The Learning Leader Show With Ryan Hawk - 367: Ozan Varol - How To Think Like A Rocket Scientist

Episode Date: May 31, 2020

The Learning Leader Show With Ryan Hawk Text LEARNERS to 44222 Full show notes found at www.LearningLeader.com #367: Ozan Varol - How To Think Like A Rocket Scientist Sustaining excellence = The ability to learn from failure - "Failure sucks and shouldn't be celebrated. We must learn from it." "Learn fast, don't fail fast. We need to get better with each iteration. Breakthroughs should be evolutionary, not revolutionary How success can lead to failure The Challenger Explosion - A string of successes discounted the role that luck played in the process "Just because you're on a hot streak doesn't mean you'll beat the house." Post mortem - A Latin phrase for "after death." Instead of a post mortem, do an "after action review." Review after all actions whether they succeeded or failed. The "Kill The Company" exercise Ask the people within your company what they would do to compete and beat your company... And then do that. Mark Zuckerberg does this with acquisitions (WhatsApp, Instagram). One of his greatest fears is becoming the next MySpace. As a mid-level manager: Put yourself in the position of your customer. Why are customers justified in buying from our competitions? "They see something we're not seeing." Growing up in Istanbul, Turkey. It was a culture of conformity. Ozan did not fit in. In fact, he was assigned a number in school and that was used to call on him instead of his name. His parents let him choose which school he went to and he remembers feeling so empowered by them for having a choice. He wanted more of that. So he decided to come to the United States for college and attended Cornell. Ozan blindly applied for a job that didn't exist by emailing Steve Squyres (he was in charge of a NASA funded project to send a river to Mars). And he acted on his dad's advice, "you can't win the lottery if you don't buy a ticket." "Science is a way of thinking much more than it is a body of knowledge." - Carl Sagan In the modern world we look for certainty in uncertain places. We search for order in chaos. The right answer in ambiguity. And conviction in the complexity. We should be fueled not by a desire for a quick catharsis but by intrigue. Where certainty ends, progress begins. "The great obstacle to discovering was not ignorance but the illusion of knowledge. - historian Daniel J Boorstin It takes courage... Often times there is a failure of courage. Have the courage to take action when the rest of the world is standing still. Ask yourself two questions: What's the worst that can happen? What's the best that can happen? Adopt an experimental mindset - Frame your actions as experiments. Don't be afraid to try new things... "The way you figure out what's right is to try to prove it wrong." The goal? "Find what's right, not to be right." Ask people who disagree with you... Why? Have a mindset to learn from them. "Tell me what's wrong with this..." Be a work in progress. "All progress happens in uncertain times." "It's bizarre. People prefer certainty of bad news instead of the fear of the unknown." "Be curious about tomorrow." Think: "What problems can I solve right now?" It is not helpful to try and solve something that you cannot control. Diversify your identity and services -- This allows you to be flexible and not depended on one stream of revenue. "All of our differences are minimized when we zoom out." The Apollo 8 mission gave us an opportunity to look at the Earth from afar (mission to go near the moon). Jim Lovell could cover up the earth with his thumb. It put things in perspective. Rocket science teaches us about our limited role in the cosmos and reminds us to be gentler and kinder to one another.  

Being afraid of a no, being afraid of rejection, it really comes down to a failure of courage. And the difference between the people we put on a pedestal, right, the universe enters, the world changers. The difference between them and then the rest of the world is that they're willing to take action when the rest of the world is standing still. Are you curious about taking a more proactive approach to your leadership development? Have you thought about the people you are surrounding yourself with as you strive to get better? If so, the new Learning Leader Academy may be for you. It's been designed to not only provide you with online training videos. In fact, I filmed 30 of them sitting side by side with the greatest mentor of my life, my dad.

But the Learning Leader Academy also gives you the opportunity to interact with an active community of leaders. with growth-oriented mindsets. If this sounds like something that you would like to do, check out more details at ryanhawk.me. That's ryanhawk.me for the Learning Leader Academy. Welcome to the Learning Leader Show, presented by Brixie and Meyer. I am Ryan Hawk.

Thank you so much for being here. Text, learners to 44222 in order to join tens of thousands of learning leaders from all over the world. Receive Mindful Monday updates what I'm reading, writing, watching, thinking about. Also give you more details about how my book, Welcome to Management, can help you become a more effective leader. Text learners to 4422.2. Now on tonight's feature leader of the great Ozone Varral, rocket scientist, award-winning law professor, an author of a very interesting new book titled Think, Lerner.

like a rocket scientist. Simple strategies you can use to make giant leaps in work and life. He's a native of Istanbul Turkey, grew up in a family of no English speakers, moved to the United States by himself at the age of 17 to attend Cornell University and major in planetary sciences. While there, he served on the operations team for the 2003 Mars Exploration Rovers Project

that sent two rovers to Mars. Wow, a few of the topics we discussed, why we should not strive to fail fast and what we should do instead. And then when flip-flopping can be seen as a strength. And then the two questions we all should ask ourselves every single day. Ladies and gentlemen, it's Ozone Verall. All right, Ozone Verall. Welcome. It's so great to have you here on The Learning Leaders Show.

