The Unmistakable Creative Podcast

Life of Purpose: Ozan Varol | Think Like a Rocket Scientist

Join us for our Life of Purpose series this month as we revisit some of our most impactful episodes. Dive deep into expert insights and practical strategies on health, performance, and community, helping you achieve personal and professional fulfillment.

When Ozan Varol was just 17, he moved from his home in Istanbul to the United States to study Astrophysics at Cornell University. When he got there, he sent his resume to a professor and was invited to work on the operations team for the 2003 Mars Exploration Rovers project that sent 2 rovers to Mars. Ozan is now a law professor and teaches others how to make giant leaps on Earth. Listen in to gain actionable insight on how to think like a rocket scientist.

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Duration:: 1h 7m
Broadcast on:: 04 Jul 2024
Audio Format:: mp3

As you probably noticed this month, we're bringing you our "Life of Purpose" series and revisiting some of our most transformative episodes, tune in to explore expert insights and practical strategies on help, performance, and community well-being, all aimed at helping you achieve personal and professional fulfillment. If you sign up for the newsletter, you'll not only get recaps of the key ideas in each interview, but at the end of the series, you'll receive our free "Life of Purpose" ebook. What you have to do is go to unmistakablecreative.com/lifepurpose, again, that's unmistakable creative.com/lifepurpose. So we tend to assume part of our fear of uncertainty comes from this assumption that the decisions we're making are one-way doors. In other words, the door opens one way. You enter into this new room that you haven't been in before, and you close it, and there is no getting out. So if you take a new job, if you move to a new city, if you give a shot at being an entrepreneur and things don't work out as you hoped, you assume that you're stuck. But that assumption, in many cases, is incorrect, because a lot of the doors we're navigating in our lives come with two-way doors. So you can go in, you can have a look, and if you don't like what you see, you can walk back out. And the example I give in the book is from Richard Branson and his launch of Virgin Atlantic. Launching an airline is an extremely risky and very expensive bat, and it looks like a one-way door at first glance, but Branson took what looked like a one-way door and changed it to a two-way door by negotiating this deal with Boeing that allowed him to return the first airplane he bought if his airline didn't take off. So I think as people are one way to get a little bit more comfortable with uncertainty is, when you are facing one of these major life decisions, just ask yourself, is this a one-way door or a two-way door? And if it looks like a one-way door, ask if your interpretation is correct, because often we're so conditioned into believing that these rooms only come with one-way doors that sometimes a one-way door is just masquerading. It's not, it's not really, it's actually a two-way door in reality. I'm Srini Rao, and this is the Unmistakable Creative Podcast, where you get a window into the stories and insights of the most innovative and creative minds who've started movements, built driving businesses, written best-selling books, and created insanely interesting art. For more, check out our 500 episode archive at unmistakablecreative.com. I was on, welcome to the Unmistakable Creative, thanks so much for taking the time to join us. I'm delighted to be here. Thank you for having me on. Yeah, it is my pleasure to have you here. So I actually found out about your work through way of both the fact that you and I have had a conversation where I've been a guest on your podcast, but you recently wrote a book called Think Like A Rocket Scientist, and I had no idea that this was your background. So on that note, I want to start by asking you, what was the advice that your parents gave you about careers or making your way in the world when you were growing up? So the one piece of advice that comes to mind, which I took to heart and which I still apply to this day, it was something that my dad would tell me, which is you can't win the lottery without buying a ticket. And so I grew up in Istanbul and lived there until I was 17 and then came to the United States to study astrophysics and grew up in a family of no English speakers. But my parents, even though they didn't speak any English, they'd never been to America, they had a firm belief that anything you can dream is within reach. If you have the will, the determination to try it. And so my dad would always sort of reinforce that point growing up, can't win the lottery without buying a ticket. And so, you know, the one example, which eventually led to me writing the book, you mentioned things like a rocket scientist is where I took my dad's advice. I was a senior in high school in Turkey and I just got accepted to Cornell to study astrophysics. And shortly before I arrived there, I researched what the astronomy department was up to. And I learned that an astronomy professor, his name is Steve Squires, was in charge of a NASA funded project to send the rover to Mars. He had also worked on the Carl Sagan as a graduate student. And Carl Sagan was a hero of mine growing up. I'd seen the original Cosmo series. So this was too good to be true. And there was no job posting, but so I was intimidated, but I emailed him, just keeping my dad's advice in mind and said, hey, you know, here's my resume. I'd love to work for you. I had the lowest of expectations. But keeping that advice in mind, I just reached out to him and marched to my surprise. He invited me for an interview and it eventually offered me the job on the operations team for what would become the 2003 Mars exploration rovers project. So one of the quotes that immediately caught my attention when you opened the book was that you said conformity in the educational system saved us from our worst tendencies, those pesky individualistic ambitions to dream big and devise interesting solutions to complex problems. The students who got ahead weren't the contrarians, the creative trailblazers, rather you got ahead by pleasing authority figures, fostering the type of subservience that would serve you well in the industrial workforce. Now, I wondered about that quote, particularly in the context of being educated in a country like Turkey and having Turkish parents, because, you know, you said your dad said, you know, you can't win the lottery without buying a ticket. Now, let's say that you didn't want to be a rocket scientist and you told him, you want dad, I want to go be an artist, but we think you would have had the same message because I think in immigrant cultures, there's this tendency to seek out security partially because of the fact that, I mean, I understood my parents logic when I finally figured out that context plays a big role in all of that. Totally. And I do think my parents, and this is much their credit, they were unlike many parents in the culture that I grew up in, and that I think they would have supported me, even if I decided to become an artist or a soccer player or a musician, but that is so rare. And it's in part for the reason you mentioned, which is, you know, we're, and to a lesser extent in the United States, but it's certainly true here as well. We're living in very conformist cultures, and the career paths tend to be predetermined. And so in Turkey, it was like, you know, we either became a doctor or a lawyer or an engineer, and that was it. I like those are the three options you had. I could relate. And, but my parents were very adamant about just saying, look, you have to follow your own path. And so even, so there was a big disconnect between the education system that I was operating in, and then I come home and be in this environment where my parents were basically telling me to be a non-conformist, to embrace my autonomy, and to sketch out my life path for myself, regardless of what I was being inculcated within in school. Well, the other thing that I wonder is, you know, you went to a place like Cornell. I went to Berkeley. These are schools that in a lot of ways embody what you have just said here, because basically at least, you know, when I went to college, it was very clear, there was certain set of criteria that you had to meet, and, you know, if you didn't, you wouldn't get in. My sister and I were very clear on the fact that we probably