Ozan Varol: Igniting Creativity

Ozan Varol is a recovering law professor and former rocket scientist who has spent the last decade or so analyzing the way we think, create, and ideate. In 2020, he wrote Think Like a Rocket Scientist, which explores the way we problem solve—it’s full of fascinating stories and case studies. And he’s now out with his next book, Awaken Your Inner Genius: Escape Conformity, Ignite Creativity, and Become Extraordinary, which offers a continuation of the theme: How do we come up with new ideas and novel solutions, without falling into the trap of doing what everyone else is doing. Ozan is a wonderful narrator and guide, offering hundreds of anecdotes of people—in every conceivable sphere of life—who are doing things differently, and creating change in the process. The best part? Most of his advice is simple and easy to implement, a small shift in how we move throughout our days. Okay, let’s get to our conversation.

MORE FROM OZAN VAROL:

Think Like a Rocket Scientist: Simple Strategies You Can Use to Make Giant Leaps in Work and Life

Awaken Your Inner Genius: Escape Conformity, Ignite Creativity, and Become Extraordinary

Ozan Varol’s Website

TRANSCRIPT:

(Edited slightly for clarity.)

ELISE LOEHNEN: Do you have a system as you encounter interesting anecdotes, do you file them away?

OZAN VAROL: I do. Yeah, and it happens in two ways. One is I read a lot and whenever I read, I take extensive notes on my computer and if I see a story that I know might be future fodder for like a chapter in a book or a blog post or like a story that I share in a keynote, I will file those away in a digital note taking system. I use Rome research, but you can use whatever you want, and I tag it, so I will say, this is about creativity or this is about burnout or this is about mental health. And so I've got those tags and the stories organized around them, so I'll go back to those and look through to see which story I want to tell, which story I think will resonate with my audience.

That’s one way, and then a second way is actually common for the stories that ended up in Awaken Your Genius. I would say the second method was more frequent or more common than the first one, which is whenever I start a book, I turn into this antenna. Everywhere I go, I start seeing stories and movies I watch or even song lyrics or books I read or conversations, and so everything turns into potential fodder for whatever it is I'm going to put into the book. And so a lot of the stories that ended up in the book were just like randomly picked up from places. That came to me after I started writing the book. Like, you plant your flag, you put up your antenna and then things just magically start to come. There's this chapter on the Power of Play and one of the stories I tell in there is from R.E.M. and how they came up with “Losing My Religion,” which is a pretty interesting story. The guitar player was like, I'm tired of playing the electric guitar, and he sets it down and picks up the mandolin and starts playing the mandolin and comes up with this riff that really resonates with the rest of the band. Then they just sort of like all step into this playground and start playing with different instruments. And then the lead singer starts experimenting with different lyrics and this beautiful song, “Losing My Religion,” just pours out of them in a very unscripted, unplanned way.

My wife and I were watching an episode of Song Exploder on Netflix, which one of the episodes was about the making of that song. And I was planning a chapter on play in the back of my mind, and then this happens often with like stuff, we watch much to the chagrin of my wife Kathy, but I'm like I need to pause this. You know, like I need to just some notes down. We can’t continue the episode, I'm like rewinding, writing stuff down. And so it may not be great for your significant other, but yeah, once that that happens, it's like, okay, I had this potential chapter on play in mind, and this is a perfect story to begin the chapter.

ELISE: Yeah. Well, what I love about the book is it's sort of meta because you talk about your own process and your own meandering journey through many interesting careers, all viable, all revered culturally, but since abandoned, right? Rocket science, law, law professor. So it's fun to get insight into your process as an example for other people of what it is to turn down. I mean, so much of the book, I know it's called Awaken Your Genius, but so much of the book to me felt like turning down the signal, an exterior signal, so that you can hear yourself in one way, and then also pick up the signal that's important rather than unvarnished noise, which I think is what we typically swim in.

And it's funny because last night I was having dinner with a friend who's a magazine writer, great writer, not prolific, she would agree with this. She has a daughter and she's been primarily parenting. But I've been on her, I like to harass people into writing books. And, so anyway, she's been completely resistant. And then last night she said, I'm sort of semi-retired from magazine writing. I think it's time for me to write a book. And I was like, yes, yes. And she was like but I don't know what. And I'm like, well, now even the acknowledgement of it or the owning of it is enough. Just wait. I was like in six months you'll have the idea. I don't know if that's how it is for you, but that's how it is for me. I feel like they come as downloads as soon as I acknowledge that I'm willing.