Thank you so much. for having me on. Delighted to be here. So you were recommended to me by our mutual friend, Shane Snow. I remember the email, it said, I have a dope podcast guest. And Shane almost never does this, by the way. So he only does it when he knows I'm going to like it

because he knows I'm very picky. And at that point, I said, it doesn't even matter who he says. I'm saying yes. However, I pick up your book, OZON, called Think Like a Rocket Scientist. And I can't stop talking about the stories within it with my wife and my friends. So huge, huge credit to you, man, for putting out a great,

a fantastic piece of work that is creating a lot of dialogue with a lot of people. Thank you so much, Ryan. And coming from you, that means a lot. And that's really what you just said is like the most wonderful thing. An author can hear. So thank you so much. That means a lot. I certainly. It's well deserved. I know how hard it is, and especially the way that you weave the stories and the science and application together. It's an incredible skill and you make it look easy. But I'm curious those on to get us started. You know, I love studying people who have sustained excellence.

And you certainly are one of those yourself in your own right. So we could just deconstruct your own process. And we will for part of this time. But you've also spent time around others who have, whether it's an academia and sending something to Mars and much more beyond that. But I'm curious from your perspective, what have you found to be some of the commonalities among people who have sustained excellence? The first thing that popped to mind, Ryan, when you ask that question, is the ability to learn from failure. And I'd love to dig a little deeper into that.

So, you know, we went from, I think, being really afraid of failure. Now the pendulum has swung in this other direction in Silicon Valley where we're sort of become obsessed with it almost, right? Celebrating and fetishizing failure, I think, to a dangerous degree. So you have the mantra of fail fast, fail often, fail forward. They're now conferences dedicated to celebrating failure. Silicon Valley companies are holding funerals for failed startups, complete with like backpipes and DJ spitting records and sponsorships by liquor companies. And I don't buy it.

Like based on my study of excellence, of sustained excellence across numerous industries, there are two problems that are wrong with that approach. One is, regardless of what Silicon Valley tells you, failure sucks, that whoever says they celebrate failure and they don't mind failing is lying to you. But more importantly, when we celebrate something, we don't learn from it. So the mantra should really be learn fast and not fail fast. Because fail fast research shows doesn't lead to sustained excellence, doesn't lead to sustain success. what most people do is they move from one failure to the next, repeating the same mistakes, making the same bad decisions, taking the same bad risks, and not getting better with each iteration.

Whereas the successful people do the opposite. They learn from each iteration and they get better with each one. Breakthroughs, whether it's in science or in business, tend to be evolutionary, not revolutionary. So if you're trying to achieve something transformative, you're not going to succeed on the first try. Einstein's first several proofs for E equals MC square failed. SpaceX's first three launches were spectacular disasters. There were failures. But each of them learned. So Einstein learned from his failures.

SpaceX learned from their failures. And in the end, produced these groundbreaking products. In Einstein's case, it was this groundbreaking theory. In SpaceX's case, it's this aerospace company. that's disrupting this deeply established industry. We have an obsession with grand openings and trying to get things right from the get-go, but the opening doesn't have to be grand

as long as the finale is. And the best way to make the finale grand is to learn from your failures. You have a chapter in your book at the end, and I took a lot of notes on. This is one of the areas I read again today, it was on getting ready, called Nothing Fails Like Success. And in it, you talk about the Challenger disaster as well as the Columbia spacecraft that disintegrated upon reentry in 2003.

So there was a disaster in 1986, which I mean, I pay attention to space. I wanted to be an astronaut when I was a kid. So like, I'm really into this stuff. But I, for some reason, I didn't think about the Columbia disintegrating upon reentry in 2003, because maybe it was the footage of it isn't the same as the Challenger. And I found that fascinating about the fact that take the inverse of failure, look at success, but sometimes success can create failure. Could you describe maybe help illustrate those stories and then apply that to how we think about

that today? Absolutely. So Challenger in Columbia, the technical flaws were very different. And I'll just briefly mention what the technical flaws were. In Challenger, it was a failure of what's called the O-rings. These are flexible rubber bands that seal the solid rocket boosters and prevent hot gases from leaking out of them. And NASA had been flying space shuttles with damaged oarings for several years before the Challenger disaster. And a number of engineers raised their hands and said, hey, this is really dangerous.

An engineer by the name of Roger Burgulet, six months before Challenger, he wrote a memo saying that the repeated failure of the oarings could cause a catastrophe. of the highest order, the loss of human life. But his memo was ignored primarily because the, and I should also mention, like, these were really difficult decisions. And there's definitely hindsight bias here. And we may have made the same decision to launch Challenger if you and I were sitting there on that morning. But that doesn't mean we can't learn from them.

And so one of the takeaways here and one of the reasons why the most capable managers at NASA developed tunnel vision is because of the. string of successes they had leading up to the Challenger mission. And the idea was like, if we just do what we did with the previous launches, nothing bad can happen. And I completely discounts the role that luck plays in the process, right? Because it's possible to do things wrong and still succeed because luck intervenes to save the day.

And that's basically what was happening. The primary owing was failing in these missions. and the secondary oaring was kicking in to stay of the day, but the temperatures on the morning of Challenger's launch were really cold, which made the oaring's brittle and incapable of performing their function. And then fast forward 17 years you get to Columbia. Now, I mean, it looks like if you're just looking at it on the surface, the failure is very different.

Now Columbia explodes on reentry because of what NASA had called foam shedding during liftoff, a foam had separated. and struck the space shuttle's thermal insulation, which is responsible for protecting the shuttle from the searing heat of reentry, that was the technical flaw. But the cultural flaw was the same as Challenger. It was assuming, basically,

because foam shedding had been happening on numerous space shuttle message before Columbia, and those missions were all characterized as successes because nothing bad, the outcome of the mission hadn't been compromised. And though that string of successes basically led managers at NASA to develop tunnel vision. But just because you're on a hot streak doesn't mean you'll beat the house. And when we're busy, you know, popping champagne corks and lighting cigars to celebrate our successes,

we failed to realize that we succeeded despite making a bad decision, right, despite a bad misstep. which going back to what I was mentioning before about learning from failures, I think the same idea applies to learning from success as well. So just because just so we don't learn from failure, we also don't learn from success because we're too busy celebrating our successes as opposed to doing an investigation of like what went wrong and what went right. So I was, I think of, I was on one of the things I like to do when I work with leaders

and teams and I'll say, so how did last year go? And I work a lot of sales leaders. So like VPs, SVPs of companies. And I'll say, so how did last year go? You know, very just open-ended, you can say whatever. And, you know, it's nice when they say, well, last year was great. We beat expectations. We were 103% of budget, you know, things like that.

