem
to carry this really meta lens on the way that you move through the world. So it's
not just you think about things, but you think about how you think about things. And then you
want to know about both of those levels of inquiry and then sort of deconstruct like,
what are my methodologies? What am I aware of and not aware of? And then share that with the world.
I'm curious, is that something,
because it's kind of a unique thing. I've seen that in people who have meditated for many,
many years or really devoted themselves to those processes. Is this kind of been a part of you
for a long time? Is this something that you've cultivated intentionally?
That's a great question. I don't know when it came into the picture. I think part of me thinks that it's been there all along. I was an only child, so I spent just a lot of time being alone. And when you're alone, you have a lot of time to think and examine what you want and what you don't want. And I, you know, fortunately had parents who didn't get in my way and, you know,
never said, oh, you can't do that. You know, people like you don't try to become an astronaut
or don't try to, you know, work on a space mission. So it's not, I think on some level,
it's always been there. There's definitely been periods of my life where I lost sight of that, where I stopped examining my life.
I think practice of law was probably one of those periods where I was just so immersed in the lawyer
mentality, 80-hour weeks and thinking of your life in six-minute increments that I lost sight of,
I think, what was really important to me. And I stopped examining myself, which really, I mean, it was exhausting.
I practiced law for two years.
And I just remember when I left the law firm, I like stopped working.
And then I was in my apartment for just a week.
I couldn't leave.
I was running on stress hormones.
And I wasn't even aware of it.
I mean, I was so unaware of my body and so disconnected from my body that I just did
not realize how exhausted I was.
So I think it's been there.
The examination part has been there, I think, all along.
And it is aligned with my authentic self.
But I've definitely lost sight of it in several periods of my life.
And then I come back to it.
And coming back to it
is where the magic happens. And I find that it's something you need to be really intentional about,
especially in this day and age where we're moving from one email to the next and one notification
to the next and one meeting to the next. There is no room to pause and reflect and deliberate and just ask the basic question
of like, why am I doing what I'm doing?
Now, what is the purpose of me picking up my phone and going to the front page of the
New York Times?
What is the motivation behind that?
And often there is none.
It's just autopilot.
You know, that's what you do when you pick up your phone, when you have an election going
on.
But there isn't that reflection period of, okay, let me pause and really think through what I'm going to do next.
And basic questions like, what is my North Star in life?
What is my mission?
What is it that I want to accomplish?
And one of my purposes is to help other people reimagine their lives and reimagine the status quo. And if I'm aligned with that purpose, then it becomes easier, I think, to make some of the decisions that we've been talking saying, Jonathan, like, I'm good. I've been teaching the same classes now
for 10 years. And my impact in the classroom is quite limited, not just because I'm teaching the
same subject matters, but also you have this environment where we're required to grade
students on a curve, which creates this zero-sum atmosphere and totally impedes learning.
Everything becomes about, is this going to be on the final?
And looking at that and saying, you know what?
I don't want to do that anymore.
I don't want to do that because I'm not learning.
I'm not growing.
And I don't want to do it because it's not moving the needle on what I think is my life's
purpose. So yeah, there's that, I think, quote from Socrates or Plato,
one of the ancients about how an unexamined life
is not worth living.
And that is something that I try to do.
And it definitely takes intention
and carving out space for it in this day and age
where all of these notifications are
screaming their hundred decibel sirens for attention at all hours of the day.
Yeah, I completely agree. And how the over-examined life also can lead to a pretty
neurotic and obsessive existence at the same time. For sure.
There's like a sweet spot that we try and sort of navigate. You know, one of the things that
comes up, and this is something that you write about in your book, like a rocket scientist, is how we grapple with
uncertainty. So this is something I'm fairly intimately familiar with. I spent a lot of
chunk of time about a decade ago diving into the research and writing a book around this.