OZAN: Absolutely. I completely agree with that. The moment you set an intention to do something, the moment you say, I'm going to write a book, then you become this receptor for potential ideas. So I think setting the intention is really important. And then the second part of it for me is listening. And I think most people don't do that second part, which is to listen and by listening, I mean not to external noise, but as you were saying to those internal signals. I write about this in the book, but ideas don't arrive with a bang. There is no parade. The big thing never screams that it's a big thing. The big thing actually at first looks quite small, but if your life is filled with constant noise, constant chatter, and you're not making room to listen to yourself, you won't be able to hear that subtle whisper, when it arrives. Most people say, oh, my, my best ideas come to me in the shower, it's surprising. If you think about it though, it's not surprising at all because it's like one of the few moments of your day when you're by yourself and you're not getting bombarded by these high decibel sirens for attention in the form of notifications and emails and text messages and phone calls and this and that. You're in this solitary environment where you're letting your mind wander and it's just you and your thoughts and all of these built up whispers then begin to emerge to the surface, but we just don't stay with that long enough to really lean into those ideas, but imagine, you know, the types of ideas you might be able to generate if you can replicate those shower like conditions throughout the day so that you do hear those subtle whispers when they come up.

ELISE: And I think a lot of it is setting a container, right? So creating some structure, some sort of system where you know where to put these things, even if you don't know what they are or what to do with them yet. So you talk about jotting down notes or Quentin Tarantino floats in a pool and then like goes to the side and jots down notes. When I walk, I text myself insights, things that strike me that usually I can parse after. You need enough context so you're not like what is this random thought? But I know I have a place to put them.

And I think for so many of us, they're sort of these ephemeral, they float through. And we think we'll either come to them again. But I think it's in the collective consciousness, I think it comes to you and you can take it and move it or it'll go to someone else, not that it's proprietary, but that's the process. Like building a container, being receptive, bringing it down if that's what you want.

OZAN: Right. Absolutely. And I do think a container is really important. And I do a number of things, I mention, you know, using Rome to take  digital notes, but I send audio, I record audio on my phone when I'm walking and then I'll text the audio notes to myself. Old-fashioned pen and paper works really well. And for those who are listening, I don't wanna give the misleading impression that when you're on a walk or when you're sitting down with just you and your thoughts that all of these amazing insights are coming up. That's not true. I would say 95% of what comes up when I sit down is just utter unusable junk. It's just stuff. It's just junk that's just in my brain and it's holding space. But here's the thing, if you keep the junk in there, if you don't have a container to offload the junk, then the junk is gonna crowd out the more valuable signals. So there is so much value in getting out the junk out of your mind into a place like a notebook, a digital device, whatever it might be.

And then I often find that having done that exercise, ideas will come up later in the day, like having offloaded all the stuff from my brain, amazing insights will just pop up at random moments. So it might not be during that thinking session itself, it might come up later because you've taken the time to just, you know, clear the flies off the soup and clean out your head for those more valuable signals to come through.

ELISE: Yeah. One of the things, I can't remember the exact context, but this definitely rings true for me, in your definition of genius or what this idea is, and I think that there are a lot of big words that we conflate and potentially confuse: Genius creativity, originality, I think originality can feel like a prison to people, it's like Harold Bloom talking about how Shakespeare already created every character in existence, more or less like the anxiety of influence, right? That there's nothing new to make. And you talk about how truly creative people, and I think that this process that we're both describing is part of this, they're recombining elements, right? We're all in conversation with each other. So it's not about finding something screamingly original, often it's revealing what's already there and contextualizing or combining other people's work and words in really interesting ways.

OZAN: For sure. I agree with that. Someone, I quote them in the book, I forget the name, I think it might have been Franco, but he says, to create is to recombine, a lot of what we call original things, they're actually recombinations of existing ideas, this mixing and matching of ideas that were there before in the collective consciousness or collective knowledge base. And then you're taking those ideas and applying them to different fields to create new things, or you're taking those ideas and bringing your own unique perspective to them. Right? When I first started writing, this would paralyze me, and this is part of a relic from academia. Like whenever you're writing in a piece of academic literature, it has to be new. It has to be something that hasn't been argued before. Like you have to bring a fresh angle and that idea of like original equals new, was completely paralyzing for me because I would come up with what I thought was a great idea and then you look at what existed, like, oh yeah, so far more accomplished than I am already wrote about this thing. So then I would set it aside until I realized that original doesn't have to mean new. It can be an old idea, but you can take it and if you bring your own unique perspective to it, if you bring your own individuality and unique expression to it, it can still feel fresh.