And my obvious immediate next question is, why? What was it that made last year great? That made last year, why did you succeed? because that was the definition of success within your company, was exceeding the budget that was set for you by the company. And that's always the most interesting part during the work goes on because you can tell if someone has done a good, and you use the phrase post-mortem,

and we can talk about what that means. I like also a military phrase like an after-action review is another good one to use. You can tell the people who have done a quality after-action review from that great year versus the one to, who are like, well, because we're just talented. We have great people. We have, you know, and to those who say that, they may have great people.

That may be true. But I am very weary, scared for them, for their sake, that they'll be able to continue to have success because I believe not only should you have a deep understanding of why you failed, you need to have a deep understanding of why you've succeeded, of why you've hit it. Because like you said, there is luck. There are other circumstances. at a minimum you need to be knowledgeable at. And so can you relate this?

And I just kind of did, but I want it from your perspective, from the rocket scientist's perspective, can you relate for that mid-level manager who's working, maybe some practical application for them so that they don't run into some of the same issues that happen to some of the smartest people in the world at NASA and had loss of life.

Okay. Yeah. And I love that phrase, Ryan, which I hadn't heard before, after action review. I call it a post-mortem. And I call it a post-mortem because that's what a lot of business leaders use.

And I actually don't like the term. And I don't like the term because post-mortem implies that there has to be a dead body. Right. And it's catastrophic failure. Didn't you say it's after death is a lot of things? Yeah, after death. Exactly. That's exactly what it means.

It was taken from medicine, from autopsies, and that it implanted into the business context, after-action review is a much better way of putting it because you're just reviewing the action, right, regardless of whether it produced a success or failure, which is, I think, a much more healthy way of thinking about it. And also it implies that you should be doing this review regardless of what happens, regardless of success or failure. So I'm going to mention two things in response to your question. So one is taking the focus off of outcomes of success versus failure, that binary approach

and actually looking at the inputs. Did we make the right decisions? Did we hire quality people? Did those people do what they were supposed to do? Because here's the thing. It's possible to do a lot wrong and still succeed because luck intervenes. So just like some of the managers that you mentioned, we had a great year. Well, you had a great year, not because you made the right decisions, but you might have had a

great year because you got lucky, right? The economy was doing well. And so all of these factors that are external to your own decision-making process may have intervened to save the day. So that's part of it. And then the same idea applies to failure too as well, by the way. A lot of business leaders will try to change everything when a failure happens. And that's not necessarily the right course of action because sometimes good decisions lead to failure.

Because whenever you're experimenting with something new, whenever you're taking a leap into the unknown, you're exploring edges or building things that may not work, failure is going to happen. But that doesn't mean that all of your decisions were. incorrect. You shouldn't scrap all of them and like start over from scratch. I cite a study in the book about how NFL coaches tend to completely change their lineup after a one point loss, but they don't do it after a one point gain. Like they assume that because the match produced a failure that they have to shake everything up, even though on a different day it actually may have produced a win. So that's part of it. And then the other part of it is doing something called the premortem, which is like, The opposite of a post-mortem or after-action review where you take a look at what happened after success or after failure, pre-mortem happens before.

You basically assume the way this works is like suppose you've got a launch coming up in six months, right? You're launching a new product. And you gather all the relevant people in a room and you tell them that we're going to assume that the product failed. And I want you to come up with reasons why. and then everybody brainstorms and comes up with a list of reasons as to what can go wrong. That exercise can be really powerful because it provides safety to people to express dissent. No one likes to be the skunk in the picnic, you know, the person pounding their fists on the table saying that, hey, this might go wrong and here's why. But if you tell people that we're going to conduct this exercise specifically to identify the weaknesses, the points of potential failure, then it empowers people.

to step forward and share things that they otherwise may not be willing to share because of, you know, we all want to feed in and conform. And so that exercise is really powerful. Another one which is related to that, which I've seen use with great success, which also has a military equivalent. It's called a kill the company exercise. And the military might call that ret teaming. And so you assign executives to play the role of a competitive. and in business would be a competitor business.

And you play the role of a competitor and basically figure out ways to put your own business out of business. You come up with strategies to put, and I've seen this described in Lisa Bodell's book called Kill the Company. And that also is a really powerful way of identifying potential points of failure because you're basically asking people to completely switch perspectives. and not just think outside the box, but actually step outside the box and look at the box from the perspective of a competitor looking to destroy the box. And that forces people to use new neural pathways and adopt new perspectives that they otherwise might miss if you simply ask them, you know, where are the potential points of failure or where are the weaknesses in our company?

I've recently been reading a book about the creation. And since growth of Instagram, the title's actually blanking right now. But regardless of that, one of the, I mean, it's sold for a billion dollars to Facebook with 13 employees and no revenue. But one of the reasons why is because it feels like Mark Zuckerberg, and there are a lot of opinions out there about him, understandably. But one of one of his obsessions is not becoming MySpace. everyone has said he is obsessed with that and he thought things like WhatsApp or Instagram and there are plenty of others could make him and his company MySpace. And so it feels to me like he is regularly.