wouldn't have gotten to Berkeley with the grades we have now. And I, you know, I think that what happened to me was that the options in front of me blinded me to the possibilities that surrounded me. And so I wonder, you know, particularly because you chose to go to school like Cornell, like what, how do you want to do that, particularly in a system where it's so indoctrinated, and the funny thing is the society in many ways rewards you for this conformity with a education at an Ivy League school, a prestigious job at Goldman Sachs. So how do you navigate those two contradictions? Yeah, that's a great question. And I think, so for me, going to Cornell, getting to really any college in the United States was a way of escaping the conformist culture that I was operating in Turkey. Like I said, my home environment was very safe for nonconformity, but the education system was not. I give an example in the book, like our teachers would, in elementary school, each student got assigned a number, and our teachers would call us by that number, as opposed to our name. I mean, talk about sort of robbing, like, the individuality of each student. So my name wasn't Ozann, it was like 154. And to this day, by the way, my number is my ATM pin code, change your change your pin code alerts frequently be damned, I still kept it. So for me, coming to the United States was very much, you know, I had to sort of reach escape velocity and get out of that conformist culture because I just wasn't suited for it. I wasn't happy in the ambitious system in Turkey. And so coming here was a big win for me in so many different ways in getting into Cornell and getting to work on this Mars mission. So why do you think more people are not as, you know, daring as you are, you know, to say, okay, I don't even know if there's a job here, but here's what I want to do, all come and do, you know, whatever it is, because I look, like I said, I looked back at college and it was the biggest mistake I made. This is fresh on my mind partially because I'm about to talk to a group of students at Babson, who are all seniors, right after we get done. And you know, like the thought is that, wow, you've been so conditioned to choose from the very things that have been put in front of you that you think that this system works exactly the way that it's defined by other people. So you think, okay, my way to find a job is to go to LinkedIn or whatever it is. I can only apply to the jobs that are on job boards. Why is like, why are more people not like you and how do we begin to create more people like you? They're taught to not question assumptions. So we're handling things, especially in the education system, right? There is one right curriculum, one right way to interpret history, one right way to get an A. There are in multiple interpretations, multiple ways of looking at things. You know, in math and science classes, for example, the problems are just handed to you. You can't question the problems, you can't reframe the problems, you can't redefine them, which is wildly disconnected from reality, by the way, as you know, like in real life, you have to find problems yourself and redefine them and reframe them. And so I think our education system and in some respects also well-intentioned parents get in the way of questioning assumptions, as you said, of shaking sort of settled expectations in terms of what a typical career path should be like. And so I was fortunate enough to grow up in a family where I was indoctrinated with this belief that I could basically do anything I wanted and I wasn't necessarily stuck with the assumptions and the routines and the processes and the habits that were handed to me. And I carried with that. I mean, even when I got to Cornell, I, you know, the idea of like picking a major and sticking with that rubbed me the wrong way. So there was this program at Cornell where you could apply, it's called college scholar to free yourself from all degree requirements, except you needed 120 credits, I'm sorry, to graduate, but you could take any classes you wanted. So you got to make up your own major and I was like, yeah, I want to end. I mean, that was, and you had, you know, like that was a path for me, which ended up getting into this program where I designed my own major. And so, so I think it starts very young and once that conditioning kicks in and is reinforced by parents, by teachers, by the education system, it becomes really hard to do the sort of thing that you're talking about to begin questioning assumptions to adopt first principles thinking. And so, and the remedy isn't easy. I mean, you, you have to switch your entire mode of conditioning in an, in a, to a place where like you're questioning everything and questioning everything is really inefficient, right? You can't go through life questioning everything you do, like you take to work and like I routinely copy other people's choices in, in areas where I don't like, I just don't care, like fashion and music and interior design, like things I don't care about, but in areas of my life where change matters and creativity matters, I've just made a habit since I was very young of like, just very deliberately asking, why am I doing what I'm doing? Like, why am I going to LinkedIn to find a job? Why am I? And usually the answer, by the way, is because everybody else is doing it. And if, if that's the answer, that's, that's, that's the sign there that you are not adopting first principles thinking. You're simply doing things because other people are doing it. So you need to be very deliberate about de-conditioning yourself from that, from that mode of operation that's just been so heavily reinforced. Hey, I'm Ryan Reynolds. At Mint Mobile, we like to do the opposite of what Big Wireless does. They charge you a lot, we charge you a little. So naturally, when they announced they'd be raising their prices due to inflation, we decided to deflate our prices due to not hating you. That's right. We're cutting the price of Mint Unlimited from $30 a month to just $15 a month. Give it a try at mintmobile.com/switch. $45 up front for three months plus taxes and fees promoting for new customers for limited time unlimited more than 40 gigabytes per month slows, full turns at Mint Mobile.com. They say opposites attract. That's why the sleep number smart bed is the best bed for couples. You want a bed that feels firm, but they want soft? Sleep number does that. You want to sleep cooler while they like to feel warm? Sleep number does that too. JD Power ranked sleep number number one in customer satisfaction with mattresses purchased in store and now sleep number smart beds start at $999 prices higher in Alaska and Hawaii. For JD Power 2023 award information, visit jdpower.com/awards only at a sleep number store or sleep number.com. Yeah, well, it's funny people kind of have asked me like, what is the sort of purpose of the people that you choose and you know, the way that you have these conversations. And I think I told somebody once I feel that my mission in life to some degree is to undo the social programming of people in society and to unplug them from the matrix, you know, you so to speak, I mean, but not through my own work through the exposure to mental models in different ways of thinking. So let's get into the book. I mean, you've kind of alluded to some of the principles here, but I think that the thing that you know, like I said, is most people probably hear this and think, I'll think like a rocket scientist, my roommate was joking with me this morning when he saw the book. He was like, yeah, only a smart person would want to read that or we had to really have this ongoing joke that he's like, you know, that I'm smarter because I went to Berkeley and I was like, you're an idiot because you didn't like, and of course, the funny thing is that literally is some of the cognitive bias that you speak of. So I think I want to start with this whole idea of flying in the face of uncertainty. And we say two things about uncertainty and that is that our obsession with certainty leads as a stray and all progress takes place in uncertain conditions and that our yearning for certainty leads us to pursue seemingly safe solutions by looking for dark keys under street lamps. Instead of taking the risky walk into the dark, we stay in our current state. However, inferior it might be. And you know, I see this over and over. You know, I think that one of the things I'd always said, particularly that online courses and why I think unmistakable stood out was because