And so I think the best pieces of work that I love tend to be combinations of the old and the new. Like they're taking an old idea and then bringing a fresh perspective to it, bringing their own unique individual expression to it and it makes so fun to read because you can sort of recognize some of these older foundations, but then you can also see how the author or the film director has also brought their own unique take into the mix.

ELISE: Yeah. One of the other things that you write about at length, which I think is helpful for people, is you poke at this idea, and again, it's a little bit of a paradox because we're talking about flashes of insight or these things that just come to you in the moment, but creative work requires, I mean, you write a fair amount about practice and people who have been doing this for a really long time and how it’s not appropriate to necessarily compare yourself with someone who has 30 years of experience on you, but that also creative work isn't instantaneous. It's not effortless. I think that's another pervasive myth, even if we're not really conscious of it. That people who are gifted, you know, your Michelangelo just emerges. You talk about watching Bob Ross. I also loved watching Bob Ross and being like this is American TV? This is so odd. And then understanding why people love watching Bob Ross. But can you talk a little bit about that, like what you've learned about process, refinement, and work?

OZAN: For sure. So I think pop culture gives us an exceedingly false impression of how ideas come into being. So you look at any movie or any television show, it's like, oh, the idea just appears in a flash. Like you have that eureka moment and as if out of nowhere, the idea comes into being, and it's not like that at all, you're not seeing, like you're seeing the final thing, but you're not seeing the years of effort that went into the process beforehand. And I think, you know, you could understand that, right? When you're watching a TV show or a movie, you know, or even reading a book like a sentence, like, and then she thought some more, just is not interesting or like a clip of someone just sitting down and thinking for an hour doesn't make for exciting television. And so you're only seeing the end product, which is the arrival of the idea, but not seeing the messy stuff that comes beforehand, and when you look at how ideas come into being, and this goes to something we talked about before, but like you have this oscillation between focus and unfocus.

Like you're stuck with a problem. You're thinking about the problem. You're trying to generate ideas on something and then you go and do something else. So for Quentin Tarantino, this is like working on a scene in depth. And then he'll go and float in his pool and think about what he wrote, and he just lets his mind wander. And then he comes up with additional ideas that he jots down. For Einstein, it was the unfocused part was like playing the violin. He'd be stuck on a problem and then he'd go and play the violin, so that the oscillation between focus and unfocus becomes important, but to be able to get to those better ideas, what David Lynch calls like the big fish, you have to dive deeper cause usually the first thought that I have on a subject isn't my best thought. It's usually the conventional wisdom on the subject. But if you just spit that out as the answer, if you don't stick with a problem long enough, then you're not gonna be able to dive deeper. to a depth where David Lynch's bigger fish swim.So deep thinking requires time. Just most of us don't, don't devote time to thinking. Instead, we see the final product and then we expect these amazing insights to just come. Uh, and that's not usually how idea generation works,

ELISE: Yeah. I think it's easy to judge something where you're like, that feels clear, simple, well executed, it must be easy. I've gELISEs written 12 books, so this book wasn't my first rodeo, my own book. But it was certainly much harder than gELISE writing where there's no ego involved and you're really just structuring other people's ideas and thoughts. It's a totally different thing. And with this book, we spent a year editing my book. It took me a year to write it. A year to edit. And that's revising, clarifying, adding, densifying, going back in. As you know, I think we all have this experience too, which can be so disheartening where you are like, oh my God, I am gonna do this amazing painting, or make this amazing thing. And then you come back and you're like, this is unintelligible. I have no idea what I'm trying to say here. And so there's a certain amount of interpretation that's required in any creative process too, so that what you're actually trying to express and articulate makes it across the page, but I think it leaves people thinking that it's effortless or easy because it should be kind of effortless for the reader. Right? That's the goal. You're like, let's write something that moves and that’s easy to understand and but I think it stops people in the creative process because it's hard. It's hard. It takes a lot of time. You might be much faster.

OZAN: Not at all. Like, people don't realize how long it takes. This book is about 200 pages long. It took me two years to write this thing. And the readers aren't seeing the horrible early drafts, you're not seeing the early drafts that would make any self-respecting writer absolutely cringe. Same thing with movies, like you're not seeing the tens of takes it took to get that Oscar worthy monologue and the amount of practice that goes into or the so many times at a standup comedian will bomb on stage before they actually get a joke right. And so you're only seeing the final product, which then makes it really intimidating because you're thinking, as you said, like that whatever comes out of me should be in this polished form, but that's not how it works. And so, you're right, it paralyzes people and it stops them from getting started because they think that this is something that just comes easily to people. And as delightful as a process of writing is for me, it's not easy at all. It's actually really quite challenging and I mentioned this in the book too, but like part of me is intimidated by meeting readers in person because I'm like, there's no way I can live up to the persona that I have on these pages. I'd rather have you meet my far funnier, smarter doppelganger who only lives in my book because the book has been polished over a period of two years, not just by me, but by editors and other capable of hands who have brought their own editing magic into the mix too.