And I believe that one of the people that you cite who started that exercise was Merck's CEO. Yeah, that's right. Kenneth Frazier was one of the first people to do that exercise. And I've heard of that and I think it could be very useful. What about for that person Ozon who, let's say they're, are not the CEO or even a senior exec in a company, but they're running a team of 15 people in the middle of a company. Is there a way that they could do that sort of kill the company exercise to be useful to create innovative thoughts within their team? Absolutely. So this doesn't have to be

killed a company. It could be kill the project or kill the product, right? Whatever product your team is working on, whatever projects, I mean, it can be, you know, I've done this with my books, writing a book, what can go wrong. And so it can really be applied to anything on a much smaller scale. And as you are going through this exercise, I would highly encourage you to put yourself, to really put yourself in the position of a competitor or in the position of a customer as well, which is also really powerful. Because we often look at our projects and our products from our own perspective,

and we miss the human dimension to our products. So it's important to ask, you know, why are customers, and so this is a variation of the Killed Company exercise, but why are customers justified in buying from our competitors? And the answer, by the way, isn't that they're stupid. It's not because, you know, they're wrong and you're right. It's because they see something you're not seeing. they believe something that you don't believe.

They're telling themselves a different story. And you're not going to be able to identify that story and even begin to change it if you're looking at the world through your own limited perspective. Interesting. It also makes me think of, from a preparation perspective, I recently spoke with Admiral William McCraven. And he said, you have to rehearse the risk out of your mission. And so, like, he was in charge of the bin Laden raid in Pakistan, and he said the amount of times they practiced, I mean, for months, they practiced the rate for months to rehearse the risk as much as possible out of the mission. I think that's another, it's kind of a sidecar view, but that's another perspective here. Ozone, one of the other parts about you that I think is fascinating was when I was reading about your upbringing, and I'm really curious about people who go on to be productive achievers.

yourself and what they were like when they were a kid and their parents and their upbringing. And you grew up in a school system. And I want you to share what that's like and where it was that forced conformity. And even something I believe you wrote about was that cutting your hair could create some sort of punishment if it actually not cutting your hair, if it got too long. And so what was it like growing up in that setting and then actually until you eventually got out of it, how did that change your perspective on the world? Yeah, so I grew up in Istanbul, Turkey, and I grew up in a family of knowing the speakers.

My parents had never been to the United States before. And in primary school, as you said, Ryan, it was a very conformist system. And I'll just mention two examples of how deep the conformity ran. In first grade, we were all assigned numbers. And one of our teachers would call us by those numbers instead of our real name. So I wouldn't be called Ozan. I would be called 138. And I won't reveal my actual numbers.

It's your pin number, right? Yeah, exactly. It's the only pin number I've ever had. I saw you put that in your book. I was like, hey, there might be people who are reading this that remember your number from school. But anyway, go ahead. So that was part of it. And then like, as you mentioned, Ryan, it was, yeah, we all wore the same uniforms.

We all had to have the same bus cut. And I once made the grave error of skipping. haircut and my school principal who was a bulldozer of a man better suited to be a prison more than a school principal he would conduct these inspections and he noticed by longer than standard hairdo and he grabbed the hair clip from one of the girls in my class and put it on my hair as an act of public shaming of the price you pay for not towing the line for not conforming for not using number two pencils for not coloring between the lines. And I was really, so I sort of became this like non-conformist, slightly as a rebellion against that very, very conformist culture. But also outside of school,

I cultivated this interest in astronomy. I would read science fiction books as an escape, basically, and to pull myself into different worlds where imagination and creativity was rewarded. And my parents did their very best to foster that. You know, one of the most formative moments in my, in my personal life, I remember, I think I must have been like four or five years old and about to start kindergarten. And the way that the system worked in Istanbul is there was like, you know, five or six public kindergartens close to your house and you could have your pick. And my parents visited all six and they vetted them basically and filtered them down to three.

they were all the all of those three were okay acceptable from their perspective and they came home and they told me ozan you're going to start kindergarten and you get to choose which school you're going to attend and they took me to all three schools and they said you have to you know think through questions that you want to ask some of the things that you find important and like you know the four year old me or the five year old me is like what kind of toys do you have or like what kind of books do you have But it made me feel so empowered in a way that the school system didn't. It made me feel like my destiny was in my own hands, that when it came to the important decisions in my life, I had a say. And that anything was possible, too.

I mean, my parents both came from very, very humble economic circumstances. But they maybe believe that if you want something, you can go and get it. And that stayed with me throughout my own life. And you eventually came to the states to go to Cornell. What made you choose to come to the United States and go to Cornell? Two things. One was trying to get out of this conformist education system. Real quick.

Yeah. Why is it set up that way? Is that just the way it? I mean, there may be a really dumb question, but why is it? No, no, no. It's a great question, by the way. And I think education systems, by and larger conformist, it's just different degrees, of conformity. And it's in part because public education, and this is true in the United States as well,

was developed in the industrial age to create factory workers, right? You had to conform and do as your boss told you to be able to operate the assembly line in a factory somewhere. They weren't built to produce people who reimagine the status quo or who challenge conventional wisdom. That sort of behavior, I think, is rarely awarded, regardless of what education system you're in. It was just, I think that conformity and the subjugation of the individual to the greater good of the community is just more deeply ingrained into the Turkish culture. And by the way, I mean, I love the country of Turkey. My parents still live there. It was just the conformity aspect of it really was a complete, it was a disconnect between the way that I was and I was raised. And so that's one of the reasons

why I came to the United States and I put a corner. Real quick, were you an outcast? Were you an outlier in Turkey? Did you have, could you relate to others? Or I'm just curious. Or did you find a whole gang of nonconformists who wanted to come to the states or go somewhere else? I'm just curious about that part of socially how it was.