when I took an online course, the number one thing I did in that blog mastermind course was I didn't follow the instructions to the letter. That made all the difference. So with that in mind, talk to us about how we navigate this dynamic of, you know, seeking certainty while also knowing that progress takes place only in uncertain conditions. Sure. And the story you alluded to there with respect to looking for our street keys under street lamps instead of in the in the dark, it's the story, the classic story of the drunk who's looking for his keys under the street lamp, because that's where the light is, even though he lost his keys in some dark corner of the street with the dark is super risky. And that's a metaphor for how most of us live our lives. This is true for the individuals and for businesses as well. You know, market is used the same bag of tricks over and over again, because changing means introducing uncertainty. Pharma companies offered drugs that are only a marginal improvement over what's on the market as opposed to the one that's going to cure Alzheimer's disease. You know, movie studios launched a 17 sequel to Fast and Furious because, you know, betting on a new idea is too risky. So we keep looking at the rear view mirror and doing what we did yesterday. And that's in large part due to a fear of uncertainty, because anytime you're exploring unknown territory, the same questions keep popping up. What if this doesn't work? What if this fails? What if people point and laugh and instead of finding out the answers for sure, we stay within our current state, however, inferior it might be to to other possibilities. And so, so as you said, so you need all progress takes place under uncertain conditions. So if you look at, you know, scientific history, almost any discovery, any major breakthrough you can think of, there is first chaos and immense uncertainty. And then the breakthrough comes when the scientists embrace the uncertainty as opposed to rejecting it. So I offer a couple of strategies that people can use to navigate this, this dynamic, but one is the difference between one way doors and two way doors. So we tend to assume part of our fear of uncertainty comes from this assumption that the decisions we're making are one way doors. In other words, you, the door opens one way, you enter into this new room that you haven't been in before, and you close it and there is no getting out, right? So if you take a new job, if you move to a new city, if you, you know, give a shot at being an entrepreneur and things don't work out as you hoped, you assume that you're stuck. But that assumption in many cases is incorrect because a lot of the doors we're navigating in our lives come with two way doors. So you can go in, you can have a look, and if you don't like what you see, you can walk back out. And the example I give in the book is from Richard Ranson and his launch of Virgin Atlantic, launching an airline is an extremely risky and very expensive bat, and it looks like a one way door at first glance, but Ranson took what looked like a one way door and changed it to a two way door by negotiating this deal with Boeing that allowed him to return the first airplane he bought if his airline didn't take off. So I think, you know, as people are one way to get a little bit more comfortable with uncertainty is when you are facing one of these sort of major life decisions, just ask yourself, is this a one way door or a two way door? And if it looks like a one way door, ask if your interpretation is correct because often we're so conditioned into believing that these rooms only come with one way doors that sometimes a one way door is just masquerading. It's not, it's not really, it's actually a two way door reality. So we know a lot of you have been listening to us for years, and it means the world to us. What we do here at the unmistakable creative wouldn't be possible without the support of our listeners. If the podcast has been valuable to you, one of the best ways you can support us is to subscribe to unmistakable creative prime, which gives you access to transcripts, all of our courses, monthly coaching calls, live chats with our guests in an incredible community of creatives, and it costs less than you spend on a cup of coffee every month. For the school teachers and people in our education system, prime is completely free to help you with this transition to teaching online. We've packed it with a ton of value and actionable content, and we hope you'll check it out. Just go to unmistakablecreative.com/prime to learn more. Again, that's unmistakablecreative.com/prime. Well, I might have shared this story before on the show, so forgive me if I have for those you listening. But I had a friend at Berkeley when we were in college, and he didn't get into the business school at Haas. And so what he did was he took all of the classes, literally, up until the day, weeks before graduation, and then he walked into the dean's office and said, "Look, I've taken every class for the degree." And she's like, "Wait a minute. You didn't get into Haas?" And she said, "He said no." And she was livid. And he said, "My parents are going to be here Saturday, so can I walk?" They had no choice but to grant them the degree. And it was one of those moments where I thought, "Wow, this is a system that has rules that appear to be set in stone, but it's all an illusion." Right, exactly. And the rules around us are created by people who are no smarter than us. They just happen to be the rules, and they often exist in response to, they were created in response to problems that no longer exist, but we're so conditioned into believing that the rules can't be bent, they can't be questioned, that those people, like your friend, who have figured out a way around it, get ahead in life because of that quality. Mm-hmm. Yeah. And speaking of which, let's talk about this whole idea of reasoning for first principles, because I really loved the Elon Musk story. So I think that that may be a perfect place for you to kind of give as an example of what it means to think by reasoning from first principles. Sure. So Elon Musk, when he was thinking about starting SpaceX with the audacious goal of sending people to Mars, first he needed a rocket, so he started shopping for rockets on the American market. Now, sticker shock isn't in the vocabulary of most Silicon Valley entrepreneurs, but that's what he experienced when he looked for rockets to buy. I think one rocket would have set him back like $65 or $70 million, and he would have needed two, and then, of course, he'd have to pay for the payload and the people and everything else. So that was too expensive. He then went to Russia to shop for decommissioned, intercontinental ballistic missiles. I could do not. Right. Without the nuclear warheads on top, of course. And that also was too expensive. And so on one of his trips back from Russia, he had an epiphany. And he arrived at that epiphany using this principle from physics called first principles thinking. And so at bottom, first principles is a way of questioning all assumptions in a system until you're left with the fundamental non-negotiable components. So you hack through assumptions as if you're hacking through a jungle with a machete, until you're left with those raw materials. And so you go from, and the metaphor I use in the book is you go from being a cover band that's seeing somebody else's songs to being, and should I say, unmistakable artist, an original artist that does the painstaking work of actually creating something new. And so Elon Musk realized that as he was trying to buy rockets that other people had built, he was playing the role of a cover band. And so he went back to first principles and asked himself, you know, what's actually, what are the raw materials of a rocket? What's needed from a physics perspective to put a rocket into space? And when he looked at the raw materials, if you bought those raw materials on the market, it was like 2% of the typical price of a rocket that he would have bought from somebody else, which is a crazy ratio. So instead of buying rockets that other people had built, he decided to build those rockets from scratch. So if you walk through SpaceX's factories today, you'll find people, you know, welding titanium, building and flight computers. And another way he used first principles thinking, and this is true for Jeff Bezos as well with blue origin, but one of the fundamental deeply held assumptions in rocket science was that was a rockets that