Ozan Varol | How to Ignite Your Creativity to Awaken Your Genius

Srini Rao 

Ozan welcome back to the unmistakable creative thanks so much for taking the time to join us it 

Ozaan Varol

okay

it's great to be back thank you for having me back

Srini Rao

yeah it is my pleasure to have you back here so we had you back when your previous book how to think like a rocket scientist came out as i was mentioning just before we hit record here that is one of those books that ifired back to repeatedly over the last several years and when i saw that you had a new book out it was kind of a new brain er to have you back but before we get into the book i was trying to think about what i didn't didn't ask you the last time we spoke so this time i wanted to start by asking what was the very first job that you ever had and what impact did that end up having on what you ended up doing with your life

Ozaan Varol

the very first job i had was working in my middle school library and i would like you know put the books back on the shelves clean up and what not and i probably did that for about a year and the biggest joy of that for me was just like getting lost in the shelves and like picking up random books flipping through a random page and just reading it and seeing what comes up

like following the bread crumbs of curiosity and cerendipity into the next random fact that i would discover from these books and so that really stayed with me one of my favorite activities to ties to this day is just getting lost in a book store and walking past the best seller section and like looking past you know the book that's on everyone's book shelf but really trying to find on this covered gems that most people haven't heard of before so don't let me lose in a book store with a credit

ard it's a it's a dangerous thing

Srini Rao

uh uh

well you and i have that in common because i noticed that the difference between going to a book store versus amazon was on amazon your searching and in a book store browsing and i think people don't realize there's a big difference there's really no room for their dipity when algorithems are recommending everything like it was because of just random trip to barns and bel that we ended up having andrew yang as a candidate as a guest on this show when he was running for president i think that that sense of discovery is something that is lost on the internet but you know

what struck me most about what you said was that this was while you were in middle school and when i think about going to the library in school particularly after the third fourth fifth grade when you know you're not really checking out books just for pure curiosity or enjoyment but you're pretty much always there for an assignment um what do you think that happens like i remember a friend of mine at berkeley at the library once he was like you know they actually have real books here like the great cat was how did you not know this this is a library but it was stunning

to him that the library at a university had other things he could read other than stuff that he needed to read for school

Ozaan Varol

yeah and i think the reason why i knew that from an early age was because i just fell in love with books the moment i began to like learned to i learned to read and write i would just get lost and fantasy worlds created by people like as a gasmovand arthur c clark and so before now i got into the education system where you're told what to read this is what you should read and you need to finish this and have that sort of shoved into my hands i had that sense of

discovery of like oh i get to choose what i want to read and there are all of these books out there that sounds really interesting and so i did that from an early age which means that was already ingrained in me before middle school and so it was sort of a natural transition from then to be like well okay i'm in the library and i wonder what else i can find here that that might be useful to me

Srini Rao

well why do you think that that is not more prevalent because i have this theory that lot of people have this idea that they don't like to read and that's because they've never been able to choose what they get to read you know and it's funny because my dad is a college professor who doesn't read books which i am always stunned by like how the hell did you get a ph d if you don't read books like he hasn't even read my books like he had to listen to the audio boo cause he reads very slow but that love for reading like for me it wasn't

thing that was prevalent like our house wasn't filled with books until i got much older what do you think that is like why is this not more prevalent the way that you think about reading and books in our education system

Ozaan Varol

i really do think it has a lot to do with just the educational system the way that it's structured where you've got this authority figure and you've got a school board and everything is predetermined here is the approved you know list of subjects and here's the approved list of books here is how you need to interpret history and then whenever something is forced upon a child the initial reaction is to just refuse again awaken your genius to my new book i tell the story of carl sagan and how

he hated calculus when he was in school like this is carl sagan right like you think he fell in love with matthanphysics and at an early age but he hated calculus in his book he writes that calculus was invented by this is what he thought initially was that calculus was invented by ill meaning teachers for intimidation purposes until he came across the book i think it was arthur c clark actually unlike calculating interplanetary trajectories and in the book clark was using calculus to calculate the trajectory

and so sagan then could see for himself why calculus was useful and why calculus would be helpful in doing the source of things that he found interesting not somebody else found interesting and told them that he should memorize or read or study so i think when that system operates in the way that it does which is here's the approved book here's you know you need to read it you need to finish it and that's the other part to everyone i know is stuck on some book like they feel guilty about giving up the book

like they forced my force march themselves through a book that they don't like so they stop reading all together because they don't want to go back to this book and my reaction always is like why don't you just stop reading it like just put it aside go find a book that you find interesting but when i tell them to people i can just see the guilt come back to their bodies like they feel guilty because they were told in school there is no such thing is like if you don't like a book you can just stop reading it now like you have to read it

Srini Rao

uh

Ozaan Varol

otherwise you're gonna fail the exam and so that also sticks with people of like which is why a lot of people stop reading is because they feel compelled to finish every book they start in one of the things one of the joys of my life my reading life is like if something doesn't grab my interest by page i don't know thirty forty that book is done

Srini Rao

well we're talking about some cost bias there it's it's funny because i was just thinking back to this book that i wanted to read called super intelligence by nick boston because it was recommended by a bunch of other people in different books and i was like you know what this book is really difficult to read in mind numbing i'm not really finding this that interesting even though it's a best seller um so one of the things that you say early on in the book is that too often schools cure students of curiosity dispelling any desire they have to pursue what they're interested

Ozaan Varol

yeah

Srini Rao

instead of asking their own questions and figuring out their answers students are compelled to memorize someone else's answers to someone else's questions the word educate is related to the latin word education educate means to deduce or draw out of a person something potential or latent in other words education is supposed to help students develop and ripen what's already within them most education systems do the opposite now you having been here before now that i'm going to ask you this question again three years later if you were task

as somebody who has been in our education system with re designing the entire thing from the ground up in order to accommodate what you are saying there what would you change