Yeah. No, you know, I think I was, I had a few people in class who were like me. but by and large, I was on my own. I spent most of my time in my room reading books. I taught myself how to program on my computer. I learned HTML programming. I would build websites and all of which I had no idea at the time would become actually really important

when I came to Cornell and applied to work on this Mars mission. And one of the reasons why I was hired was because the principal investigator of the mission thought that the coding skills that I had picked up would be really valuable and they turned out to be the case. So I came to Cornell to study astrophysics in part to just get out of that conformance education system, but also Cornell had a reputation for being really good in astronomy. And what am I heroes growing up was Carl Sagan.

And Carl Sagan, I would watch the Cosmos series, the original Cosmos series on all Beta Max tapes. I didn't speak English when I was watching them. So I had no idea what Sagan was talking about, but I still sit there and watch them. And when did you learn to speak English? I started learning it when I was in middle school. Wow. You have hardly an accident. Okay.

Anyway, that's wild. Okay, go ahead. And so I came to Cornell and with a very thick accent, by the way. And then it just sort of disappeared. I remember my sophomore year, my college roommate was like, dude, there's something happening to your accent. And then I picked up a Philly accent because he's from Philly. So, yeah.

So I came to Cornell. And before I arrived, I was doing some research online about what the astronomy department was up to. And I found out that one of the professors was the principal investigator for this planned mission to Mars. And to top it off, he had worked as a graduate student under Carl Sagan. It was like too good to be true. And so I, and there was no job listing. But one of the best pieces of advice I got from my father is you can't win the lottery without buying a ticket. And so I sent him an email expressing my burning desire to work for him and listing all of the, you know, limited set of qualifications I had built up in high school.

And much to my surprise and delight, he ended up hiring me. And so I ended up working on the operations team for the, what would become the 2003 Mars Exploration Rover's mission. I did that for four years. Wow. I want to highlight that piece of advice. That was a big highlight in your book that I marked. and not necessarily the thought of everyone buys lottery tickets, but it's the mindset that I guess I could rephrase it by saying,

if you don't have the guts to ask or the willingness to be proactive, the answer is always no. We talked about our mutual friend Shane Snow, and part of the way I got him on my podcast before I even had a podcast, essentially, was just the willingness to continue to email and find that email and ask and ask and ask. eventually he said yes. And I think that's kind of how this whole thing has grown. And so maybe you could, could you share your mindset because as a young kid, an immigrant, to have even the gumption to apply

for a job that didn't exist, how can others maybe, what could they learn from that story and implement into their lives so that they can maybe eliminate some of the fear of being willing to go and ask for something that they really want. That's a great question. And I think you pinpointed the problem really well. Being afraid of a no, being afraid of rejection, it really comes down to a failure of courage. And the difference between the people we put on a pedestal, right, the universe enters, the world changers.

The difference between them and then the rest of the world is that they're willing to take action, when the rest of the world is standing still. That's the primary difference. So then how do you cultivate that mindset? One of the things I did when I was, you know, I drafted this email to Steve, who would become my boss, Steve Squires, and as I was about to send it,

that voice kept or started talking in my head, right, that the voice of the inner critic. Like, who are you? You're this skinny kid with a funny name from a country halfway around the globe, what value do you have? What are you able to contribute? He's probably going to pull up your email and laugh

and move on with his day. And that voice, by the way, still exists, right? It'll still come roaring in unexpectedly whenever I'm about to make a leap into something new. So then I ask myself two questions. The first is, what's the worst that can happen? And it's really important to write this down, write the answers down, because there's something about the act of writing your fears down that disempowers them. That takes their power away.

If you just let them sort of linger in your mind, they keep getting powerful and powerful. The act of writing really takes their power away. And so in the case of this email I was thinking about sending, what's the worst that can happen is he'll laugh, he'll move on with his day. and he just won't reply to me. That is the worst that can happen. And then the second question I ask is, what's the best that can happen? And that is a really important question. And one that most of us don't ask is whenever we're faced with uncertainty of taking a leap into the unknown,

we tend to focus on all of the negative outcomes because uncertainty to our ancestors could be life-threatening. It's not anymore in most cases. it's really important to ask what is the best that can happen. And to me, the best that can happen was that I would get this job working on a Mars mission, which was my childhood dream, and it would come true. And it did. And so if you put it that way, like the choice of sending the email becomes so obvious. But unless you ask those two questions, you find yourself just not acting.

And I love that Chinese proverb which says, many a false step was made by standing still. So that's important to keep in mind as well. Wait, say that again? Many a false that was made by standing still. Explain that. As in standing still could be a false step, right? And so we tend to think that false.

False. Yeah. Okay. I said full. I'm sorry. No, no, no. I'm sorry about that. False step.

Yeah. False step. Okay. Exactly. So not taking action can be riskier than taking action. And maybe even a follow up to that. because I have to like, you know, you, I'm sure you do this too. At times you have an idea.