went into outer space, couldn't be reused. So they would plunge back into the ocean or burn up in the atmosphere. And imagine doing that for a moment for commercial flights. Like you fly from, I don't know, Portland to say, yeah, you step off the plane. And then someone walks up to the plane and just torches it, which is what we were doing for rockets for decades, and you know, Boeing 737 is actually not that, not that much less expensive than a rocket, but commercial flights are so much cheaper because airplanes can be reused over and over again. And so one of the things that both SpaceX and Blue Origin have done is to question that assumption and build these rocket stages that can be reused, refurbished and sent back into space like certified pre-owned vehicles. So there's one thing that you said, and I want to go through this in terms of a practical example that I was trying to think of this for myself, but you know, you say the same qualities that make knowledge a virtue can also turn it into a vice, knowledge shapes, knowledge informs, it creates frameworks, labels, categories, and lenses through which we view the world. One of the things that came to my mind as I was reading this is that I've been off of Facebook for probably 25, 26 days now, and I've realized that my thinking and my thought process is more original and unique sounding than it's ever been, and what I realized is that, you know, the amount of cognitive bias that gets infused in you when you use social media, which we'll talk about because I know you go into all of that really kind of strips you of your originality because you're basically drowning in the sounds of other people's voices. So with that in mind, let's say that we were to take something like a podcast or something like a blog and we approach it from the whole idea of first principles, like what questions, what assumption should I be questioning? That's a great question. So with respect to say a blog, I think if you, if the initial approach is to go online and say, okay, I'm thinking about starting a blog, let me see what other people have done. Yeah. And so that's, I think what most people do, and so I think the example here of questioning assumptions in the blog world will come from Tim Urban, who I interviewed on my podcast. And so when he was thinking about starting, wait, by why, he went online and looked and the standard advice was, you know, you send something to your email list every week. It should be short because people have limited attention spans and it shouldn't be too detailed. It shouldn't have any stick figures. It should just be text. So that was the standard advice. So someone looking for, or going on a quest for external answers, that would have been the advice they found online. And Tim basically did the opposite on all of that. And so he looked at that advice and now his blog, wait, by why, is wildly popular. And his blog posts are book length. I mean, they are tens of thousands of words and he sends them infrequently. He basically violated every rule in the blog publishing playbook. And because of that, he stood out from the crowd because the center is too crowded. So if you're simply doing what other people are doing, you're all reaching for, you know, the low hanging fruit, but the low hanging fruit has already been picked. And so his approach was to basically do the opposite of what other people are doing. And so to go back to your question about, you know, how do you approach that? I think it's perhaps it doesn't hurt to know what other people are doing, but being very cognizant about not copying them. And in some cases, actually affirmatively asking like, what if I did the reverse? What if I took what other people are doing and did the exact opposite and you don't have to execute? But the simple process of like thinking through the reverse is actually one way of getting yourself to question assumptions and to exercise those first principles, muscles that have probably atrophied because of this use in decades of conditioning by society. It's funny because people, we've made very clear on our homepage that by the way, your, you know, fame or lack thereof has nothing to do with how we pick our guests. You know, we've said people, no to people that literally anybody listening to this has heard of and probably a thousand people would say yes to and I think that has served us really well. You know, that's why I jokingly say that my first book, Unmistakable, could have also been just called everybody is full of shit. But I don't think Penguin would want to publish that because, you know, and even with the mastermind group that I'm working with, I've told them, I said, look, one thing I need you to consider is that my advice is based on my cognitive biases, you know, especially because many of them have children. And I say, look, I'm giving you advice based on my life and you need to learn how to adapt it to yours. This is why I always joke that I think the next Tim Ferriss experiment should be somebody should drop their kids off at his house for a week and see how his productivity goes. That's a great idea. And then we would see how effective Tim Ferriss really is as a human is he as superhuman as he appears to be. But I love the example you gave from your podcast or any. And one of the things that also struck me is like, you know, I'm with the book coming out. Now I'm doing a lot of these podcast interviews and many of them, I get questions that advance from the host and you very deliberately don't script your interview. Your assistant asked me and I emailed her back and said, yeah, I'm sorry, I'm not going to do that. And you know, every now and then somebody will ask and I'll say, I've had people try to send me questions when I said, hey, I haven't read your book. I'd really like, Oh, I have a list of questions you could ask. And I was like, yeah, I'm not going to ask those questions. So why don't you just let me reschedule and read the book? Because what is the point to me asking you a bunch of questions that I could get the answers you from reading the damn book? Yep, absolutely. And so, and so that's one way of like, okay, taking someone taking something that everybody else is doing and then questioning it and that's one of the reasons why your podcast is so successful. Well, you know what? The other thing is that when I was thinking about this is what assumptions are we making about the format? And I was like, Oh, well, we've done animated shorts who says that we can't repurpose everything that we're doing into multiple formats, which we're already looking at, you know, different, you know, show ideas and all sorts of stuff based on that. So yep. And it's just like, yeah, just one more example before we move on, since you mentioned question in the format, I think one of the great recent examples of this is Malcolm Gladwell's audio book for talking to strangers. It really questions the format in so many different ways. You know, the standard audio book is the author gets up and reads the whole thing from cover to cover, but he actually included audio clips from interviews that he had recorded as part of this, as part of the book writing process. So the audio book has this like podcast feel to it in some respects. And so that's one great example that I would encourage people to check out. Well, I think that, you know, to really sum this up, I loved this quote because it kind of flies in the face of so much of what we think is, you know, right when it comes to this, you set to cut is to make hold to subtract is to add to constrain is to liberate. Expand on that briefly. And then we'll get to the next section. Sure. So that appears in a section of the book on, on Occam's razor and Occam's razor is a, is a mental bottle named after this, I think he's a 19th century philosopher, William Occam. And the idea is basically that the solution to a complex problem is often the simplest one. And so our temptation when we're building something is to add and to add an ad, right? Where can I find more? Why can I add more features? How do I create more benefits? But the mental model suggests that you can actually find originality easier by cutting as opposed to adding. And so one of the examples I give in the book is from from millennia, which is the three star Michelin restaurant in Chicago. That's one basically every award known to man for for restaurants. And when they first started their business, they were asking, you know, the typical question of like, how do we add? How do we add? How do we make this dish? You