Ozan Varol Quotes

If you stick to the familiar, you won’t find the unexpected. Those who get ahead in this century will dance with the great unknown and find danger, rather than comfort, in the status quo.

it’s far better to be uncomfortably uncertain than comfortably wrong. In the end, it’s the confused apes—the connoisseurs of uncertainty—that transform the world.

our obsession with certainty leads us astray and why all progress takes place in uncertain conditions.

scientific development often begins by someone noticing an anomaly and saying, “That’s funny…”50 The discovery of quantum mechanics, X-rays, DNA, oxygen, penicillin, and others, all occurred when the scientists embraced, rather than disregarded, anomalies.

Walking,” he explains, “has a very good effect in that you’re in this state of relaxation, but at the same time you’re allowing the sub-conscious to work on you.

Remember, the thought experiment is the starting point, not the end. The process is messy and nonlinear. And the answer, as we’ll see in the next section, will often come when you’re least expecting it.

Over time, our beliefs begin to blend into our identity. Your belief in CrossFit makes you a CrossFitter, your belief in climate change makes you an environmentalist, and your belief in primal eating makes you paleo. When your beliefs and your identity are one and the same, changing your mind means changing your identity—which is why disagreements often turn into existential death matches.

Critical thinking and creativity don’t come naturally to us. We’re hesitant to think big, reluctant to dance with uncertainty, and afraid of failure. These were necessary during the Paleolithic Period, keeping us safe from poisonous foods and predators. But here in the information age, they’re bugs.

Our ability to make the most out of uncertainty is what creates the most potential value.

Much as in life, if you like someone, you’ll tend to overlook their flaws. You’ll find signals from a love interest—or a spacecraft—even when they’re not sending any.

Do we own the process or does the process own us?”7

Talent hits a target no one else can hit,” philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer said, but “genius hits a target no one else can see.” When

The great obstacle to discovering,” historian Daniel J. Boorstin writes, “was not ignorance but the illusion of knowledge.

Our ability to make the most out of uncertainty is what creates the most potential value. We should be fueled not by a desire for a quick catharsis but by intrigue. Where certainty ends, progress begins.

When you try to improve on existing techniques,” says Astro Teller, the head of X, Google’s moonshot factory, “you’re in a smartness contest with everyone who came before you. Not a good contest to be in.”11

Without an informed public willing to question confident claims, democracy decays and misinformation spreads. Once alternative facts are reported and retweeted, they become the truth. Pseudoscience becomes indistinguishable from real science.

Charlie Munger, vice chairman of Berkshire Hathaway, is a major proponent of this idea. “You’re not entitled to take a view,” he cautions, “unless and until you can argue better against that view than the smartest guy who holds that opposite view.

...Teller doesn’t buy it: “Taking good, smart risks is something that anyone can do, whether you’re on a team of 5 or in a company of 50,000.”18 Bezos would agree. “Given a ten percent chance of a 100 times payoff, you should take that bet every time,” he wrote...

Be careful if you spend your days finding right answers by following a straight path to the light switch. If the drugs you’re developing were certain to work, if your client were certain to be acquitted in court, or if your Mars rover were certain to land, your jobs wouldn’t exist.

Here’s the problem. Process, by definition, is backward looking. It was developed in response to yesterday’s troubles. If we treat it like a sacred pact—if we don’t question it—process can impede forward movement. Over time, our organizational arteries get clogged with outdated procedures.

Moonshots force you to reason from first principles. If your goal is 1 percent improvement, you can work within the status quo. But if your goal is to improve tenfold, the status quo has to go. Pursuing a moonshot puts you in a different league—and often an entirely different game—from that of your competitors, making the established plays and routines largely irrelevant.

Let’s pause there for a moment. As shocking as it sounds, we can generate breakthroughs simply by thinking. No Google. No self-help books. No focus groups or surveys. No advice from a self-proclaimed life coach or an expensive consultant. No copying from competitors. This external search for answers impedes first-principles thinking by focusing our attention on how things are rather than how they could be.

The path, as the mystic poet Rumi writes, won’t appear until you start walking. William Herschel started walking, grinding mirrors, and reading astronomy-for-dummies books even though he had no idea he would discover Uranus. Andrew Wiles started walking when he picked up a book on Fermat’s last theorem as a teenager, not knowing where his curiosity might lead. Steve Squyres started walking in search of his blank canvas, even though he had no idea it would one day lead him to Mars. The secret is to start walking before you see a clear path. Start walking, even though there will be stuck wheels, broken drills, and exploding oxygen tanks ahead. Start walking because you can learn to walk backward if your wheel gets stuck or you can use duct tape to block catastrophe. Start walking, and as you become accustomed to walking, watch your fear of dark places disappear. Start walking because, as Newton’s first law goes, objects in motion tend to stay in motion—once you get going, you will keep going. Start walking because your small steps will eventually become giant leaps. Start walking, and if it helps, bring a bag of peanuts with you for good luck. Start walking, not because it’s easy, but because it’s hard. Start walking because it’s the only way forward.

F.

been experienced, fitted together with a precision better than the finest watch

We’ve all been in that meeting before. People are gathered around a conference table, with half-empty cups of lukewarm coffee strewn around, to “brainstorm ideas” and “explore options.” But instead of exploring ideas, everyone’s busy shooting them down. “We’ve tried that before.” “We don’t have the budget.” “The management would never approve.” Idea generation stops before it even begins. As a result, instead of trying something new, we end up doing what we did yesterday. The goal should be to resist the tendency to activate convergent thinking through a “This can’t be done” attitude. Instead, begin with a divergent “This could be done if …” mindset.