And so you're seeing the, the final curated product and not the messy versions that came before it. So when you compare your beginning to my end, you result in paralysis because you think, well, I can never do that. And I have that fear too, of like, if I compare where I am now to an author who's been writing books for 10 years, it's not an apples to apples comparison. They're going to be far ahead of me because they've just been doing this for a lot longer than I have. We're genetically wired to compare ourselves to other people, but the moment you compare your beginning to someone else's end is the moment that you, I think, end up containing yourself and confining yourself unnecessarily.

ELISE: Yeah. And typically what permeates, what breaks through culture, and I wanna talk about noise and algorithms and social media, too, but what breaks through is typically the tail end of a longer career. I think maybe Steve Martin, where he's like, I spent eight years learning, four years performing, and then four years of incredible success. And obviously we revere him as one of the greatest living comics, but the path there, it's always rose colored glasses, but it's easy to write off the uncertainty. I also wanna talk to you about uncertainty and surrender, but first let's talk a little bit about what we actually see, the algorithms, the social media success, and the upside and the downside of this, right? Because you examine the way that it clouds our perceptions and our judgment. And then also that sometimes when we judge our own work and we don't put it out, we can be surprised at what actually that happens to me all the time, I’m like, I don't know if this is interesting at all. And I'm like, oh, that's the thing that was liked the most. So can you talk a bit about both sides?

PAUSE

OZAN: Sure. Let me begin with that second point because it, that honestly was the moment that launched my writing career in many ways. This was maybe five years ago, I wrote this article on why facts don't change people's minds, and I, you know, I still have an email list. I had a much smaller email list back then, and I would send out this email every Thursday. And so this was like Wednesday night, I wrote his article on why facts don't change people's minds. And I looked at it in self-loathing, you know, I was like, God, this is not good. And the insights in it were so obvious to me because as a former scientist, I had like spent my entire career trying to convince people to using objective facts and data, and it just wouldn't work. And so I wrote this thing, what I thought was a really obvious article, and I was about to scrap it, but I'm like, I need to send this email tomorrow morning. So I was like, okay. I asked my inner critic for a pass and, and hit publish. And then a few days later I got this email from what was then called Helio, t’s now The Next Big idea Club, and the editor at that magazine, he wrote me an email. He said something like, oh, this is like a really interesting take. And I was like, oh, hmm, I didn't think so, but thank you for saying that he asked, you know, do you mind if we cross post this on our side? I was like, sure, go ahead.

And then a few days after that, my web designer emailed me and she said look at your website stats, like something really strange is happening. And I looked in and there was like this hockey stick shaped graph depicting this like incredible amount of traffic coming to my site from what was then Helio. And so the article had gone viral, it got over a million views, hundreds of thousands of social shares, and I was this close to not publishing it. I was like this is just not gonna resonate with people, or people are gonna find it too obvious. There's two primary lessons for that for me. Number one is what might be obvious to you can be groundbreaking to somebody else. And this goes back to the earlier conversation about, you know, what does new mean and what does original mean? The idea in that article was not new, but it was original in the sense that I brought my own unique take onto it and unique experience to it. And even though it was completely obvious to me, other people don't have my perspective and my experience on the world, so it wasn't obvious to them, and it really resonated with them and it struck a chord with them.

So that's lesson number one. And then lesson number two is, and this I find to be true over and over again, you never know if something is going to work until you try it. Like until you hit publish it and until you see what sort of response is going to get, you just don't know if it's gonna work. And you can make all the pros and cons sheets you might want, as my like overthinking prefrontal cortex is prone to doing. Or you can be like, okay, well I wrote this thing, I'm just gonna give it a shot and I'm gonna try it and see if it works. And, I don't know if this is true for you, but many of the articles that I think are gonna be like viral or greats end up producing crickets. And then like the things that I'm like, this almost ended up on the cutting room floor. Let me resurrect it because I've got nothing else to post, ends up being the most popular.