And so for me, a lot of it, a lot of my work is done in public. A lot of my work is done with people who want to sign up for something I'm going to do. And, you know, a lot of things have worked that have been pretty cool. But I've also publicly put out things to say, hey, I'm going to do this kind of course, or I'm going to teach this live or I'm going to do something and then it doesn't work. You know, it's like, I think eliminating the, like, or at least squashing the fear of being embarrassed publicly, that's another part of that, not being afraid. You just be like, hey, you know, like, yeah, I'm kind of embarrassed, but we got to move forward. I mean, what else,

what else am I going to do just not try things? I mean, I have ideas and some of the ideas are really stupid. And that's just part of how it works. I think all of us should just be a little bit more okay with having stupid ideas, even when other people see them publicly. And you're like, I mean, what's the word? Like you said, what's the worst that could happen? I, you know, I'm temporarily embarrassed and then you move on. Right, exactly. And I think it's also helpful to adopt that like experimental mindset, which is what a lot of scientists do, right? You approach life as a series of experiments. You're going to try launching something new. And you know at the outset, like this may not work. But I'm not going to know if it's going to work until I try it. Like no

amount of sitting on my couch and thinking through it is going to help. I mean, some of it is helpful, of course. But unless you actually put that idea into the world and make that offer, you're not going to know how the world is going to react. And if you frame what you're doing as an experiment, for me at least, that has a way of taking some of the sting associated with the failure because then it's just, okay, it's just a hypothesis that was proven wrong. I'll learn something from this and then I'll apply to something else. You know, if the project didn't work because the product market fit wasn't right, I can pivot to a different market. And that experimental mindset allows for that as well. And then another thing that I found helpful is to put some distance between me as a person and the ideas of me or the products of me, right? Because we tend to tie our identity around what we produce. But if you can put some distance around your projects, yeah, you're creating those projects,

but they're not a reflection on you as a person. They're not you. They're your ideas. They're your experiments. You're just trying things out. And if they don't work, that's fine. You're still you. The things that you value the most are still going to be there in most cases, regardless

of the outcome of these experiments. One of my favorite quotes that you've used when it comes to one of your heroes, Carl Sagan, is science is a way of thinking much more than it is a body of knowledge. and that struck a chord with me and I really appreciate that thought and mindset. Can you share more about your approach to science and that it's a way of thinking more than just a body of knowledge? Yeah. And the way that science education usually works is that you sit in a classroom and you memorize a bunch of facts, right? You'll learn about Newton's laws and you'll learn.

about the principles of physics. And that honestly drains the life out of a really interesting field, which is one of the reasons why I wanted to write this book. I wanted to write the book not to teach people the science behind rocket science. That's not what the book is about. But the book is more about what Sagan is talking about, which is how do you take ways of thinking from this very different field and actually apply it in your own life? And that I think is when the intimidation creeps in, when you say, well, rocket scientists, you have to be a genius to think like them.

That's completely incorrect. So much of what they talk about can be applied regardless of what business you're in. But because of the way that science is conceptualized, because of the way that our science classes were taught, we assume that science means you're going to sit down and memorize a bunch of stuff that you're going to forget after you take the exam. but it's really much more about how do you approach problems? How do you approach uncertainty? How do you make difficult decisions? How do you deal with failure and how do you deal with success? And those frameworks are really useful regardless of what you're doing.

And I'm really the living embodiment of this because after college, I quit astrophysics and ended up going to law school and becoming a law professor. And now I do popular writing and speaking before corporate audiences. and I've taken those principles from rocket science and apply them to dozens of industries. And they work beautifully. So part of the reason why I wanted to write this book was to remedy that disconnect, to bridge that gap between what rocket scientists know and do and what the rest of the world does. Ozone, one of the things I found to be really interesting and guests I've had on my show,

especially the really smart ones. You've talked to some of the same people. Tim Urban comes to mind. Really, really intelligent writer. It's funny too. Yeah. But when I read this from you, it made me think of people like him is that we should not, we should be fueled not by a desire for a quick catharsis, but by intrigue. Where certainty ends, progress begins.

And what I found, and I want to hear you talk about in a second, but what I found is, the people who seem to be the most intelligent thinkers in the world, they're never quite sure about anything. You know what I mean? They're always a little bit, like Tim, when I asked him that sustaining excellence question, it took him like a minute to start figuring out an answer. And then he got there and it was really good.

But it's because these deep thinkers who are really smart, guys like you and him and Shane and others, it's that you're always, you're never certain about anything. You have thoughts, you have opinions, you have some facts to back it up, obviously, but you always know I'm still experimenting and that could change. And I think that's the mentality a lot of us seem to have, especially now on social media and the things out there where everybody knows all the answers.

I'm so unattracted to people who think they have all the answers. I love the ones more like you and those people who think, you know, this is what I believe, but I also think that could change. And I think you write about flip-flopping and why that could be a positive. I'm curious how that kind of mindset has become part of you as well as the people, some of the people that you work with. Yeah, I mean, it's so inherent to the scientific method, right? So you have hypotheses.

But the way that you figure out what's right is actually by trying to prove yourself wrong, which is the opposite of what we do. Most of us look for evidence to confirm what we think we know. as opposed to looking for evidence that's going to disprove us. And that's where the uncertainty comes in, right? If you're so certain of your conclusions, you're going to completely ignore any facts to the contrary. And that's going to get in the way of progress.

But if your goal is to find what's right, not to be right, then you keep an open mind. And you actually actively seek out people. and this has become so hard in the age of social media where we're algorithmically sorted into these echo chambers and it's become so easy to disconnect with people who disagree with us. It requires you to actively step out

and ask people, befriend people who disagree with you, or ask people who'd normally agree with you to disagree with you. And you should do this as a business leader as well. And your employees, the people working for you, are not going to do this unless you're affirmative. asked them in most cases.