Ozaan Varol

oh my god i would change to so many things like let's just start with the fact that most education systems resemble a dictatorship you know you've got strichirarchy any unauthorized movement is subject to discipline essential bodily functions require a whole past like you have to raise your hand to be able to pe you've got these arbitrary rules you can't like wear a hat or chew gum because why because somebody said so and then you've got the way

that knowledge is actually um dispersed which is this one directional the authority figured behind the podium gives knowledge and then all the students just sit around the class room and absorb it by osmosis and so you and textbooks operate the same way too you've got these right or wrong answers in a text book and students are supposed to memorize them and then spit them back out on a standardized test so one of the one of the first things i would do is

let's just start with textbooks right i think textbooks need to do a much better job of giving students behind the scenes look at how ideas are actually formed and discovered like there is no i guess to be found an a textbook right if you open a text book it's a series of one dimensional answers right or wrong answers and i would change that to just introduce more nuance and give a glimpse to the students into the process of coming up with ideas instead of just asking students to

to memorize newton's laws teach them about how newton discovered them like the discovery process the trial and error the repeated failures the the iteration and improvement over time that part of the process is completely hidden from students and then just the answers are given as if they're the most important thing and they're not the most important thing because answers change over time yet the process of discovery the process of learning the process of finding

roblems and re framing them sticks with you and so re framing problems is another part of the education system that i would change the way that education operates now students their handed problems and they are expected to solve those problems even if they may not be the right problem to solve and real life doesn't operate that way right you get problems in real life but the best thinkers and the most capable people are able to take the problem and ask themselves is there a better problem to solve can i refram

Ozaan Varol

this in a way that's actually going to generate better answers but in schools students are totally em strung by by the problem set meaning the problem has already been predetermined by somebody else and your job is to just solve the problem as given to you which is totally disconnected from from reality i would also create a lot more space in the education system for students to think through what they find interesting like room for not just being compelled

to learn about you know history or learn about or two because that's what the school board decided was important for the student to learn but room for students to determine to ask themselves what do i actually want to learn about like what am i interested in you ask that question to an adult now and most people have a really hard time answering it like truly honestly answering what do i want to learn what am i curious about what am i interested in because that curiosity

it's just stifled from a very early age and instead replaced with a system where somebody else determines what you should be interested in and then you're forced to learn about it versus having some say in in what you learn about and what you're curious about

Srini Rao

yeah well you know we were talking you know it seems like right now about sort of the high school primary education and what i realized was that i could basically crush it in primary education through memarization and wrote learning and of course that doesn't work in college like i remember ling find as like any more on can get straight as in high school because it's not an indication of intelligence it's an indication of discipline um like it doesn't mean you're smart if you get stah

Ozaan Varol

yep

Srini Rao

and what i realized was that when you get to college like the way you're tested is your presented information but then the context changes when you're tested on it but i want to come back to that dan pink said something to me about the current education system when we're talking about primary education and part of what's problematic with it take a listen

Srini Rao

what do you make of that

Ozaan Varol

i agree and i gree and i was nodding here as i was listening to that clip from dan and i agree because in part because i was the complying kid like i graduated first in my log school class and i'm actually when people say that when they were like introducing me i'm embarrassed because what that says is i was really good at complying i was really good at conforming if the teacher said go read this book i would go and read that book if the teacher said this is

and i would you know i would also think that it was important and i was just really good at trying to figure out what my teachers wanted and then just you know putting that on an exam somewhere and so i do think that the system is built on control and control means you've got kids who comply who do as their teacher tells them and those are the kids that excell in the education system and then you've got the defying kids who don't conform and research you know research this is stuff

after study shows that most teachers rate creative students as problematic in the classroom precisely because of the reason that dan mentioned because creative students tend to try to bend the rules or think on conventionally and and that in a system that's built on discipline and control means defiance and defiance means problematic and so those kids have a really hard time making their way through the education system for that reason

Srini Rao

well why is a system that's two hundred years old so resistant to change because yeh i just finished reading to rose's book dark horse and he uh basically describes us as what he calls the standardization covenant and basically it's a system that was standardized to produce standardized output yet that's not the world we live in today and i don't think this is any secret to anybody i mean i had enough guests here who are educators who have mentioned the idea that the modern

education system was based on the industrial revolution to produce factory workers so why is this system so difficult to change like where the incentives miss aline i know for fact my dad's a tenure professor so i looked at tenure and i was like okay you know my joke with my dad is like yeah you have this cushy retirement and guests who pays the cost for that basically people like me who you know take on mountains of student loan debt in order to pay for an education that doesn't lead to its intended out

um

Ozaan Varol

yeah i agree and look there are so many variables that play here you've got structures that are basically i mean in many ways forcing well meaning teachers and i don't want to i don't want to portray or give the impression that this is the teacher's fault you've got so many forces at work requiring teachers to teach to the test to standardize to become more efficient to overload their classes with students and so the only way

Srini Rao

yeah

Ozaan Varol

they can survive and get through the day is to teach in a way that that we just described looking back on my life though i think the best teachers that i had and the book is dedicated by the way to to teachers who helped awaken my genius and their names there listed on the front page there they were able to even operating within the strictures of that system they were able to move out of it and bring their own creativity into the class room and i could see how hard it was for

them because they had to juggle these responsibilities juggle the demands placed on them from outside forces but they still were able to bring out the creativity of their students not punish defiant behavior defiant again in the way that we're using it here defiant isn't like you know causing a ruckus in the class room and in disrupting the class room environment defiant means being creative defiant means thinking unconventionally defiant means you aren't giving the

so that's that's that the teacher is expecting to give that sort of behavior was rewarded by the best teachers that i had and in punished by and then the not great teachers that i had and i think at a university level ten year plays into this for sure i mean i know tell the story in the book but i quit my tenure professorship in part because i saw myself beginning to decline like i taught the same classes for ten years and it was an amazing care