know, what other vegetable can we add here? But over time, they realize that they that approach is flawed. So now they're asking, looking at what they have in front of them and asking, what can we take away? Michelangelo approached sculpting the same way. There was a famous quote from him where he says, the sculptor arrives at his hand by taking away what is superfluous. And so this is one way of getting to first principles as well. So looking at what you have in front of you and asking, what can I remove? So yeah, go ahead. Wow. You just gave me an idea. I'm not going to share that right now. I want to, you know, let it just a for a bit. But it reminds me of a story I had a friend who worked at Oracle who was an MIT graduate. And he was this was when, you know, before it was easy to stream things in the living room, like, you know, early 2000s where, you know, so I came over one day. I said, what are you doing? He said, well, he said I'm he was working on RFID. So he said, I'm trying to build a remote to basically take the videos that are on my computer and project them on the TV. And, you know, I looked at him and I said, well, I said, why don't you just use a wireless mouse? And he said, yeah, I guess I could do that, huh? That was what it reminded me of when you said that. Yeah. And that story actually reminds me of another story from the book, which is about this legend. It's not actually true. But I think it illustrates the point you just made that NASA spent a decade and millions of dollars developing a ballpoint pen that were working zero gravity and function in extreme temperatures. The Soviets use a pencil. Wow. So that, that story is actually a myth, but, but the moral still holds, you know, everything should be made as simple as possible. All right. So let's talk about this whole idea of mind at play. I mean, you, there's a subject here that is of deep personal interest to me. You know, you say we discourage curiosity also because it requires admission of ignorance, asking questions or posing a thought experiment means that we don't know the answer. And that's an admission that few of us are willing to make for the fear of standing stupid. We assume most questions are too basic to ask so we don't ask them. And you know, to actually start writing this blog post on curiosity, I talked about the fact that it turns out that I don't know if this was, you know, your case, but I feel like every male I have ever talked to has gone through a phase when they were kids where they have a fascination with fire, like a mini arsonist phase. And I remember because my, you know, one of my friends came over and he wasn't allowed to spend the night anymore. And his mom told him that I would become an arsonist when I grew up, the more I talked to male friends. And you know, I think this is primarily because I was genuinely curious about the impact that fire would have on things, like it wasn't burning houses. It was like Gia Joe guys and you know, he all fudge cookies. Right. So explain this to me. Like what is it about the, I know the education system plays a role in stifling our curiosity, but I see it all around me. People stop asking questions. Yeah, I think, you know, asking questions and especially uttering those three dreaded words, I don't know, requires an admission of ignorance and that's an admission that most people aren't willing to make in part because they'll come across, I think they assume that they'll come across as stupid, right? Like they shouldn't be, they should be no, they should know something that the other person is talking about, but they don't and that makes them somehow less than. I think that's, that's a large part of it. The other part I think you mentioned is, is both education system and well intentioned parents sort of, you know, because as children, we're just natural curious observers, whether it's playing with fire or playing with nature, you sort of approach the whole world as your own playground where anything is possible, but then curiosity over time gets replaced with answers, the right answer, the life hacks, the silver bullets, what have you. And I think it's also because answers, questions aren't really valued in the business world either. And the answers are far more valuable because all they point a way out, whereas a question is just the beginning of the inquiry, not the end. And people look at that and say, well, it's, you know, it's too much work. Let me just go online and see what other people have done. And then I can find some answers that I can copy from my own. Hey, I'm Ryan Reynolds. At Mint Mobile, we like to do the opposite of what Big Wireless does. They charge you a lot. We charge you a little. So naturally, when they announce they'd be raising their prices due to inflation, we decided to deflate our prices due to not hating you. That's right. We're cutting the price of Mint Unlimited from $30 a month to just $15 a month. Give it a try at mintmobile.com/switch $45 up front for three months plus taxes and fees promoting for new customers for limited time unlimited more than 40 gigabytes per month slows. 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If you use the code unmistakable at the link incogny.com/unmistakable, you'll get an exclusive 60% off an annual incogny plan. That's a huge saving and a small price to pay for peace of mind. So don't wait. Take control of your personal data within Cogny today. Let's reclaim our peace and put an end to those spam text messages and other data privacy issues once and for all. Well, there's a guy who wrote a book, you know, I'm going to reach out to him and try to have him on the show. About curiosity. It was a very like science based approach. And one of the things he actually said is one of the downsides to having this much information at our fingertips is that it stifles the natural curiosity in which we had to work a lot harder to find answers. So what do you have to say about that? Like, how do we balance those two things? Because, you know, let's face it. I mean, it is incredibly convenient to be able to do that. There are a lot of things where I'm like, okay, I don't need to know this. I just need this one little factor right now. But again, you know, if it's stifling our curiosity, the byproduct of that is we're not asking questions that could lead us to really interesting places potentially. Yeah. And I think there's a balance to be struck there, right? So it's not like answers are not important or that you shouldn't be looking for answers. But you shouldn't just be looking for answers to the exclusion of asking questions. Because answers are often and on top of that, so one strike a balance between finding answers and asking questions. And second is, don't just accept the answers you find. So hang a question mark, you know, to the extent you go online and research something about how to start a blog or podcast to go back to our earlier conversation, instead of taking the answers you find as granted, just hang a question mark at the end. You know, ask yourself, how can I put my own spin on this? So it doesn't mean you just stop looking for answers. You just treat answers like the beginning points and not the end. Yeah. So one other idea that you talk about here is combinatorial play, which I really appreciated. I think that, you know, my version of describing that was creative cross-training. But you said combinatorial play requires exposing yourself to a motley coalition of ideas, seeing the similar and the dissimilar and combining and recombining apples and oranges into a brand new fruit with this approach, the whole becomes more than the sum of its parts. I, you know, we're doing a month inside our private social network about transforming information into wisdom. And the thing that I'm coming across more and more is that, wait a minute, if you're just reading the same self-help books and listening to the same shit all over again, there's no way that information turns into knowledge or wisdom. So what exactly is combinatorial play? Like how do people bring more of this into their lives? Sure. So combinatorial play, the idea goes back to our, the name goes back to Einstein. So he said combinatorial play is the essential feature in, in productive thoughts. And so that requires basically that you don't specialize in just one field. So instead of just looking to what you know, what your industry knows, it requires exposing yourself to ideas from very different places. So not reading the same books that others around you are reading, not listening to