ELISE: Yeah, you can't plan it. You can't plan it. Even though in some ways, and this takes us to the next point, there are people who are gaming it or you can sort of pretend and this is why I also like the book, and I like your work because it's so easy to distribute as you talk about morning routines or checklists or do this, and this invariably will happen, and that is not life. We all know that. Although we buy into that again, I'm still like, what is your morning routine? Maybe it will give me insight into being a more functioning person. The signal is noisy. Right? And if you try to tune yourself to it, you will drive yourself wild cause you can't predict it. And then you're up against Instagram. I thought it was helpful that essentially you were like, do not become a one trick pony on a, you know, a social media site where you don't own your content and you don't own your audience. I watch a lot of people to do that and I feel that way where I'm like, I feel vulnerable spending so much time on Instagram so that they can change the algorithm.

OZAN: But you've got an email newsletter too, right?

ELISE: I do. And a podcast, but people are always like, why are you pushing a newsletter? I'm like, because Instagram makes a lot of money off of my free labor. And then they can just completely change the algorithm and shut us all down effectively.

OZAN: Right? Yeah. Because you don't own your audience in Instagram. You're depending on this middle institution that dictates the terms of your relationship with your audience. And that institution can change algorithms at any point, and in a way that like only 5% of your followers can actually see what you post. Whereas with an email list and email newsletters, I think, you know, they don't sound sexy because they've been around for so long. Whereas like a reel on Instagram is shiny and new, but shiny and new doesn't necessarily mean better. And there's so much value in investing things that have stood the test of time. Like people are quitting Facebook by the millions, but no one is quitting email. And so, with an email newsletter too, you own that email list. Like no one can come between you and your audience and take the terms of your relationship with them. You get to send an email to them whenever you want to and it will land in their inbox, which is pretty amazing.

ELISE: Yeah, certainly. And I think particularly as people are thinking about their own creative process or how to get started or how to refine what they're doing in so many ways the only way you can figure it out is by doing it and modifying or, I feel like I've found myself, I mean, I had a pretty good sense of who I am, but I feel like I've really found myself in the last few years as I’ve just been following my own curiosity. And you talk about that too, like, I think we're similar in the way that we work our way through bookshop. And I don't necessarily read bestsellers. I mean, I might read a bestseller, but that's not how I decide what I'm gonna read. I read, as you have listened for a while, quite obscure things, but I follow my curiosity, I follow my interests and I like to go pretty deep. And as you write about, there's a lot of treasures in things that might have been overlooked or are old.

OZAN: Yeah, absolutely. And I love that. And none of this to say by the way that you should not use Instagram or that you should not read a best seller. You absolutely should if you want to. I think what I see a lot of people do is they feel compelled to read a book or they feel like they should be on TikTok or Instagram because that's what they’re hearing in the sort of the ether, the noise. And that's not necessarily the case. So you should read a book on the newsletter or on the bestseller list if it aligns with you, but you should also pursue your curiosity to these other more obscure places because you're going to find overlooked ideas there. So we talked partially about this creativity being this inner journey where you're listening to the signals from within, but you're also going to turn your attention outward and then discover signals outward. And if you watch only what everybody else is watching, or if you read only what everybody else is reading, then you're going to think only what other people are thinking because you're being exposed to these same inputs as other people and not looking to other places to find ideas that have been overlooked. And I totally get this by the way, because it's inconvenient. It's so much more convenient to look at the bestseller list, go on Amazon, and buy the book that's sitting on everyone's bookshelf. It's much harder to leave your house, go into a bookstore. and follow the trail of curiosity to your next read and find the types of obscure books that you like to read. And so I think there's a lot of value to that.

I tell the story in the book about Jimmy Breslin, who was a reporter and when the JFK assassination happened, he, along with all the other reporters in the country, went into the White House press briefing room and he is like standing in the back of the room and he looks at the room, there's like hundreds, thousands of reporters waiting at the White House for information. And he looks around the room and he goes, I can't make a living here. Look, everyone is going to have the same information, therefore everyone is going to write the exact same story. So he decides to leave the White House and he goes across the river to Arlington National Cemetery, and he finds the guy who is digging the grave for JFK and he interviews the the grave digger and writes this incredible column telling the story of the JFK assassination from the perspective of the person who's preparing JFK's final resting place. And he ends up writing this really famous column that stands out from all the coverage that's basically reaching identical conclusions because everybody was at the White House getting the same information. So I think in our life we tend to do the same thing. We're all in our versions of the White House getting the same information from the same sources, and it's super inconvenience to have to leave and go to the Arlington National Cemetery and find a guy who is digging the grave, but you're going to be able to find overlooked ideas that way that you otherwise would’ve missed