Srini Rao

yeah

Ozaan Varol

or one that i loved but i saw myself getting in front of the podium this was in twenty twenty twenty before the pandemic standing there and thinking man my energy my aliveness for this material is no longer there and that was a really important signal for me to start to seriously think about leaving academia because i did not want to turn into one of the teachers who just like stood in front of the class room and went through the motions and taught the same

know same cases in law school the same way that they've taught it for years and years and years and completely grow complacence and hurt the class room environment in the process but a lot of professors stick because you know you've got ten ear and so it's the cushiest job ever

Srini Rao

you know i don't know how i missed the law school part of your background because of the fact that your previous book was how to think like a rocket scientist i didn't even know that you had gone to law cool i want to come back to that because i think there's a lot of things you learned about how to think and construct arguments from illegal education two questions come from what you just mentioned so one thing that i noticed with college was that it felt like i was picking options from a fast food menu and that they just got narrower and narrower

Ozaan Varol

yeah

Ozaan Varol

sure

Srini Rao

and that the options in front of me would blind me to the possibilities that surrounded me and i felt like at least in the mid nineties the the sort of strategy was go and choose what you think will make you employable and of course i got ship grades i did terrible in school and also nobody taught me how to learn i realized the way i studied in high school was just not going to be sufficient because i feel like if i went back to berkley now i could sit in on a final exam for economics and just through

the thought processes i've learned on this podcast i could probably get a decent grade on it

Ozaan Varol

yeah for sure do you want me to reflect back to you on what you just say yeah sure

Srini Rao

yeah i mean so i guess i guess the question is like you know why is it that people are not choosing in a way that leads to potentially like a fulfilling career in the future like the way it's set up seems you know less than ideal for that

Ozaan Varol

totally because you're given as you said you call the picking options from from a menu um and i agree with that i remember i went to cornelis i was i was a freshman looking through the course catalogue and and being dissatisfied with menu options basically like i just kept scrolling through it and i'm like well this looks okay but really i also want to add in this other piece to it and so i sort of wanted to like

put together my own menu so go off menu order off menu and say like you know i want the uh the fried chicken but the side here doesn't work for me so i want a different side and i don't want you know the drink that comes with it i want a glass of wine instead or there's something along those lines um so i went to i remember just tracking to the registrar's office and i just like went up to the person

and the front and i said i'm a new student here this menu doesn't work for me is there a way for me to design my own major to design my own menu and the answer shockingly was yes so there was just like a little known program that you have to apply for and you need recommendation letters but if you got accepted to it the college freed you from all graduation requirements except you have to get a hundred and twenty credits

by the end of the four years and you have to write a thesis in your senior year but aside from that you got to design your entire for your adventure i was like perfect so i you know applied and was accepted and i got to take exactly the classes that i wanted to take versus the classes that someone else put on the menu and then someone else thought should be good for me and that lesson really stuck with me of like were often presented a limited menu of options in life in terms of

what a fulfilling career looks like what a fulfilling marriage looks like what fulfilling life looks like but man there's so much so much value and stepping back and asking what do i want what do i actually want and then going off menu like asking for what you want and what you want doesn't exist creating it for yourself creating your own career designing your own life um but so much of life operates the other way were like someone's handing you a menu and saying these are

Ozaan Varol

the only option it's like a multiple choice tis right you've got a b c and d but there is actually a hidden option e where you get to fill in the blank with whatever it is that you want so that moment really stuck with me and the importance of going off menu and asking for or creating whatever it is that you want

Srini Rao

it's funny have you seen the movie accepted with justin long

Ozaan Varol

sounds familiar but i don't i don't remember it

Srini Rao

the premise basically is this kid doesn't get into college and so in an effort to get his parents to stop like you're writing him he has his friend build a fake website for a fake university and prince and acceptance letter has it mailed to himself and his parents basically say great you got in and they hand him uh you know first year's tuition and so he goes to this place and his friend accidentally makes the website fully functional and it says acceptance one

click away and when he finds this like old mental hospital he opens the door on they one and there's like a thousand people there who have all paid tuition and louis black is the dean and he's unsure what to do in louis black you know he says well what what do i do for a coriculum and he was like maybe i should ask them what they want to learn about and that stayed with me always because like yeah like and so basically what he does is he takes everybody's tuition

Ozaan Varol

m yeah

Srini Rao

and appropriates it to whatever it is they're interested in learning like one guys like i want to learn to cook so he's like great appropriate all of this guy's tuition through learning about the culinary arts and i always thought to myself like god i wish an educational institution would do a pilot program that did exactly that

Ozaan Varol

yeah that would be amazing and it's just started an earlier age right right before before college and in primary school just giving some room to students to just ask themselves get used to asking what am i interested in what am i curious about and then creating an environment where they can actually where they can actually follow their curiosity versus you know curiosity just completely completely leaving their body

Srini Rao

yeah

Srini Rao

so you mentioned that you were basically standing in front of class room realizing this was no longer energizing to you re uplifting and you decided to put an end to your academic career why do you think that so many people ignore things like that and spend the bulk of their lives doing something they hate only to wake up and realize that half their life has passed them by