So one of the things I did, for example, with my book, after I finished the first draft, I gave it to people to read it. When I gave it to them, I said, tell me what's wrong with this. Tell me what should be changed, what should be taken out, not what's right, but what's wrong. And I think that allows for psychological safety on the part of the people who might be reluctant, right, especially if they're working for you, if their next paycheck depends on you, to share negative views or to share critique, that allows them to step forward with that. And related to that is the idea, I'm always, whatever someone calls me an expert, I like look

around and see who's standing behind me. And the reason for that is I'm actually really afraid of calling myself an expert or becoming an expert on anything because the moment we think we are an expert is the moment we begin asserting confident conclusions without backing it up with the facts the moment we think we've made it is the moment that we stop learning and growing so i continuously tell myself that i'm a work in progress going back to like the challenger in columbia accidents too that we talked about before you know one of the reasons during the apollo mercury and gemini era we didn't lose a celsius a single crew in space.

There was a fire on the ground with Apollo 1, but we did not lose a single crew member in space during the really early, really risky periods of spaceflight. The first time we lost an American crew in space was Challenger. After spaceflight had become quote-unquote routine, after this was viewed as not particularly risky anymore, after we had declared ourselves an expert in what we were doing, is the moment we lost a crew in spaceflight.

And I think the same idea applies whether or not you're running a business or you're in academia. It doesn't matter. It's the same principle that once you erase doubt, once you become so confident, you end up missing crucial fact. Something you've said is in the modern world,

we look for certainty in uncertain places. search for order and chaos, the right answer and ambiguity and conviction in the complexity. And I think that applies really well to right now. I like to make these timeless, but I think this could could apply to any time where somebody might be dealing with uncertainty. And you've also said that all progress happens in uncertain times. And that actually, it made me feel good. And I wanted to talk to you about that, about how progress can.

be made in uncertain times and how in the world that we live in, we look for certainty, even though it's hard. What advice do you have for leaders in this time where there isn't an answer? There is uncertainty for the near future and distant. What do you share and say to them as they're seeking your advice right now? And one is to reiterate where you just said, Ryan, which is all progress happens in uncertain conditions. If you look at any breakthrough that's ever happened and happened because of uncertainty. Answers, certainty are really cheap. But we are so driven by fear of uncertainty.

I mean, people, and I'm sure you're seeing this around you as well, people actually prefer the certainty of a worst case scenario over the uncertainty of the unknown. I'd rather know tomorrow that this horrible thing is going to happen instead of becoming curious about what tomorrow might bring. So one is the shift from fear of the unknown to becoming curious about tomorrow. And I think that's easier said than done. The way that you become curious about tomorrow is to ask yourself a series of questions. So one is, and this is actually a question I had to ask myself, what problems can I

solve right now based on what the world needs, as opposed to the problems that I had expected to solve. If the pandemic has disrupted the way you run your business, how can you use your skills, resources, products, services in a way that you haven't used them before? But that's going to address the problems that the world has right now that need to be addressed. When my book came out on April 14th, My book tour was canceled. And because of the pandemic, of course, there's no travel. And I spent two days not thinking like a rocket scientist and just being very miserable basically about what was happening. Right.

I was wishing for reality to be different than it was and trying to control what cannot be controlled, which is a really futile exercise, right? It's like tugging at a plant to make it grow faster. Not possible. Instead, the far more useful exercise is to become curious. about tomorrow and ask yourself, okay, given setting aside what I cannot control, what I can't change, what can I control? What is still within my power to do? And in my case, it was like, okay, I can't go on a physical book tour, but are there other creative ways of getting the word out

about the book? And the answer is, of course there are. So I teamed out with a bunch of different authors who were in the same position as me. We did virtual events. I double down on, on podcast appearances. And I think in the end, honestly, my outreach efforts ended up being more successful than they would have been if I was relying on an in-person book tour. And I think the same idea applies regardless of industry, is if you've been forced out of the status quo, instead of wanting reality to be different than it is, I think it really helps to shift to this other mindset of curiosity, of becoming creative and using what's in front of you to solve. problems that you didn't expect to be solved. Yeah, I think that focus of what's within my control and what's not and focusing on that. You said, easier said than done, but sometimes just having regular moments of pause throughout the day to ask yourself that question.

I know that's certainly helped me because there are times where I am very upset about the fact that there are no live events. And so keynote speaking is off the table for the time being. But then I think back to, well, let's think about this. What actually can I do? It has opened up time. I'm not on airplanes. I'm not in hotels.

I'm not traveling. It has opened up time for me to better serve my existing clients, to better serve upcoming new clients in different and unique ways that will make me better and stronger long term. So now this thing that didn't exist, this better service from a virtual way or using Zoom or whatever it may be, that is going to remain past. and the thing that I already really enjoyed and liked will eventually come back. And I think that that's a way you can look at and say,

I'm going to be better for this. I'm going to be stronger coming out of this, even though I don't love every aspect of it. And I miss parts, a lot of parts of what this is taken away, but long term will be better off from it. Absolutely. And related to what you just said, Ryan, is the aspect of diversification too, right?

So if you're, we're told to diversify investments, but I think the same idea applies to your identity as well and the services you're offering people. So Ryan, if the only thing you're doing is in person physical keynote speeches, you're out of a job, right? All of your income is completely gone. But if you've diversified your identity, right, if you're not just a keynote speaker, but you also do consulting, you also do a podcast. You know, you've got a blog and you do X, Y, and Z, it becomes much easier to deal with uncertainty. Because if uncertainty affects one of those identities, you can lean on the other ones. And then the same idea applies to services that businesses provide. Okay, two quick things before we wrap up here, Ozan.