the same music that others around you are listening to, not reading the same magazines, not reading, not attending the same conferences. And so adopting ideas from diverse disciplines allows you to be original in a way that many people are not. Because a breakthrough in one field is often a combination of ideas from, from other fields. So the, one of the examples I gave in the book is from Johannes Gutenberg, he had a printing press problem. So he looked to other industries like the olive oil industry or the wine making industry that use a screw press to extract juice. And he took that same idea and applied it to, you know, kickstart the era of mass communication in, in Europe. And that was a, you know, very simple, seemingly simple technology, perhaps obvious in hindsight. But it wasn't obvious to the fields of, of, of communication. And so the borrowing, borrowing of an idea from another field helped him become who he was. And, and the way to, to do this is to again branch out and attend conferences that you would have normally attend or pick up books that, that you know nothing about and surround yourself with people from different professions and backgrounds and interests. It goes back to the point you mentioned, Serene earlier in the conversation about the, you know, the impact of, of social media on our curiosity. I think that's one of the places where it comes into play here as well. Because of algorithms and whatnot, we're only exposed to ideas that interest us, that resonates with us, that sort of, you know, vibrate on the same frequency that we're operating in. And, and then we also like friend people like us. We follow people like us on Twitter. So it becomes this giant echo chamber where we're completely secluded from other ideas which really hampers, hampers, combinatory play. And, yeah, go ahead. It's funny you say that because, you know, I, I'm sure you know who Roger Ailes is. He was the founder of Fox News, you know, you know, by most accounts a despicable human being. You know, I'm not a fan of Roger Ailes. And I remember my brother-in-law saw that I had got Roger Ailes book, You Are The Message along with the other, you know, biography that somebody wrote about him. And he was like, what? And I said, listen, like, I may not agree with a messenger or who he is, but Roger Ailes built Fox News into a massive media brand. There's got to be something I can learn from him. Right. Exactly. And this is something that I tried to teach my students as well. I'm a, my day job is a, is a law professor and I, I tell them like the best lawyers are the ones who know the opposing sides argument better than the opposition does. So if you, if you only read books that, that you resonate with, if you're not reading, you know, Roger Ailes, a book, You Are The Message, then, then you're going to stifle that ability to be able to rebut arguments on the other side. You have to know what those arguments are first. So that's one point. And then the second is you'll benefit from, from knowing how we built Fox News into, into what it is today, even if you don't agree with, with the messenger. And so I think, I think that's, that's really important. And it relates to another idea I talk about the book about another idea that I talk about in the book, which is this, this notion of trying to prove yourself wrong, which is our, our default is trying to prove ourselves right. But to be able to find what's right, to be able to discover new ideas, not only do you have to exercise this, uh, combinatory play muscle, but also expose yourself to ideas that you don't necessarily agree with, because that reading those will make your own ideas better. Yeah. Well, I mean, that's what I noticed, um, part of the, I stopped reading medium because I realized it's like, oh, when I go here, all I'm getting is content similar to what I've written. Right. Um, and I'm like, wow, the algorithm is basically confirming all of the things I already believe in. I'm, I also have stopped discovering people that I find interesting as a result. Uh, I mean, that's the number one thing I look for is, is literally as my primary filter for how I choose people is a, am I curious about this for some reason? Yeah. Uh, there's something about this interest me. So with that in mind, you know, let's, let's get into this whole idea of moonshot thinking, because when I saw this, you know, you said moonshots force you to reason from first principles. If your goal is a 1% improvement, you can work within the status quo, but if your goal is to improve tenfold, the status quo has to go, then you also followed it up with something I thought was really, really observant. You said we need the idealism of divergent thinking to be followed by the pragmatism of convergent thinking, because often I think that moonshots, particularly in the self-help world, seem more like mental masturbation, you know, they're like, oh, I'm dreaming of this like crazy life in which I date the most beautiful people. I have a six pack, I have six pack abs, live in a mansion. And I'm the most enlightened human being on the fucking planet now, that's nonsense. Nobody is like that. Um, you know, this is why a joke is that if I could actually implement the advice of everybody I've ever interviewed, I would be crushing it, but I'm human, right? So how do you take that whole idea of moonshot thinking? Because the other thing I think when I read the word moonshot thinking is, yeah, well, I don't have a Google Plex and I don't have Astro teller. So let's say that I want to imply moonshot thinking to what we're doing here at Unmistake. Well, even if our listeners wanted to apply to one of their projects, how would we do that? Yeah, great question. So, um, to go back to the first thing you asked, because, which is the idea that divergent thinking should be followed by convergent thinking. So divergent thinking is, is this idea of moonshot thinking where you sit down and you think through a question without considering constraints? So you don't worry about what's possible. You don't worry about what's doable given the budget, the resources, the skills, the software, the fill in the blank has, you just let your brain run wild and come up with, with potential answers to whatever you might be struggling with. But that, it, that can't be the end of that, because starry dreamers, as you said, aren't the best, um, people to execute on those ideas, you know, you can dream all day. But if you're not doing anything about it, then, then it's not going to work, of course. So that idealism of divergent thinking has to be followed by the pragmatism of, of convergent thinking, convergent thinking basically brings in constraints into the mix. So now you take your wild dreams and you collide them with reality, um, and, and think through how you can implement what you dreamed about by introducing these, these constraints. So one of the ideas that I talk about in the book is, um, ideas of doing that is, is called backcasting. So you look to this imagined future and then you backward, go backward from it to figure out the steps you need to take to be able to get there. So you know, if you have this again, dream of launching a business, you would sit down and write out every single thing you need to do to be able to get to that end goal. And that has a number of benefits. So one is, it's a reality check. So to the extent that those steps seem too honest or not doable for you, um, maybe this is not the right idea. And it's also a reality trick because sometimes if you list out everything you need to do, you pivot your focus from outcome to process. So you actually look to, like, if you have this idea of, or you want to climb a mountain, or you want to run a marathon, if you look to everything you need to do to get there, it serves as a really sobering reality check, because often we fall in love with the destination and forget about the path required to get there. Like we want to have climbed a mountain, we don't actually want to climb a mountain. And so, so backcasting is a good way of introducing some convergent thinking and, um, pivoting back to process and the concrete steps required to, to achieve that dream. Um, okay. So what role does your own self perception and self belief play in that? Because you may have heard our interviews with Greg Hurdle, um, who, you know, who was an old mentor. And he had a very, very clear way of saying something that, you know, in some ways seem deterministic, but also was realistic. He said, look, the modern age sort of self help new age