But a lot of these jumps that you're talking about, a lot of these sort of like being willing
to move away from something that we know and then step out into Joseph Campbell's abyss where,
you know, like it's just, we are in the unknown is something that is, that is where possibility
lies, you know? And at the same time it is where abject terror lies for so many people
to talk to me a bit about this. Oh, for sure. I think, you know, we are for so many people. Talk to me a bit about this.
Oh, for sure. I think we are in so many different ways wired to fear uncertainty. I think there is a genetic component to this where the unknown was threatening to our ancestors. If you didn't fear
the unknown, you become lunch for a predator. And then it's reinforced that tendency to look for certainty and to lean into the known
gets reinforced by the education system. In school, there was one right answer,
one right way to interpret history, one right curriculum. You see that the final products,
you see Newton's laws as if they arrived by some grand divine visitation, and not the years, the process that went into,
which is the interesting part, and the uncertainty, and so much unknown, and so much
trial and error. You don't read about Newton's experiments in alchemy, which
failed spectacularly. You only read about his laws of motion. And so then you get out into the real world and everybody's looking for certainty and
everybody's looking for the one right answer that's going to be on the exam.
And so then life becomes a series of Google searches and three-step formulas and life
hacks.
But there is so much beauty in uncertainty.
And that's where all progress
happens. All breakthroughs, if you look at scientific history, from the discovery of DNA
to x-ray to penicillin, it all happened in conditions of uncertainty. But when we grasp
for certainty and for certain answers, you get into this mode of operating where the uncertainty becomes so threatening that you are just reluctant to take any steps to do anything where you don't know for sure what's going to happen.
And that, I think, is quite paralyzing.
That's why we just keep doing the same thing we were doing yesterday. That's why when I was a practicing lawyer and thinking about switching into academia,
there was so much uncertainty for me.
I didn't know if I would enjoy it.
And so if uncertainty were a paralyzing force for me, I would still be practicing law.
And if I wasn't willing to dance with uncertainty, I'd still be doing that
in San Francisco. And one framework, I think it's easier said than done to say,
oh, embrace uncertainty and sort of be fine with it. I think for a lot of people,
it sounds like being ordered to stay dry in a thunderstorm. It's just so against the way that
we are conditioned. One framework that I find really helpful is a
distinction between one-way door decisions and two-way door decisions, which I write about in
the book. One-way door decisions are the irreversible kind. And I think this is what
stops a lot of people in their tracks, is they assume that if they make a decision, if they
enter this new room, if they move to a new city or start a new career and
things don't work out as they envisioned, life as they know it is going to come to an end.
So it's irreversible. But that assumption for most of our decisions is incorrect.
Because most of the decisions we make in life come with two-way doors. In other words,
you can walk into a new room and if you don't like what you see, you can walk back out. And usually what looks like a one-way
door is actually a two-way door if you get creative about it. And this framework, by the way,
was the reason why I was able to leave the practice of law and go into academia. I remember
thinking, you know, I thought about this for months before finally
deciding to apply for academic positions. And I think I was operating under the assumption that
once I left the firm I was practicing for in San Francisco, there would be no coming back.
But that is a faulty assumption. I could go into academia, which is why I did. I took a two-year
temporary non-tenure track job in Chicago,
which incidentally is where I ended up meeting my wife. But it was an experiment for me. And I
thought to myself, look, I'm still licensed to practice law. And if I don't like teaching for
two years, I could always go back. Probably not to the firm that I used to work for, but to a
different firm. So I think writing those out, thinking through
the decisions you're facing in terms of that one-way door and two-way door lens,
and then also asking the two questions I mentioned before when I was talking through my
mindset in sending the email to Professor Squires, the principal investigator for that Mars mission,
what's the worst that can happen?
And if this were to happen, what would I do about it? And actually writing that down.
And then what's the best that can happen? To me, that's also really helpful with grappling with uncertainty because often what we fear is the feeling of fear is worse than what is actually to be feared.
And so writing down those answers as a way of undressing your fears
and seeing them with their masks off,
and you realize that they're not nearly as threatening as they might be
if you just let them percolate in your head.
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I love the framework.