ELISE: And correct information. I mean, you do a great job across a range of of ideas to poke at some of these things that we hold is truisms and we just repeat. Right? So whether it's breakfast is the most important meal, that was a fascinating story about Kellogs. I didn't know the whole backstory of Corn Flakes. That's an interesting story. And then, you know, I did know about the opioid epidemic and how that started from, what was it? A five sentence letter, anecdotal letter that suddenly became represented as this massive longitudinal study cited for decades. And then I loved that you brought up Frost and you went into poetry and sort of the way that we often just replicate or say these things where if we stop to think or we read the actual poem, we would recognize that we're spinning out a distorted version of facts. And so when you go deeper, when you stop right, and think, and listen and ask questions. You get potentially to a deeper level of truth.

OZAN: For sure. Yeah. So pausing to reflect and and ask, is this right? Or what do I think about what I'm reading is really important, and then as you said part of the, the process of finding overlooked ideas is actually going to the primary source, which most people don't do. We read one person's interpretation of another's interpretation, of another's interpretation of the primary source. So I tell the story in the book, as you said, Frost and “The Road Not Taken,” which is probably one of the most popular and one of the most misquoted poems of all time. Even as an astrophysics major, we had to take, I think, two writing classes my freshman year, these writing seminars and I took this class on. It was something to do with poetry and I remember quoting the poem, and I took one line out of it, probably the most famous line, you know, “two roads divergent the woods. And I took the one less traveled by and that made all the difference to..” like, I don't know, I think I was trying to be a clever freshman to make this like retort against someone in his writing seminar.

And the grad student who was teaching the seminar started to laugh and he is like, did you actually read the poem? I'm like, yeah, I read the poem. He is like, go back and read the poem. He is like, you may have read one stanza, but you haven't read the whole thing if you're actually quoting it for that. And so I went back and read the poem and lo and behold, the poem is so misunderstood. The poem is actually about self-delusion. If you read the earlier parts of the poem, Frost makes it clear that the two roads actually were not different. He says they were trodden about the same, you know, the leaves lay equally black. He writes, and so the writers, the character in the poem like a hindsight belief that he took the road less traveled by is actually a study of self-delusion. He did not take the road less traveled by. And so ironically, this poem about delusion has generated mass delusion about, and it's quoted from like everywhere. From books to Hollywood movies to like Sky Mall posters about the testament to like rugged individualism and picking your own path in life. And the poem's not about that at all, and it's, you know, it's pretty easy to go read the poem, but most of us don't bother to do it, instead we rely on the soundbites and secondary sources. And there is so much value in actually going and reading the original source because you're going to find ideas in that original source that no one else is seen because they're too busy looking at sound bites or looking at second end interpretations of what's happening.

ELISE: That was also fascinating, the chapter about how inexpert or kind of pathetic we all are at predicting the future, but particularly experts, right? And particularly pundits.

OZAN: Yeah.

ELISE: Who are called on to predict the future are the least accurate.

OZAN: Yeah. Philip Tetlock, who's a University of Pennsylvania professor, has this study, I think he begins in like 1980 and goes for about 20 years and collects tens of thousands of expert predictions to just see if experts perform how they perform. And, as you're saying, it turns out that experts do a really terrible job. They fail to beat a simple algorithm that assumes that what happened last year will happen again this year. Like a simple algorithm that assumes that if the GDP grew 1% last year, the same growth rate will happen this year and experts failed to beat that and the experts, as you said, the pundits, that had media claimed that they were the type of people you see on talk shows and the talking heads, they tended to perform worse. It didn't matter if people had an advanced degree, it didn't matter how much experience they had. The primary indicator that actually made a difference was media claim, and it was a negative one. So the more media appearances you made, the less accurate your predictions were. They're just, you know, really ironic because those are the people that the public is getting their information from. And if you think about it, you can kind of see why that might be the case, because a lot of the experts that appear on TV are paid, are asked to make these really confident declarations about what's going to happen with the economy or what's going to happen politically or what's going to happen with Covid. And the more confident they are, the less nuance there is and what they're saying. And so they're likely to then mislead themselves and in the process mislead the public.

ELISE: Yeah. We don't really like nuance or complexity, that's for sure.

OZAN: It's like why complicate this simple picture that I'm painting, simple but completely wrong.

ELISE: Yeah. And, another anecdote, another story that I loved that sent my head spinning was about war planes and where to apply extra protection. Can you tell that story? Because I think it's a good type of head scratcher, in the sense that I was wrong, essentially.