world that we live in creates these sort of delusional fantasies that anybody can become Elon Musk, which I said, that's not true. He said, you know, because he said it's not inspiring to say Michael Phelps is Michael Phelps because he was born that way or that Oprah became Oprah because she was destined for that. And he said, we're not all created equal. And I remember that it was a harsh reality check, but I think it was still one of our most popular episodes for good reason, because he kept it real. And so when you think about a moonshot, like I think of the moonshot and think, am I ever going to be, you know, Larry Pader, Sergey Brin, I don't think so. Yeah, I think, I think that's a great point. And what's a moonshot for Elon Musk? So moonshots are relative as well, right? So I don't have a goal of sending humans to Mars, like that I have, I don't have any interest in that. It must us. So that's a moonshot for him, but I have my own moonshots in my own world, which are certainly more limited compared to what Elon Musk is dreaming about. You know, my moonshot, I don't know, five years ago was to write a mainstream nonfiction book that you can find in bookstores. And at the time that seemed out of reach for a number of reasons. And for me, that was a moonshot. And so, you know, moonshot thinking doesn't have to be science fiction thinking. It can be, but it doesn't have to be. And so in your world, what are you thinking about doing, but you're not doing because you don't think you're capable of getting there? And usually our dreams, I mean, the problem that I see, at least in my audience and the people that I interact with are not that people's dreams are too big, but they're too small. Because we've been conditioned by society that, you know, flying low is safer than flying higher. And so, if you course correct a little bit in the direction of the moon, it doesn't actually have to be like getting to Mars, but if you course correct a little bit in the direction of the moon, then you might end up actually getting there. And even if you don't get there, then you'll fail above everybody else's success. So I think it's all relative. And to go back to your question, too, about like, yeah, we're not Google X, we're not Astra-Teller, we don't have the financial might of you on Musk or Amazon. But in a lot of cases, it's like you don't, it's not about finances. The roadblock to dreaming big tends to be in our head, being forced by just decades of conditioning my society. Like, I love Seth Godin's book, The Icarus Myth, about the, I'm sure, you know, many of your listeners will have heard or the Icarus Deception is the name of the book, but it's based on The Icarus Myth, where Icarus's father tells him to not fly high too close to the sun, because his wings are going to melt, and he ignores his father's advice and ends up plummeting to his death. But as Seth Godin points out in his book, there's a second part of that myth as well, which is his father also instructed him to not fly too low, because then his wings would get caught, I think, in the waves or what have you, and he would also plunge as well. But that second part of the myth gets ignored. We all focus on this idea that flying too high is dangerous. So I think course correcting just a little bit and the direction of the moon, so aiming a little bit higher than you otherwise would, can be quite beneficial. Yeah. So I think that the other thing, you know, you talked about sending two rovers instead of one in this chapter about redundant season, you know, you said two things that really stood out to me. When we immediately launch into answer mode, we end up chasing the wrong problem. When we rush to identify solutions, we fall over their diagnosis or initial answer, or our initial answer hides better ones lurking in plain plain sight. The other thing that really caught my attention is just because a hammer is sitting in front of you, it doesn't mean it's the right tool for the job. It's only when you zoom out and determine the broader strategy, can you walk away from a flat tactic? You know, I think about that in terms of people like Gary Vee, who go out on Instagram and say, "Oh, everybody should be on Snapchat," and then millions of people as a result go and, you know, get on Snapchat. I was like, "Wait a minute. Have you not considered the context here? He happens to be an investor in this company too." Like, that to me is always one of those things like, "Okay, is the person who's telling you to do this thing going to benefit from it?" Because that is a context to consider. Like, if I offered a podcasting course and said, "Everybody should start a podcast," well, I have a potential upside for you following that advice. Right. Absolutely. And so when people are out looking for answers about, say, how to implement a social media strategy and they find Gary Vee's advice about Snapchat, it's always a search for tactics. Right, tell me what to do, give me the three-step formula, the life hack, so I can go out and do it. And that's problematic for the reasons that we discussed earlier because it gets in the way of first principles thinking. So it was much better to zoom out and determine the right strategy. So once you determine the right strategy, then the tactics become malleable. So you don't have to go to Snapchat. There are other ways of, better ways, actually, of accomplishing the same strategy, the same end goal, then copying somebody else's tactics, which gets in the way of first principles thinking. So it's helpful to just step back and ask, like, what is this tactic for? Why is Gary Vee suggesting that I go into Snapchat? What is the larger goal that that tactic is supposed to serve? And if that goal resonates with you, if that's what you're trying to build, then step back and you'll be able to identify other tactics that you may have missed before because you were narrowly zooming in on what somebody else who's famous is done and copying their playbook, basically, play-by-play. But when you focus on strategies or principles, you'll be much better positioned to be able to develop your own voice and your own tactics for getting to similar ends. Yeah. Well, we kind of definitely already talked about the whole flip-flopping idea kind of is organically made its way into our conversation. So I want to skip that one. But one of the things you talked about was testing, and this really struck me when you gave the Seinfeld example where you said the distortions introduced by the observer effect are significant. The effect can fool you into believing that a hit show will flop or that a horse is a mathematical genius. Now this is sort of interesting because there's so much research that says, "Oh, you should basically survey your audience, listen to what they have to say." There are literally entire books written about this. I know because I've followed the advice in them, and sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't. I'm like, "Okay, well, look, the data might say this, but when we've done things that the data doesn't say to do, we've had some pretty surprising successes." Yeah. And so the idea in the book about the observer effect and the whole chapter goes back to this simple principle from rocket science called test as you fly as you test. And the idea is that test experiment surveys should take place, and this is true whether you're launching a rocket, a new business, a new website, really anything. The test or the experiment should take place in conditions as close as possible to the flight. Any disconnect between the test and the flight can cause catastrophe in a system as complex as a rocket, but that same principle applies in your own personal and work life as well. And so the problem with most surveys and most books that instruct people to run surveys is that asking people questions about what they would do or what they would prefer hypothetically is very different than the actual flight. When the users actually get the thing you're offering them, and the example I give in the book, one of the examples is the iPhone. There was a survey conducted, Apple connected the survey and asked, I think this was done in the US, Japan and Germany, if they like the idea of having one device to fulfill all their needs, only 30% of them said yes. So they seem to, if you look at the survey results, they seem to prefer carrying around a separate camera, a separate phone, a separate iPod type music player instead of a single device that could perform all three functions. But then once the iPhone actually