Episode Details

The Learning Leader Show With Ryan Hawk

Text LEARNERS to 44222

Full show notes found at www.LearningLeader.com

#367: Ozan Varol - How To Think Like A Rocket Scientist

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