OZAN: Sure, yeah. It's a story about Abraham Wald who is a mathematician and during World War II he is asked to solve this problem, and the problem is, the people at the Air Force wanted to add more armor to these war planes, and the question was, where should the extra armor go. And the planes that like returned back from combat, when they examined the plane, most of the bullet holes were in the fuselage, and so when you know, you look at that, I think most people, including myself, would assume that the extra armor should go where the bullet holes. Should go on the fuselage. But Walt says, no, no, no, no, no. We need to do the opposite. We need to put the armor on the engine where we're not seeing any bullet holes. And people are like, why would you do that? And he said, look, we're only looking at the survivors. We're only looking at the planes that took bullets into their fuselage and returned. We're not seeing the planes that crashed and burned and they crashed and burned because they took bullets in a place that were not seeing any bullet holes in the surviving planes, which is in the engine.

So he decides to put the extra armor onto the engine, and that strategy ends up being extremely successful in World War II, and it has a lot of ethical implications for how we live our lives. Now a lot of what people call the best practice involves putting armor in sort of the most visible bullet holes, where the most visible bullet holes appear. But you're not seeing the planes that that crashed and burned. So there is a survivorship bias of like you're seeing only the person who adopted this, you know, latest fad diet and lost weight, but you're not seeing that the people who tried it and didn't work for them or if you're thinking about buying an online course, you're seeing all of these incredible testimonials that paint this like really clean, simple picture of how this online course is going to change your life. But you're not seeing the failures, you're not seeing the planes that crashed and burned. You're not seeing the students who took the course asked for a refund, or you're not seeing the students who took the course and didn't benefit from it.

Same thing with going to college. Like there's so many famous entrepreneurial stories of people who dropped outta college and then paved their own path in life and ended up being really successful. But then there were also stories of people who dropped outta college when they shouldn't have, when staying in college would've been a much better option for them. And so that's another way in which the noise around this misleads us. Because often I ask myself this, am I falling victim to the survivorship bias? Like am I about to put armor in the most obvious place where the bullet holes are? Where are the failures here? Where are the planes that that crashed and burned that didn't make it back?

ELISE: Yeah. I would add too that so many of those stories that we hear about college dropouts are white, privileged, very wealthy kids with family connections and resources. It's not a fair fight, but I think that's such great advice because particularly when people are trying to reverse engineer, anything successful in the market. They think that whether it's a business, a startup, a movie, one, you're sort of replicating something without recombining it, but two, you miss the lessons. It's hard to just take that and assume that that's a course that works, that checklist translates, right? There's so many other mystical and magical factors involved in all of it. So you really can’t start there. When people who are, and we talked about this a little bit at the beginning, but for people who are ready to open themselves up, do you corral or start with an idea, or do you really try to stay completely open? Like where do you coach people to start?

OZAN: Start in terms of creativity?

ELISE: Yeah.

OZAN: I think it really depends. I do a little bit of both. Sometimes it is just a blank page where I'm sitting, I have a chair right here, where I sit and write stuff down. And sometimes I've got absolutely no agenda, you know, this is like Julia Cameron's morning pages where you're just sitting down and you're just, there's no agenda, you’re just pre-writing or writing down whatever's coming up, there's a lot of value to that, but sometimes there's also value to going in with a specific idea, or going in with a specific question. And I'll do this in a number of different ways. One of the things I do, which I haven't really talked about publicly, is I journal about my dreams. My dreams have gotten really vivid over the past, like, I would say two years. And the more I journal about them, the more vivid they get.

So sometimes before I go to bed, I will ask my subconscious a question, it might be, what should I title my book, or what should I write about next? And then I will literally sleep on it, then I'll have dreams, and sometimes there won't be an answer, but sometimes an answer will come in the form of a symbol in a dream, or in the form of a story that I see while I'm sleeping. Or sometimes I'll just like wake up with no dreams, but a fully formed idea about what might come next. I find that practice really helpful of like going in with a specific question before you go to bed and just asking your subconscious to work on it overnight and then see what emerges in the morning and then journaling about it. Journaling about it before you pick up your phone and start polluting your mind. That's really, really important I think, because when you wake up in the morning, you're feeling, at least most days you're feeling relatively refreshed. And your subconscious is relatively clear. And before you open the news or social media and start to basically pick up all of these energies that don't belong to you, writing down what you're thinking, what you're feeling, what kept you up at night, what thoughts emerged, ends up being extremely valuable. And there's so many chapters in the book that honestly had their inceptions in a dream for me.