came out, people felt very differently. Once they could actually hold the iPhone in their hands, they couldn't let it go. So the indifference that you saw in the surveys quickly morphed into desire. And so as business owners, it's much better, instead of asking people hypothetical questions about what they would prefer, what they would like, just give them the product. So if you're a shoe company and you're thinking about, well, how much would people pay for the shoe, give people the shoe, ask them to actually take out their wallet and fork over their hard earned dollars to the cashier that's very different than asking them hypothetically in a survey, how much they would pay, because then the survey spits out perfectly wrong answers. Yeah. Well, I think this is a perfect way to bring us full circle, like you talk about this idea of both failure and success, and I think it's in really interesting ways of observing things. I mean, you talked about that we emit black boxes toward detriment, so let's kind of go there with the whole failure idea, and then we'll wrap things up with success. Sure. So the idea of a black box, as I'm sure you're listening to, no, it's this recording the West in the airplane that captures everything that happens, and it's actually sort of a misnomer because the black box is orange, so it can be identified readily in the events of a crash. So our goal should be to incorporate those black boxes in our lives, and there is this notion in Silicon Valley that the mantra fail fast, fail off, and fail forward, which I think for the reasons I get into in the book is misguided. The mantra should really be learn fast, not fail fast, because just because you're failing doesn't mean you're learning from it, and research bears us out. I cite a number of studies in the book, both from the entrepreneurial world, but also there's a study on cardiac surgeons who had botched a previous procedure, they tend to perform worse on later procedures because they don't learn from their mistakes. So it's important to adopt a learn fast, so yeah, you're going to fail, and it's important to not let failure get in the way, but to pivot to a mindset where you're not just mindlessly moving from one failure to the other, but you're actually taking the time to look at the black box and see what it contains and learning from those mistakes. So I think that of all the quits that stood out in the final chapter, where you talk about post mortems and the fact that nothing fails like success, you said the next time you're tempted to start basking in the glory of your success while admiring the scoreboard, stop and pause for a moment, ask yourself what went wrong with the success, what role did luck, opportunity, and privilege play? And when I look at that, I thought about my book deal, and I was like, yeah, so that was a fluke if there ever was one, you think about somebody like Mark Cuban, who sells broadcast.com for $100 million, the height of the dot-com boom to Yahoo of all people, and he walks out a billionaire and Yahoo is pretty much running on fumes at this point. Yeah, there's a quote in the book, I think this is from E.B. White, but luck is not something you can mention in the presence of self-made men, because when you succeed, you tend to look and say, I'm a genius, I'm so talented, this was because of what I did and we completely discount the role that luck and opportunity play in the process, but just because you're in a hot streak doesn't mean you'll beat the house. And so one of the pieces of advice I give in that chapter is to treat failure and success the same. So follow the exact same process going back to the point about black boxes after a failure and after a success. So once you succeed, it's important to look back and say, like, what been wrong with the success? What role did luck play? What can I learn from it? Because if you don't do that, then the near misses that didn't quiet become roadblocks your success will catch up to you in the future. So I think companies should be conducting post-mortems not just after catastrophic failures, but also after successes as well. Wow. Well, this has been just absolutely phenomenal. So I have one final question for you, which I know you've probably heard me ask. What do you think it is? That makes somebody or something unmistakable. So I'm going to answer that question with a story about Johnny Cash. In 1954, Johnny Cash walked into the audition room at Sun Records and at the time he was a nobody. He was selling appliances door to door and playing gospel songs at night. He was broke, his marriage was in ruins. And for his audition, Cash picked this gospel song because it was what he knew best. And also, gospel was really, really popular in 1954. Everyone else was singing it. But the audition, which is depicted in the movie, walked the line, which is really phenomenal. It doesn't go as cash planned. Cash begins to sing this slow, dreary gospel song, the record label owner, Sam Phillips, playing his interest for like 15 seconds before interrupting Cash. And he says, we've already heard that song a hundred times, just like that, just like how you sang it. And he asked Cash to sing something different, something real, something you felt, because that's the kind of song that truly saves people. That rants Joel's cash out of his conformist, let me sing you some good old gospel attitude. He collects himself and he begins singing the false and prison blues in that deep, distinctive voice of his. And in that moment, he stops trying to become a gospel singer and he becomes the unmistakable Johnny Cash. So being unmistakable for me requires embracing those distinctive qualities about yourself that the world tries so hard to beat into conformity. It requires singing the false and prison blues, what everyone else around you is singing gospel. Wow, incredible, where can people find out more about you, your work in the book? So I have a weekly email that goes out every Thursday and people can sign up for that at weeklycontrarian.com and the book is called Think Like A Rocket Scientist. It's available everywhere that books are sold. Folks can go to rakasciencebook.com to find the links to purchase the book. There was a bunch of pre-order bonuses as well that come with the book. So if people forward their receipts to rocket@ozanbarol.com, we'll send them a whole bunch of pre-order bonuses for getting the book. I've got a special bonus for the listeners of Unmistakable Creative. If you order Think Like A Rocket Scientist by April 21, 2020, you'll get two amazing bonuses. The first is a video training with a behind-the-scenes look at my productivity system. You'll find tips on how to defeat procrastination, how to minimize distractions, and how to get more done in less time. The second bonus is a pack of 10 3-minute bite-sized videos with actionable insights from the book that you can implement right away. To learn more, and to order the book, head over to rocketsciencebook.com/unmistakable. Once again, that's rocketsciencebook.com/unmistakable. Very cool. And for everybody listening, we will wrap the show with that. Thank you for listening to this episode of the Unmistakable Creative Podcast. While you're listening, are there any moments you found fascinating, inspiring, instructive, maybe even heartwarming? Can you think of anyone, a friend, or a family member who would appreciate this moment? If so, take a second and share today's episode with that one person, because good ideas and messages are meant to be shared. Have you ever felt a twinge of worry about AI taking over your job or diluting your creativity? Well, what if you could turn that fear into creative fuel? We've just published an amazing new ebook called "The Four Keys to Success in an AI World," and this is more than just a guide. It's a deep exploration into the human skills that AI can't touch. The skills that are essential for standing out and thriving, no matter how much technology evolved. We're talking about real differentiators here like creativity, emotional intelligence, critical thinking, and much more. Inside, you'll find actionable insights and strategies to develop these skills, whether you're a creative person, a business person, or just simply someone who loves personal development. This isn't a story about tech taking over. It's a story of human creativity thriving alongside AI. Picture this AI as your creative co-pilot not just as a tool, but a collaborator that enhances your unique human skills. 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