Ozaan Varol

yeah great question and i know the answer because i struggled with it so this was this was not an easy decision for me i struggled with it for a while because the signal for transformation for me really arrived before twenty twenty it was like these little messages from within that inner voice saying you know i this was this has been really fun and in two thousand seventeen i've been teaching for seven years this was like shortly after i got tenure

um but there was a part of me that was like man i spent a year of my life writing an academic article that only twenty people read um and and i wanted to write for broader audiences and i wanted to write about subjects that i cared about and that's not to say that i didn't care about the academic article that i was writing but the way that academia works is you know you're you're writing about this really narrow subject in a really narrow field and your

waiting within this really defined container that i don't want to be there like i did not want to be boxed anymore and i wanted to write about rock of science or whatever it is that i wanted to write about and so even when the signal arrived i ignored it for a long time because i was afraid and i think fear of uncertainty and fear of unfailure are probably the two reasons to answer your question why people don't train

ge and why people you know wake up when they're at an old age and realize that they spend most of their career doing something that they didn't love and so for me those fears presented as this is my safety net i have tenor i have a guaranteed pay check for life what will happen if i give that up like i am leaping into uncertainty about what this next phase of my life might look like there is no study ink

there is no guaranteed pay track and so there was an enormous fear associated with that so that was part of it but probably the biggest problem for me was ego an ego in the sense of like i had been a professor for when i quit you know ten years and there was professor in front of my name for ten years but i had built up credibility in my field and starting a blog i was going to start from scratch again i was going to lose all

Ozaan Varol

that credibility and begin from the very very beginning and my ego was screaming kicking and screaming and saying what are you going to do and more importantly who are you going to be if you're not a professor and so there was a lot of a lot of those inner voices that come from miss aline place of tying my own what i was doing around my my career my identity as a professor and that was read

really hard to to let that go and the reason i let it go is i firmly realized two things number one that what i considered my safety net had become a straight jacket it was clear to me that my academic commitments were completely depleting my creative energy and my creative energy wanted to go elsewhere and number two i realized that there is birth and death in many ways life lives on lives and our old selves become compost for our

selves and i realized you know we talked about some cost before that the time energy resources i had put into my academic career would not be a sum cost at all and actually would be a gift from my former self to my to my curentself so i can take what what i learned in academia which was like ou know i taught these big first year classes filled with students who did not want to be in the room and that taught me really important lessons about captivating audiences about the importance of telling story and how to

structure a story to grab the attention of of students who did not want to be in that class room and take all of those core components and also you know we didn't talk about this but you alluded to it with with law school being an avenue for critical thinking and that's true and taking all of that taking all of those core components from that experience recombining them to create my new self i mean i sort of i describe this in the book as like the transformation of the caterpillar into the into the butterfly

so i could take what what i was what i had learned from my previous career that wasn't lost and i could take those gifts and apply them to what i did next and that really gave me comfort in stepping into the future

Srini Rao

so what was the impetus for this as the natural follow up book to how to think like a rocket scientist

Ozaan Varol

and actually was not a natural follow up at all i you know a lot of people probably expected me to write something similar to think like a ca scientist and i did too and i tried it i sat down and i took thinking like a rock a scientist was successful at least by by my metric has been translated to nearly twenty five languages now and there was so much impetus to take what worked for that book

Srini Rao

yeah

Srini Rao

uh

Ozaan Varol

and try to do the same thing right copy and paste imitate the thing that worked before the same structure the same three parts the same nine chapters the same everything and and i tried it and for the first time in my life i got writers block like words just stopped flowing i find del i would say ninety percent of the writing process is delightful for me and all the light completely left the room totally sunk

Srini Rao

yep

Srini Rao

yeah

Ozaan Varol

my writing and my creativity and i was like all right i'm just gonna i'm going to let this go i'm gonna let all expectations go about what this next book is going to look like and instead of trying to take what worked before and impose it on this entirely new thing i just said okay i'm going to build the individual puzzle pieces first organically and see where they add up to like i didn't have a title for the book i didn't really have even a table of contents i just on day to day basis started to write whatever was

Srini Rao

hm

Ozaan Varol

coming up and the more i leaned into what was organically coming up the easier the writing became and once all these structures were gone i had complete creative freedom to pursue the ideas that i thought were worth writing about and then over time see the sort of the bigger picture puzzle that they created so i can shuffle the individual puzzle pieces around into different parts but wright in a way that was really authentic to what

feeling at the time when what i was thinking about versus trying to take the thing you know trying to take the last best thing and and recreate it which totally did not work for me

Srini Rao

yeah well well we'll actually get to that because i know you talk about that as one of the issues is a self imitation but let's start at the beginning one of the very first things that you say in the book that caught my attention was that content is something you stuff inside a bag it something you produced on an assembly line nobody wants to get up in the morning and read content over coffee and no truly self respecting creator wants to generate content either because content is normal content is fungible content creators can be replaced artist can't expand on that

me

Ozaan Varol

yeah it's just part of the book that is about artists and art and i tell the story about you know gordon mackenzie who was a long time artists i think at hall mark cards he would you know visit schools ask a question and he would ask how many artists are there in the room in the first grade all the kids would jump up from their seats and say yeah we're all artists in the third grade the number would drop to like five or or ten out of thirty kids

would raise their hands and then by the time you got to middle school only one or two students would like admit to such devient behavior as as being an artist and so as you as you quoted from the book we don't even call it art any more we call a content a part of he dies inside whatever someone calls themselves a content creator instead of an artist and i think we tend to assume that art only happens inside

studio like artists are these you know tortured souls poorly compensated they're working by themselves inside a studio painstakingly creating a work of art but if you think about it art is everywhere art isn't just related to objects and as long as you're re imagining the way that the world works anything that you do can be art we were talking about like raising children right before we started recording the way you raise your children is art the way

as a teacher in the class room the way that you defy the status quo and reward creative behavior is art the new strategy that you design at work is art like the way that you talk the way that you walk the way that you smile it can all be art but if you call what you create content and if you refuse to think of yourself as an artist i think you'll be wildly out of touch with a world that requires all of us to be artists

and to stop producing content on an assembly line content that's fungible content that can be replaced content that can be written by anybody and instead become an artist and become in your words unmistakable right because artists are unmistakable and and content creators are the opposite of that