Those two questions, it's interesting.
I have sort of like a similar set of prompts for myself.
I add one question in.
It sounds like you actually, you have this, but you don't break it out. So I'll ask myself, you know, like, what is the worst
case scenario? What is the best case scenario? And then how will I recover if the worst case
scenario happens? Like, let me map out the plan. Right. Because that tends to be the thing
that shows you that, okay, so it may hurt, but most times you're going to be okay. But then I also, there's actually a
fourth question that I add to my analysis, which is what if I do nothing? You know, what if I just
keep on keeping on? And fascinatingly for me, at least, and for probably a number of people have
asked this too, the most terrifying long-term outcome is the answer to that question, not the failure one.
Right.
Because if things are not quite, things are okay, but really not quite right now, life
applies friction.
There's no sideways.
So if you keep projecting out a year, five years, 10 years, you kind of think, well,
wow, what's my life going to be like?
What's my health like?
What's my happiness going to be like?
My fulfillment? If I don't do anything about this thing, I'm not going to feel the same.
I'm actually going to be in a pretty dark place if I'm really being honest.
And when you tell those stories, like the failure and recovery story, the what if I do nothing story,
and the what if I succeed story, it becomes really, I found it becomes super motivating.
You shared something else, which is,
I love this framework that you have,
the one-way door, the two-way door.
It also aligns, you and I apparently
think in frameworks a lot.
So the frame that I often bring
is a distinction between what I would call
ripcord versus stampede
uncertainty, which is a thing where the ripcord uncertainty is a thing where you have intentionally
invited this in and inviting it out again may hurt.
It may require a lot of recovery and loss of prestige, power, money, but you always
have one hand on the ripcord if you want it you know
where stampede uncertainty is this it happens from the outside in you're in the middle of a stampede
you're getting bounced all around you have no idea if you're going to survive but and you have
no ability or control to remove yourself from that scenario so like when we talk about the
world of business,
we're almost always talking about it from a ripcord or a two-way door standpoint.
But when we talk about how we live
in the context of life and circumstances,
like what we're all living through right now,
I feel like navigating those two types of uncertainty
is different.
And I'm curious if you feel that
there's a distinction with that too. That's a great question. Yeah. I agree with you that
there is a distinction between the two. So ripcord being the sense that you can
pull yourself out of that situation. Yep. It might not be fun, but you have the power. Whereas in a stampede, you don't have the power to pull yourself out. Yeah. No, I think I do think
there's a distinction between the two. I agree with you. I think from my perspective, I try to
not get into the stampede sort of uncertainty or put myself in positions where that's going to be,
where there is no ripcord. And the way that I think through this is I don't, for example,
bet the, you know, the life of my platform on a single thing. I think that is a situation where
you can find yourself in a stampede and there is no way of getting out because the one thing, like if I was building my career around, um, professional speaking
in front of live audiences, I would be in a stampede right now. You know, I would have no
control over what was going on. Um, but if you diversify yourself, which is what I try to do,
I think you're less likely to find yourself in a stampede.
So instead of and this actually also helps with with ego as well.
So if you if you define yourself as as a speaker, if you define yourself as a professor and only a professor, it becomes really hard to walk away from that because you've invested so much into that title.
And it becomes also really hard.
You find yourself in a stampede when a crisis comes along
and that line of work for one reason or the other
is just no longer available to you.
But if you're able to diversify yourself
and really diversify your identity,
so you're not just defining yourself as a professor,
but you're a professor who writes mainstream books
that have nothing to do with law, which is what I do, who also blogs and does professional speaking.
And when you do that, it becomes a lot easier, I think, to walk away from one of those identities.
If you've got four things going for you, you can say, all right, well,
this is not working. So professional speaking, live speaking is off the table. Let me lean on one of these other identities. Or for me, if I'm no longer deriving enjoyment from being in academia,
I can walk away from that more easily because the ego takes less of a hit. You can just rely
on some of these other identities and some of these other hats you crafted for yourself. And so I think it works. So diversification
of your identity, I think, helps in both of those. One, you're less likely to find yourself in
stampede, and you're more likely to walk away from an identity that's no longer serving you.