One of them comes from Shane because he texts me as we're talking, which is funny. But the first one is the first one is about how we treat each other. And something that rocket science can teach us. You've said rocket science teaches us about our limited role in the cosmos and reminds us to be gentler and kinder to one another. Can you share why rocket science will teach us or make us think about our limited role and might help us to be a little bit more gentler and kinder to people? All of our differences disappear when you zoom out.

When you look at the Earth from outer space and Carl Sagan's member, world words we're just a pale blue dot um and and it also becomes clear how fragile the earth is and how little our differences matter in the grand scheme of things um you know regardless of where you are we're looking up at the same uh same moon the stars are all there and we're being connected not just across countries but across generations as well and we tend to look down at whatever it is we're working on whatever it is we're believing in but if we can take the time to look up and realize that in the grand scheme of things our differences matter very little and that we can be gentler and kinder to one another because at least for now this is the only home that we have and it requires us to be kinder to the planet as well of

But that, that I think is a really powerful image. I remember in the Apollo 8 mission, I think this was Jim Lovell, the commander of the mission, when they were circling the moon. So Apollo 8 was actually a really dangerous mission. It was the first time we sent the spacecraft to the moon, circle, and come back. But this was the first time that you could look at the Earth from outer space, and Jim Lovell could cover the entire planet with his thumb. And this was, you know, during a very divisive period in American history.

with the Vietnam War going on in the 1960s. And as he was reflecting on it, he was essentially echoing the message that you quoted, which is, look, yeah, there are all of these divisions and differences on Earth, but all of them disappear. When you look at this just beautiful blue dot from the perspective of outer space.

Man, that's good. I should end it on that, but I have to end it on a funny one. I said, Shane, send me something about ozone that I cannot find. on the internet because he knows my prep processes to scour and watch and read everything there is about my guest, which I have for you, every video on YouTube and certainly everything written about

you as well as your book. And he said, ask him, why does he still watch DVDs instead of Netflix? So I do not find online. I did not find out. Yeah. Yeah. So I still get DVDs in the mail. Really? Yes. I still do. I might be the. only person in America who do that? Yeah, Netflix still does that. They do. They still send DVDs in the mail. Okay. Here's why I do it. There's something about delaying gratification that brings people happiness. So if I'm just, you know, if my wife and I are just sitting on the couch and like we can pick whatever movie, we sometimes do that, by the way. But I find such strange pleasure in like finding a movie, adding it to my Netflix queue. And then

waiting for like two days for the movie to arrive and then like seeing that like red envelope sitting in our mailbox honestly it's sometimes more joyous than the movie itself that anticipation of like the very like purposeful way of like I'm going to watch this movie I'm going to put it on my queue it's going to arrive in my mailbox I'm going to open it like a Christmas present and then put it in I just get I know it's strange but I get so much satisfaction from it wow I did not know Netflix still offered that service. They do. Wow.

Actually, I love the thought of that you, though there's a purpose behind it. There's a purpose of the delayed gratification, which I think could speak to some success in other areas of your life. If you're willing to delay gratification, that that's the type of person who's disciplined enough to put in the work when nobody sees it. You talk about writing a book. I mean, I know what that's like or any of the, the big monument. things that get accomplished. There's so much done that nobody will ever see, will ever see. And sometimes you'll do a lot of that work that leads to nothing.

That there isn't even any of the gratification part, but you have to be willing to delay it. So even in your, the funny part about Shane's talking about, why does he watch DVDs? I love that answer. Ozone, this is really enjoyable talk. I'm very appreciative of you investing your time with me today. where would you send my listeners to learn more about you online? So the best way to keep in touch with me is through my weekly email. I'm not active on, I'm not active on social media.

And you can sign up for that by heading over to weekly contrarian.com. And it's just one email. It goes out to over 21,000 people. And it can be read in three minutes or less. And it shares one idea with you to help you reimagine the status quo in some fashion. And then my book, Think Like a Rock of Scientists. It's available wherever books are sold. I do have a special bonus if it's okay with you, Ryan, for your audience.

If you head over to rocket sciencebook.com forward slash learning, you will get two bonuses for ordering the book. One is a 30-minute training on my productivity systems. And the other is I recorded these after the pandemic. I recorded these 10 or 12 videos, really short videos, three-minute videos with practical insights from the book. that you can implement right away. Wow. See that again? The URL is rocket sciencebook.com forward slash learning.

Awesome. Thank you so much for doing that ozone. And as I said, I really appreciate you investing your time with me today. And I'd love to continue this dialogue as we both progress, man. I love that as well, Ryan. It was such a pleasure talking to you. Thank you. All right.

Thanks. Wow. I think that may be the first rocket scientists I've ever recorded with. fascinating talk. Ozone's just a great guy in addition to being very intelligent. A few of the key takeaways. All progress happens in uncertain times. Think about what problems can I solve right now. What's within my control? And that's what we should focus on. Then science is a way of thinking much more than it is a body of knowledge. A Carl Sagan quote, this is in regards to curiosity and an approach to solving problems and being the type of person who has an open mind

is striving to learn, grow, better understand a topic in order to eventually hopefully solve problems as opposed to thinking you have it all figured out. And then two questions to ask yourself. Ask what's the worst that can happen and what's the best that can happen? This is why I'd urge you if you're thinking about experimenting with writing a letter, sending an email, asking for the raise, do it. And ask yourself the questions, what's the worst that can happen and what's the best that can happen? Those questions can be very useful. Thank you once again for continuing.

Continuing to spread the word, telling a friend or two, hey, you should listen to this podcast called The Learning Leader Show. It could be beneficial for you. Because you continue to do that, you give me the opportunity to do what I love on a daily basis. And for that, I will forever be grateful. Thank you so much. Talk with you soon. Can't wait.