Srini Rao

so one of the other things that you say that that really struck me in the book was that the fewer labels that follow i am the more freedom you have to step into who you are this is what buddhists call on being and dropping the veil of identity so that your true self can emerge and then you go on to say that when our beliefs and our identity emerge we embrace a belief system simply to preserve our identity any attempt to change our minds whether by ourselves or worse someone else strikes us as a threat and you know that struck

because one you know i remember when i did the keynote for podcast movement i told them i will do this key note on one condition and they said what that i would not talk about podcasting and they were like what and i'm like well listen i'm like you know that's just one label i'm like you know i don't see myself as a podcaster but i am a story teller and audio just happens to be one of the mediums through which i tell stories so i think it would be a far more interesting talk if i did that because who the hell cares about op

using your ship on i tunes i could care less about talking about that it's not interesting um so why do we get so attached to these labels and you know in terms of identity because i remember any duke saying something to me when we had her here talking about her new book quit and she said one of the reasons that often people have a hard time quitting something is because their identities are so tied to that thing

Ozaan Varol

sure and that was definitely true for me you know i thought of myself as i said as a professor and the moment you say i am a professor or the moment you say i am a podcaster or the moment you say in the case of any i am a poker player it becomes really hard to divorce yourself of that identity particularly if you've been successful at it so if you've been successful as a podcaster as you have if i've been successful as a professor as i had it becomes really hard

to say i am actually not this thing that i do that's one of the things that i do is one part of my multidimensional multi fascitive personality but to define yourself in this singular fashion by the thing that you do whether it's a podcast or a lawyer or a doctor i think is to do yourself a tremendous service because you are so much more than that and not only that again but the moment you've identified that strongly with anything

and it doesn't have to be your profession it could be a political belief system or it could be even you know these days people talk about it like like a religion but like i'm a cross fitter or i'm vegan or pale or this or that the moment you define yourself by reference to your diet or to your workout style or to whatever it might be in a way that the belief system and identity fuse the moment that happens

the moment that it will be really hard for you to see the truth and this is true for tribal affiliations as well to the extent that the affiliation of a group and the identity of the individual members emerge then it becomes really hard to say anything do anything believe anything that's different from from your group and so which is why in the book i talk about the sense of like shedding your identity like a snake would shed skin

because the moment you can do that the moment you can see yourself not as your identity but you're just multi dimensional human being that does different things and believe different things and you're a constant work in progress and i think this is the other really important part when people talk about finding themselves it's like it's as if they like misplace this like complete version of themselves somewhere in the room and they have to look around and find it i am not complete you are not complete were

Ozaan Varol

still in the middle of the action constantly evolving and expanding and the more you can see yourself not as a finished product with this like perfectly crafted set of unchanging beliefs the better off you will be because the moment you define yourself as a finished product that's the moment you stop learning and growing but if you see yourself as a work in progress not tied to a set of beliefs not tied to a particular identity not tied to a profession and if you can actually

defy your profession if you can be a podcaster and still when called to give a key note to an audience of podcasters say i'm not going to talk about the podcast or if you're as i am a former rocco scientists and write a book called awaken your genius which has poetry in it because that's like what was coming up for me from moment to moment was like i want to have these short poems that that i want to explore that i want to experiment with and leaning into that and defining expectations i think the better off

the better off you'll be

Srini Rao

yeah it makes me think about my own experience i realized at a certain point after my second traditinally published book came out that maybe my career as a published author was over and you know it wasn't until i stopped resisting that that other opportunities started to just reveal themselves um you know and you know telling you earlier about this entire youtube channel with tutorials i've built that has become like an entire business in it of itself which i never anticipated starting but i realized if i had stuck to that m

ublished author narrative our identity i would have been completely stuck with that

Ozaan Varol

yeah exactly because then you you've only defined yourself in in one narrow way um and it's interesting to the way when i look at my look back on my life before i completely let something go the other thing didn't fully materialize it's like you know you're this empty container and the more you keep holding on to things for fear of letting them go for the reasons that we talked about before

the longer it will take for the next thing to materialize right so the moment i said i'm done with academia all of these opportunities to speak to give key notes and to consult and to do other things began to materialize in a way that they hadn't i mean i didn't sort of quit cold turkey and just just sort of jump blindly off a cliff i was experimenting on the side i mean i started blocking back in two thousand and sixteen or two thousand seventeen when i was still

academia think like a rock scientist came out when i was still an academia so it was only after that book achieved some level of success that i actually ended up quitting but until i quit the new opportunities did not actually come so the moment you say i'm done with academia or that in your case is i'm done with being a published author you're saying okay like my creative energy is no longer going to go in that direction i'm closing it off

what other possibilities might there be so now you've created room in your mind and in your body for new ideas to come through and you're more open to them because you have a narrowly to find yourself as this one thing

Srini Rao

it's funny when i was going through that process of submitting proposal after proposal to my agent her constantly saying now there's no no book deal here one of my friends is like don't you remember the reason you got your book deal in the first place is that you self published and i was like jesus christ how could i not remember that

Ozaan Varol

yeah exactly and then you know we end up losing sight of what we did or why we're doing something in the first place which you know like it's happening right now we're recording this on february twentieth and we're about two months away from the launch of the of the new book and like i said the writing process is totally delightful for me but the moment when i start thinking about marketing and publicity and sales numbers and all of that it's like and so you end up lose

Srini Rao

yeah yeah

Ozaan Varol

and i have to constantly remind myself of like why i wrote the book in the first place and and and making sure that i actually live by the principles i write about in the book because it's really become hard to do now now that marketers and publicists and all of this external noise is in the mix that wasn't there before