Yeah. I mean, it's an interesting serving you. Dr. Justin Marchegiani Yeah.
I mean, it's an interesting way to frame it.
I'm thinking that, I'm sort of thinking that through in terms of my own life and, you know,
as a general set of hedges, you know, I quote, diversify, you know, so I'm in the media business,
I'm in the consulting business, I'm in the, you know, like I write.
So and I think a lot of, on the one hand, it allows me to run a series of experiments and
just have fun creating a whole bunch of different things. But it also does play this other role of
creating a certain amount of hedge against, well, if this goes south, this might still be okay.
As you're speaking, there's another distinction that sort of came to my mind
in the context of us not just surviving, but actually being able to see possibility in
the space of uncertainty and harness it and build around it, which is the social context
of making decisions and taking actions and investing in resourcing things when the world
is spinning around you.
I'm sure you're familiar with it.
There's a famous paradox, the Ellsberg paradox,
that essentially presents people with two different urns.
One has 50 black marbles and 50 red marbles.
The other has 100 black and red marbles,
but you have no idea what the distribution is.
And somebody's told, choose a jar
and tell me what color the marble is going to be,
and you'll either win $1,000 or lose $ and tell me what color the marble is going to be. And you'll
either win a thousand dollars or lose a thousand dollars. So the stakes are high. And most people
tend towards the jar with the known 50, 50 distribution. There's no rational basis for that.
And so people like, well, why would we really shy away from uncertainty? And then I was able to
actually discover fMRI studies that show that the amygdala
lights up much more powerfully,
the fear center in our brain,
when we consider pulling the marble from the jar
where we don't know the distribution.
And then there was one other really fascinating context,
and this is kind of where I'm getting with you,
where a team ran essentially the same experiment,
but they told the people,
you don't ever have to tell anyone. Just make it up in your mind. Write it down on a piece of paper and nobody will see the paper. The. We're afraid of being judged and outcast for being wrong when we do that. And when you remove that,
we're much more comfortable in the face of that. And that's why I was curious because
to me, we tend to look at the ripcord or the thing that you can pull out of as,
it's kind of like the easier one to navigate.
But I've increasingly been wondering,
especially, you know, over the course of this year,
I think that's why I'm thinking about this.
When that uncertainty is imposed from the outside in and we have done nothing and it's normalized
because everybody is in it with us,
does that maybe actually lessen or remove the social context
of making a radical move and maybe even
make it easier? And it's been a real curiosity of mine. I'm curious what you think of that.
Yeah, I love that. The social context that goes along with decision-making on their uncertainty,
because you're right. I think part of the fear of uncertainty is coming from,
well, if I do this thing and if it doesn't work, what will other people think? You know,
are they going to point and laugh? Are they going to call me names? What am I going to look like?
And I think those fears were certainly, certainly existent for me when I was thinking about,
you know, when I started my blog and I was still, you know, a professor and I still am, but I'm on my way out.
And so that decision, that framework, I think the social context is a really important piece
of it.
And I do agree that I think diversification allows you to save face in a way, right? Because you're saying, look, you know, and I think that
was partially why I was able to decide to leave academia is because my book came out in April and
it's been really successful and I've been able to do all of these things. And now that that identity
is blossoming, I feel more comfortable abandoning the professor identity. And so, yeah, so there is
a huge social component to that. And that can get in the way of deciding to make a leap into
the unknown. There's a Chinese proverb that I love which which your question of like what if I do nothing which
is such a powerful one and I'm going to add that into my repertoire there's a Chinese proverb that
I love that illustrates that it goes something like you know many a false step was made by
standing still it can often be more risky to stick with the status quo than than take a leap
into the unknown and and if there's any way
that you can lessen the social impact that comes from, and I think this goes hand in hand with the
fear of failure too, which also has a social component to it, right? If you fail, then you
feel like you're going to be shamed or embarrassed in public. But yeah, if there's anything you can
do and if diversifying your identity certainly does that for me to lessen
that, then that's, that's great. Yeah. It's a, it's such an interesting approach, something I'm
going to sort of like play within my mind a little bit. Yeah. You know, one of the other things that
you, you, you've written about, you speak about, and it's certainly something that you touch on
in your book as well. It's kind of the idea of breaking down the silos, cross-pollination of ideas, and how we tend to be so focused
on the one domain that we're in and becoming the experts in that one area and then believing
that we know what we need to know to solve the problem.