ELISE: It's interesting. I remember, I think it was in Homeland Elegy, which is a novel, but it reads more like non-fiction. And he talks about sleeping with a pen taped his hand because then he would write his dreams sort of before waking. And you do have to, like they say, don't move, keep your body in the same position. You have to like do the minimal amount of movement when you record your dreams before it evaporates. It's a hard, it's a hard practice. So I know you've had myriad careers, all fascinating, which suggests a sort of resiliency or flexibility, which I think is an interesting model for a lot of people, but have you failed and how, what's your advice for people who feel like they're getting nowhere?

OZAN: Yeah, I've failed a lot. I think a number of things, number one, I don't love this message that we're particularly, I think Silicon Valley is sending this message of like fail fast, fail often, fail forward. And there's this culture that's emerging in, particularly in Silicon Valley, but other places as well of like, I do a lot of keynotes for businesses and I'll see these in like now company mission or vision statements of like, we celebrate failure. And I look at that, I'm like, I don't buy it. I don't buy it, whoever says they celebrate failure, is probably lying to you. I've failed so many times in my life and there wasn't a single failure that I celebrated. There's always a grieving process and I think when we try to push this agenda of like, we're going to celebrate failure, you’re denying people their humanity, because failures suck. And if you skip over the grieving process, if you skip over the loss of what you expected to to happen, the loss of what was once was, I think you lose your humanity in the process. But moreover, you also don't learn anything from it.

So I think for me, celebration of failure, is a mistake. Learning from failure is not, and that's how I approach the failures I've had in my life, which is to say, okay, like, I'll give you an example, the first one that popped to mind. So I graduated from law school and I clerked for a judge on the US Court of Appeals for the ninth Circuit, and one of the most prestigious things you can do after law school graduation is to clerk on the United States Supreme Court. So each of the nine justices gets four clerks. And so these are like the 36 best legal minds in the country who have recently graduated. And getting a Supreme Court clerkship opens basically every single door for you. Like you can do whatever you want in the legal world once you have a Supreme Court clerkship.

So I had an interview with one of the justices, which was in and of itself a breathtaking experience to sit down and have a 40 minute conversation with this brilliant legal mind and trade ideas with them and most of the interviews that I've had in my life, I walked out thinking, you know, that didn't go as well as I hoped it would. I wish I had given a different answer to this question, or I wish I would've like, tweaked this thing differently or said it differently. I walked out of this interview thinking like I nailed it. That was so good. I wouldn't have done anything differently and I walked out of it assuming that I was going to get the job. I had no doubt in my mind, and you can probably see where the story story is going. I did not get the job and I was crushed. But I cried but I didn't look back on that. I'm like, oh, I'm gonna celebrate this thing. I really wanted this job. I really wanted this opportunity to clerk on the United States Supreme Court, and I didn't get it, and it sucked. And there was a lot of value in grieving for the loss of what could have been in grieving  for what I wanted and didn't.

And once the grieving is over, then I could look back on it. And one of the, I think one of the most important insights that came to me from that failure was that like two people don't have the same perspective, like otherwise, obviously the Supreme Court Justice had a very different perspective on this interview than I did. And also just remembering that there's just so many factors outside of your control whenever you walk into an interview that have nothing to do with your own capabilities too. And so keeping that in mind as well. But I got some important lessonsfrom it, but I don't think I could have learned anything from it if I skip the, the grieving process, which I think is really important

ELISE: I agree. I'm excited for this book to come into the world and I think it's interesting whether you're at the beginning of a creative process or in the middle, or curious or just, I mean, you don't even have to be curious about creativity, it is an interesting read. I'll put it like that. There's a lot of interesting stuff in that book, so congratulations!

OZAN: Thank you so much. That means a lot.

ELISE: As mentioned, Ozan’s book is full of fun anecdotes. Near the end, he talks about how paralyzing it can be to see other peoples creations and feel like we will never measure up. (I write about this at length in my chapter on Envy in On Our Best Behavior.) But I loved this quote, he writes: “I once came across this post from the best selling novelist, Taffy Brodesser-Akner: ‘I just read a book that’s so good, I can’t get out of bed. Did great books make me feel this terrible before I started writing novels? Is writing a competitive sport?’” That made me laugh, not only because Taffy is really funny and delightful, but as he reminds us in his text, this is how we all feel about each other’s work. We all feel like we will never measure up and comparison is a crime against our own creativity. So, it’s not that you need to put on blinders, but you just need to recognize that there’s always room for more great works, there’s always room for more great movies, and you’ll likely find an audience for anything you create. It might not be the biggest audience, but that’s also in some ways overrated, which he writes about as well. Alright, I’ll see you next week.