Srini Rao

yah

Srini Rao

well i can relate i remember i had a book called the audience of one my sister calls me i think a week or two after it comes out and she says how is it going i was like well it's not selling as many copies as i hoped it would she was like you're an idiot that's the entire message of the book she's like if you don't believe what you wrote why would anybody else believe but and it just it struck me so much that like you know because i said an interview so like yeah we call it an audience of one i'm sure and a publisher would be happy if it reached an audience of millions i want to come back to metric because i know you write about it but i want to go into something that

think was really an important part of the book that was probably one of my favorite parts you say that we follow narratives not evidence we judge the message by the tribal affiliation of the speaker we accept information endorsed by our tribe without investigating it or thinking it through for ourselves conversely we reject information from competing sore because sources regardless of its quality that sentence right the passage right there i think speaks to so many of the other things that you talk about in the book ranging from ou know first principle

to critical thinking so talk to me about how a legal education informs your critical thinking abilities and then let's get into first principle because remember i was telling you it before we hit record i finally just went into chat g explain this to a five year old but i'm going to have you r rocket scientists explain first principles now that i have you here i want to basically get a clear understanding of it

Ozaan Varol

sure on the first point about critical thinking in the passage you quoted and how it relates to to law school i think one of the one of the best things that happened from my legal education and by the way a lot of people go to law school for all the wrong reasons but setting that aside one of the one of the best things that happened from my legal education was i really crafted the ability which had started with my science education of being able to see different perspective

is on the same issue not being blinded by your own ideas or your belief systems and not you know falling victim to confirmation bias but actually seeing the same issue from completely different perspectives because that's what the best lawyers do the best lawyers know the oppositions argument better than the opposition does because the moment you know your opponents argument better than they do then you're able to craft counter arguments anticipate what they're going to say and take the wind

of their sales in so many different ways and so the best law professors and the best legal education systems really teach you how to do that and i think that skill is in so many ways absence from modern discourse right you know we live in these echo chambers and we accept as truth the messages that we get from our own political party to cite one example and then we reject

matically any perspective that doesn't fit our world view and actually we're not even we're not even exposed to different perspectives because it's so easy to un subscribe on follow on friend and so your intellectual vista completely narrows to only those who paret your world view so it becomes really really hard to see different perspectives on an issue and that's something that again legal education taught me and it begins also with my scientific training too because the scientific method when done accurately

is all about beating the crap out of your own ideas the science is science is based on falsification so your goal is to generate a hypothesis and try to prove your own self wrong even though most people try to do the opposite right because you get a heat of dopamene when you are proven right but the best scientists come up with a working hypothesis and working is the most important part here they're not wedded to their idea they're not wedded to their diagnosis

Ozaan Varol

they're coming out with a working hypothesis that's that's subject to modification and then they're doing their very very best to actually falsify themselves and i think that's what the best thinkers do is they keep an open mind and they try to see multiple perspectives on the issue and truthfully life becomes a lot more interesting that way when you don't see life as a series of yes or no answers or black and white and good or bad i tell the story in the in the book of

about meditation and i shared this study with i have an email list write an email the block post every thursday that goes out to them and i shared this research that i come across about meditation how a significant number of meditators actually experience adverse effects and and initially when i read this study i was tempted to reject it because i've been a life i'm not lifelong but i've been meditating probably for ten years regularly and i've been an evangelist first benefits so on night

saw the research i was like oh this is there's got to be some problem with this like i could see my confirmation bias kicking in and my own identity as a meditator getting in the way but i read the research and yeah like a good number of people i don't remember the numbers right now they're in the book actually experience adverse effects including anxiety and some of the problems can be can be severe and i shared the research with my audience to meditate on the dangers of thinking in these simplistic categories treating meditate

tion as a universal remedy or just the beauty of multi faceted in nuance thinking and here's the interesting part i got more hate mail for that post than anything else i've written in recent memory so much hate mail from meditators too which is really sort of ironic right because meditation teaches um loose attachment to ideas and what not but people were so tied to their identity as a meditator and so unwilling to even think about and study a pure reviewed research study that introduce some some nuance to this so it's really hard to do because in many ways we're wired to thinking categories but there's so much beauty and so much value to opening yourself up and seeing nuance and complexity

Srini Rao (01:00:59.694)

i mean well that's why i started writing a book titled everybody is full of ship including me like you and it was a book about exact about how cognitive bias is you know distort our ways of thinking because i saw it over and over and over again in my own thinking and i know you go into talking about causation and correlation particularly when it comes to stories about success but before yet to that let's get into the concept of first principles you say that this is the power of first principles thinking of distilling into

it's core ingredient and building it back up into a different system the power of first principles thinking can be used far beyond the world of business you can also used this thinking to find raw materials within yourself and build the new u take a moment to tease out your own building basic building blocks the lego blocks of your talents interests and preferences so explain the concept of first principles thinking to because i think story that always stayed with me about first principles thinking from your previous book was the tim urban story

Ozaan Varol 

oh yes yes i was like tim urban story one of the dangers of writing your book and then not thinking about it for three years is like wit what story was that

Srini Rao 

don't worry you know because i've spent so much time reading everybody's books and during these interviews i remember when i had tiago forte here you know i asked him about some question about the book and he was like oh yeah what were those things again i was like like well i know them because i've studied your book inside it out but yeah that story always stayed with me as a first principle s example so explain first principles and then bring it back to that example so people know what the hell we're talking about