But so often what we think is us doing the best we can and rising up and being as accomplished
as we can and as capable at doing really innovative, cool new work actually is not the reality on the ground.
Yeah, for sure. I think if you look at the history of innovation, some of the most breakthrough
products that we enjoy today happen because of cross-pollination. Life doesn't happen in these
isolated, compartmentalized silos.
And I think we do ourselves a disservice by just remaining in that one silo and not exposing ourselves to other disciplines.
And one of the examples I give in the book is the founding of Netflix.
You know, Reed Hastings had, I think he had rented Apollo 13 and incurred a bunch of late fees. And he's working out at his gym and he's upset
at having to pay $40 to Blockbuster. And it occurs to him that the model used in his gym,
you can work out as much or as little as you want and you pay $20 for it. There are no late fees.
Can be imported into the video rental industry, which is a seed that ended up blossoming into Netflix.
I mean, this seemingly simple idea, really well-established idea in the fitness industry
created a revolution in the streaming industry. That's why I think a lot of the modern
gate crashers tend to be outsiders to the industry that they ended up disrupting.
Like Jeff Bezos, he was in finance before he started Amazon.
Reed Hastings was a computer programmer.
Elon Musk was a Silicon Valley guy
when he started SpaceX.
And he learned about rocket science by reading textbooks.
Sarah Blakely was selling fax machines door to door
before she started Spanx
and ended up becoming the world's
youngest self-made female billionaire. I think with anything though, it's possible you don't
want to be a dilettante where you're just sort of dabbling in so many different things and there
isn't sufficient depth. I think that the people who really make an impact tend to be sort of
these specialized generalists where they exist in the
middle ground between specialization, extreme specialization on the one hand and generalization
on the other hand, where they know enough about a number of fields to be dangerous, where they can
really see the parallels between those fields. They're not just sort of dabbling in them and
dipping their toes into these multiple different pools, but really know enough about each
area to be able to take concepts from one and apply them, apply them to, to the others.
Yeah. And I love that. And, and, and also maybe even to know, and this is something you speak
about, you know, it doesn't always also always have to be one person who kind of, you know,
is dangerous in a handful of fields. Sometimes it's enough to know that will maybe, you know, it doesn't always also always have to be one person who kind of, you know, is dangerous
in a handful of fields. Sometimes it's enough to know that will maybe, you know, somebody from a
completely different domain than me with a different lens is going to be able to just light
something up. You have the great example of Harry Potter and the editor's daughter in the book.
Share that story. Yeah, sure. So when so when jk rowling first submitted the the
first harry potter book harry potter and the sorcerer stone to publishers they were unanimous
in their opinion they all thought that the book was not worth printing until the manuscript ended
up on the desk of nigel newton who's the head of bloomsbury publishing in the uk uh and and newton
had a secret weapon uh by the name of Alice, his eight-year-old daughter.
And what he did was he brought home the first chapter from the book and just gave it to Alice.
And Alice took the first chapter to her room. She devoured it. She came back down and she said,
Dad, this is so much better than anything else I've read. And that input from Alice convinced her father to write a, I think, a £2,500 check to J.K. Rowling to acquire the rights to publish Harry Potter, obviously the best bet made in publishing history. Because Nigel Newton was willing to step outside his echo chamber and get the opinion of someone
who's an outsider to the publishing industry, but an insider for the audience that the book
was written for.
So you're absolutely right.
So it doesn't have to be you.
It can be other people who are in your circle.
But I think where we come up short is we surround ourselves by people like us.
We befriend people like us, who think like us,
who see the world through the same perspective.
This happens all the time in businesses
where, you know, you end up hiring the same people
over and over again,
who walk the same path that you did.
And this is why this is a prevalent problem in academia,
where if you look at the ranks of elite law school,
early schools, period,
they come from the, you know, they're all the graduates of the same few elite institutions,
because once you're a faculty at that institution, then you end up hiring people
who follow a very similar path to you. And I think that is a recipe for disaster in many ways,
because it creates this environment of groupthink where you're
hearing the same views echoed over and over again.
So yeah, so I think outsiders or other people can be a really rich source of cross-pollination
as long as you make a point to actually surround yourself with people who don't look at the
world the same way that you do.
I mean, so much of that is about intention, right? Also, because I think so often
we are driven by the quest, not for truth, but for validation. And, and, you know, when,
when that is what we want, because it makes us feel good, you know, then we surround ourselves
with the people who will validate whatever idea that we have. But then we often, we, you know, we never know if it's good.
We never know if it could be exponentially better.
And we never know if it's just outright horrible.
Also, I love, um, Adam Grant was recently sharing how, when he writes a book now, he,
um, he puts together, he has sort of like a team of what he calls challengers, right.
You know, and he would have champions and all these other people. Now he explicitly has like, I think it's his research
assistants and his grad students and stuff like that. And, and they are empowered. He says,
basically, okay, so here's the chapter this week, go at it. Like just shred this thing,
show me every possible way that I could be wrong or off. And he does it in the name of wanting to really identify the bad
stuff quickly, see if it's refinable or changeable or optimizable. If it's not, throw it out. And if
it is, make it 10 times better. And I think we're terrified of doing that in our regular lives.
This goes back to the social context again, right? Because we're terrified of not knowing
everything and not always being right.
We want to be seen as the people who are smart and correct.
And we know the appropriate and the right thing to do.
And we're on the right track rather than just saying, dude, I have no idea.
Because we don't at the end of the day.
And if you look at it rationally, you know, like if you consider social context from Adam's perspective, he'd much rather know about those mistakes before the book is published, right?
From his research assistants and not afterwards from the public.
So he can correct the errors in the book before it actually hits the press machine. And so and I think what he does is brilliant because usually research assistants might be they might be reluctant to raise their hands and say, you know what, I don't know if this is right or I don't know if I agree with this or here's a counter argument that you haven't thought of. tell me what I missed. Tell me where you're getting bored. That gives them psychological
safety to actually come forward because now your boss, your professor is telling you that that's
exactly what I'm looking for and then following through. So not just sort of paying lip service
to it, but actually rewarding what it does happen when students do come back and say,
here's a mistake or here's something you didn't think of, actually following through on your commitments, that's how you spot your blind spots.
And that's how you fix these errors before they, you know, turn into something far more embarrassing
than being corrected by one of your research assistants.
Yeah. And like you said, I would so much rather have that loving smackdown from a small group of research assistants I'm close to than you go public with a book and it's out there and then all of a sudden the world just piles on you.
And rightfully so.
It's going to be a whole lot more painful.
I mean, it's interesting that all the things that we've been talking about, they're in the context in part in life, in part in careers, a lot in the context of business too, but it really is, you zoom the
lens out and the fundamental tenets of how to live a good life. You know, it's really about,
you know, how I've got a limited amount of time, of energy, of resources, of days in my life.
And how do I put it to good use, which I think is a good place for us to come full circle as well.
So, you know, we're sitting here in this container of the good life project. If I offer out the phrase to live a
good life, what comes up? I think for me, living a good life is being true to who I am, really
getting in touch with who I am, not what the world tells me I should be, not what I thought of myself a month ago, a year ago,
but who I am now. Who am I right now at this moment? I think that figuring the answer to that
question and then structuring your life accordingly, that to me is living a good life.
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