Ozaan Varol 

sure yeah and correct me if i'm not thinking about the right example the one actually include it in the book but so first principle thinking is taking a system and then distilling it to its core components and then building it up from scratch and so you are letting go of everything except for what is essential and then once you've identify the core components the raw materials then you can build it up and build it up in a different way so re imagine as you go

um and so i think two examples come to mind from from think like a rocket scientist i think one of them was involving the way that space x started and one of the ways that they've been able to cut costs is because they applied for principle thinking in terms of distilling a rocket into his core components so instead of saying oh we're just going to buy rockets that other people have built stepping back and asking well wait a minute what is a rocket actually made

of like what are the non negotiable um raw materials of a rocket and then building a rocket based on those non negotiable raw materials and re imagining things as you go so one of the things that they re imagine for example was this assumption that rockets are not re usable so rockets were burnt up in the atmosphere a plunge into the ocean requiring an entirely new rocket to be rebuilt for decades and they've been able to re imagine that and so now we've got a now landing

ad next to the launch pad at kennedy space center and now rockets that carry their car got in to arbiter are landing back on on solid ground and i think so that was one of the examples that i mentioned in the book of the power of first principle thinking and i think the timurban example you might be thinking about and correct me if i'm wrong is like the difference between a chef and a cook so a chef goes to the first principles the raw ingredients and builds

you know new dish from scratch where as a cook just takes a recipe and just raplicates it it takes recipe they take a recipe that was invented by somebody else and you just sort of copy and paste where as a chef plays with the first principles of a dish you know with the herbs and the spices and and the core ingredients and and re imagines things as they go and create these you know beautiful products from from scratch that are

Ozaan Varol

unmistakably there's am i remembering the right example or did you have something else in like okay yeah so that's that's the that's first principles thinking for me and and i think that's true for your own personal self as well and so the passage you quote thorny around identifying your own lego blocks is an exercise in identifying your own first principles like what makes you you what are your color ingredients your super powers that make you different

Srini Rao (01:05:08.294)

yeah you are yeah

Ozaan Varol (01:05:33.918)

um other people um so i'll give you an example from my life in case people are wondering well what could those look like one of my first principles is story telling and and the reason i know that is i took the time this was a few years ago to look back on my life and identify certain themes that have been there all along so one of the first things i did after i learn to read and write was i would write stories on my grandfather

this old typewriter and i would just sit in front of the typewriter and and write stories right before the before the education system told me what i should be doing in what i should be interested in that was just a core interest of mine i would just write screen plays and you know i would i started a magazine in my parents were the only readers but that that started from a very young age and then it continued i took a break from it you know during middle high school for reasons that you can imagine the rock

i sort of pull my interest in a different direction but then as a lawyer i was task with telling stories on behalf of my clients as a professor i had to tell captivating stories in the class room and really and also in terms of telling stories to discover the first principles of a good story and then build a back up in the way that i thought would resonate with the with the audiences that i was trying to reach and so that core component the core ingredient

has been constant for me and now of course as an author i tell stories in the books that i write and i try to convey stories or principles and the trojan horse of a story because stories stick in a way that you know dry facts and dry sentences don't people tend to remember the story rather than the principle that you share with them and so looking back on my life that coryingredient has been there the dishes that i've cooked with it have changed over time but

story telling has always been there and so i encourage you to do this if you're listening to this to do that exercise for yourself and there's additional ways of doing this that i describe in the book but once you identify those first principles then you will be well positioned to re imagine what you're doing and to escape from this trap that we talked about before you know defining yourself as a lawyer for example because if you define yourself instead as a storyteller then possibility is open ough for you that you may have initially missed now you might be well taylored or well positioned to also be an author or to be a screen writer to do all of these different things but that requires stepping away from the way that we narrowly view ourselves by our profession and instead identify your core components and then re imagine yourself as you go

Srini Rao

You know it's it's funny to to listen to you describe this it just got me thinking when you said story tellin ease i mean i know that's part of mine and you know i never thought about this i didn't realize like one of my probably other first principles is using technology to express creativity like that is at the core of everything that i because like my first instinct every single time i see a new tool is what can i make with this like and i hadn't thought about it that way but yeah the thing about the team oven

Ozaan Varol (01:08:46.618)

m

Srini Rao (01:09:00.534)

story i think that struck me most was that he broke it down to first principles and urban basically doesn't follow any of the you know common wisdom of blogging you know which is basically writing like an eighty thousand word blog post once every you know like two months or something like that which i think was really such a contrast to the way that people did things but speaking of that you know it's funny beaus we're not doing this in a linear order but would make sense now that now given this book is about but you go on later in the book to talk about formulas for success and as i said i think my favorite quote from your previous book one that i turned into a blog post was that you can't copy and paste somebody else's path to success and you say that formulas for success satisfy the popular craving for heroes but they are they also mislead we're seeing only the survivors not the failures who took the bullets to their engine and never return home the aspiring entreprener who moved to sell on valley to pursue a start up only to fail doesn't

make the cover of fast company and success stories also discount the role of luck the pilot may have gotten lucky and never tooken a bullet in the engine and this is the guy who smokes like a chimney drinks like a sailor and still lives to be ninety five and i think that the reason that those stood out to me was because i mean the entire sort of thesis of unmistakable first book was in a lot of ways the idea that you can't copy in pace because i just saw it over and over and over

where somebody would see a successful person do something and then they would you know try to replicate that thing like people who took online courses they would go into the course and then they would do exactly what the instructor did and they were shocked that they didn't get the same results and i was like how are you not seeing that there's one really fucking obvious variable in this equation look in the mirror

Ozaan Varol (01:10:49.138)

yeah yeah exactly and i think like the copying pasting is so ingrained part of it is genetic wiring were wired to conform in many ways but part of it is what we talked about before which is like well this is what the education system teachers right education system to circle back come full circle to the beginning of the conversation is is all about copying and pasting somebody else's path to success like there is one path one way to answer one right cure killing one right way to enter

but history that's the message that people here over and over again no wonder they go into the real world and assume that if you just know copying pace with some some successful person did you're going to get the same results but life doesn't work that way as you said there's that huge variable the person in the mirror and you're just not seeing all of the you're not seeing all of the failures like if you pull up this just pop to mind if you pull up in an outline course like

sale space for an online course you only see the testimonials from the people who love the course right you're only seeing that the raving reviews the carefully taylor carefully selected testimonials that give this very one dimensional picture of the results that you might get by taking that online course but whenever i see that my mind always goes to like where are the failures here where the people who ask for a refund or where are the people who took the course did exactly what was

Srini Rao (01:11:56.814)

uh

Ozaan Varol (01:12:18.958)

said and did not get any results from it because you are not seeing those people and those people definitely exist and when you bring that mindset to like what you read about in the news or the latest fad diet or you know the latest workout hack you're like okay what am i not seeing what am i missing how is the survivorship bias at play here where i'm only looking at the success stories and being completely fooled as a result

Srini Rao (01:12:24.014)

hm

Ozaan Varol (01:12:49.418)

because there is just so much of that of the focus on success stories and in many ways you're just not seeing the failures at all

Srini Rao (01:12:58.474)

yeah well let's finish this up by talking about metrics in particular because i think the

give me just a second son i put a power bar in my mouth and i'm chewing and i can't talk josh edit this out please

Ozaan Varol (01:13:07.638)

sure yeah yeah no worries

Srini Rao (01:13:33.714)

sorry about that i wasn't anticipating that it would be difficult to talk with that um all right so let's talk about metrics in particular because there was something about metrics that you said that really struck me obviously metric matter you and i are both published authors or publishers going to determine whether or not we get another book deal based on how many books we sell but what you say is that when we're too focused on the things we measure we can

Ozaan Varol 

problem at all

no worries

Srini Rao (01:14:03.434)

lose sight of everything else including common sense measurement has another downside it prompts us on to focus on outcomes that are easy to measure and that really struck me because we live in such a metric driven world

Ozaan Varol (01:14:19.898)

we do and i think it it leads us astray in many ways for the reason you quoted from the book which is that when mputerdrucker has this famous quote attributed to him which is that what gets measured gets managed but then what gets measured also gets all the focus you know we focus on what's easy to measure not necessarily what matters so like lawyers count bailable hours and six minute increments computer programmers count lines of code

writers count words a lot of people count the zeros at the end of their bank account but then well what are the what e the metrics that we are not measuring or that are not that are not easily measurable like values like humility and courage and beauty and play are a lot more shapeless so they get ignored like it's not easy to say am i a better colleague or a better parent than

was last year because there is no quantification attached to it and i think the epitome the epitome of what happens when we focus too much on measurement is the strip mall the strip mall is like the epitome of trying to get efficiency from every square foot is the result of a mindset that asks how do we get every single dollar that we can get from every

square inch of space and then you end up with a strip mall and there's about more than sixty five thousand strip malls in the united states they all look the same they're all extremely ugly pieces of architecture i was on a road trip the best thanksgiving going by all of these strip malls and like thinking to myself man thousands of years of architectural development and we ended up with the strip mall as one of the most prevalent pieces of architecture in the united states it's it's incredible and it only becomes

Srini Rao 

yeah

Ozaan Varol 

credible when you start thinking about why that's happening and is happening because we're focusing only on what we can measure because beauty in architecture you can't quantify it and if you're focusing only on what you can measure then you're going to ignore beauty and like i said you know with like the marketing process for my book when i'm focusing only on external metrics i completely lose sight of why i'm writing in the first place yes they're there that they matter to whether you know

i get a another publishing deal but when i focus incessantly on them i end up taking my hands off the wheel and handing control over to a set of metrics that are going to lead me off course and they're going to make me forget why i decided to write the book in the first place you know in the same way that you described of like an audience of one losing sight of of that message if you're to focus on the number of copies that you're trying to push

m

Srini Rao 

well i feel like i could talk to you all day about this book i mean it's so deep and so rich with so many different ideas but in the interest of time i'm going to finish with my final question which i know you've heard me ask you before what do you think it is to make somebody or something unmistakable

Ozaan Varol

i'll reply with a story since you know the theme has been story telling and i'll make it shorter than than it is in the book but so i grew up in a in turkey and the education system as we alluded to was was extremely conformist so much so like one just example from the book is our principal called us by we were assigned a number when we started school kind of like an that flix show stranger things like a lovin and our principle will call us by that number

instead of our first name talk about enforced conformity stripping your individual qualities and grow growing up in that system i felt so much pressure to conform so much pressure to become normal that i ended up even changing my favorite color when people would ask when i was growing up what's your favorite color i would say blue and the truth would have been purple but i would say blue because blue is what

normal boys were supposed to like and i really really wanted to be normal because my eccentric tastes and differences have gotten in the way in many ways and and so it's been a lifelong journey for me of of discovering my purple and re connecting with it and i think unmistakable people are the ones who truly embraced their purple their first principles their own genius what makes them different from other p

well because in the end no one can compete with you at being you right you're the first and the last time that you'll ever happen and if you're thinking is an extension of you if what you're building is a product of your own genius your own wisdom your own purple your own first principles well then you will be unmistakable

Srini Rao

amazing well i can't thank you enough for taking the time to join us and share your story your wisdom and your insights with our listeners where can people find out more about you the book your work and everything else that you're up to

Ozaan Varol 

yeah the book awaking your genius is available wherever books are sold if you want an easy way to find the links to get the book you can go to genius book dot nets that's genius book dot net and if you want to keep in touch with me i am not active on social media so the best way to do that is to join my email list i send out one email a week that you can read in three minutes or less with one big idea and you can join that by heading over to

my website which is on moral dot com that's o z a n v ism victor a r l dot com or speaking of using technology part of creativity you can text my first name son o z a n to five five four four four to join the mail ist

Srini Rao 

amazing and for everybody listening we will wrap the show with that