You can’t generate breakthroughs while clearing out your inbox.

Rocket scientists imagine the unimaginable and solve the unsolvable.

Science, as Carl Sagan put it, is “a way of thinking much more than it is a body of knowledge.

It is a capital mistake to theorize before one has data. Insensibly one begins to twist facts to suit theories, instead of theories to suit facts. —SHERLOCK HOLMES

Our final results appear almost self-evident,” he said, “but the years of searching in the dark for a truth that one feels, but cannot express; the intense desire and the alternations of confidence and misgiving, until one breaks through to clarity and understanding, are only known to him who has himself experienced them.”14

In school, we’re given the false impression that scientists took a straight path to the light switch. There’s one curriculum, one right way to study science, and one right formula that spits out the correct answer on a standardized test. Textbooks with lofty titles like The Principles of Physics magically reveal “the principles” in three hundred pages. An authority figure then steps up to the lectern to feed us “the truth.” Textbooks, explained theoretical physicist David Gross in his Nobel lecture, “often ignore the many alternate paths that people wandered down, the many false clues they followed, the many misconceptions they had.”15 We learn about Newton’s “laws”—as if they arrived by a grand divine visitation or a stroke of genius—but not the years he spent exploring, revising, and tweaking them. The laws that Newton failed to establish—most notably his experiments in alchemy, which attempted, and spectacularly failed, to turn lead into gold—don’t make the

We value chest beating and delivering clear answers with conviction, even when we have little more than two minutes of Wikipedia knowledge on an issue.

The more we speak our version of the truth, preferably with passion and exaggerated hand gestures, the more our egos inflate to the size of skyscrapers, concealing what’s underneath.

When there’s a vacuum of understanding—when we’re operating in the land of unknowns and uncertainty—myths and stories whoosh in to fill the gap. “We can’t live in a state of perpetual doubt,” Nobel Prize–winning psychologist Daniel Kahneman explains, “so we make up the best story possible and we live as if this story were true.

Stories provide the perfect remedy for our fear of uncertainty. They fill the gaps in our understanding. They create order out of chaos, clarity out of complexity, and a cause-and-effect relationship out of coincidence.

When we prefer the seeming stability of stories to the messy reality of uncertainty, facts become dispensable and misinformation thrives. Fake news is not a modern phenomenon.

Between a good story and a bunch of data, the story has always prevailed. These mentally vivid images strike a deep, lasting chord known as the narrative fallacy.

Authorities then turn these stories into sacred truths. All the facts in the world can’t keep democratically elected hate machines from taking office as long as they can inject a false sense of certainty into an inherently uncertain world. Confident conclusions by loud-mouthed demagogues who pride themselves on rejecting critical thinking begin to dominate the public discourse.

isolated reflection. The process of creation can be embarrassing. “For every new good idea you have,” Asimov writes, “there are a hundred, ten thousand foolish ones, which you naturally do not care to display.

Someone who walks left simply because others are walking right is a conformist of a different kind.

How would you like to spend your limited time here on Earth? Do you want to look back on your life and realize that you spent huge chunks of it keeping up with the Kardashians? Or do you want to focus on what matters and create art that you’re proud of? Remember Annie Dillard’s timeless wisdom: “How we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives.

I am here today to cross the swamp, not to fight all the alligators.

Fear of the outcome is another reason we shun curiosity. We don’t ask hard questions when we’re afraid of what we might find (which is why people are reluctant to visit their doctor when they fear the diagnosis).

On a typical day, we switch from one form of social media to the next, check our email, catch up on the news—all within a span of twenty minutes. We prefer the certainty of these distractions over the uncertainty of boredom (I don’t know what to do with myself, and I’d rather not find out). In a 2017 survey, roughly 80 percent of Americans reported that they spent no time whatsoever “relaxing or thinking.”26

two British researchers culled through decades of research, concluding that boredom should “be recognized as a legitimate human emotion that can be central to learning and creativity.”30 Falling into boredom allows our brain to tune out the external world and tune into the internal. This state of mind lets loose the most complex instrument known to us, switching the brain from the focused to the diffused mode of thinking. As the mind begins to wander and daydream, the default mode network in our brain—which, according to some studies, plays a key role in creativity—lights up.31

Combinatory play requires exposing yourself to a motley coalition of ideas, seeing the similar in the dissimilar, and combining and recombining apples and oranges into a brand-new fruit.

Think about it: Where are the redundancies in your own life? Where’s the emergency brake or the spare tire in your company? How will you deal with the loss of a valuable team member, a critical distributor, or an important client? What will you do if your household loses a source of income? The system must be designed to continue operating even if a component fails.

The credit for first-principles thinking goes to Aristotle, who defined it as “the first basis from which a thing is known.”12 The French philosopher and scientist René Descartes described it as systematically doubting everything you can possibly doubt, until you’re left with unquestionable truths.

a revolution destroys a systematic government, but the systematic patterns of thought that produced that government are left intact, then those patterns will repeat themselves.

Boone’s secret is the same as any self-respecting astronaut: test as you fly. Train in the same environment you’ll experience on race day—while your competition trains from the comfort of a gym because it happens to be raining outside. “You don’t race on a treadmill with Netflix in front of you,

Einstein described his own discovery process in similar terms: “Our final results appear almost self-evident,” he said, “but the years of searching in the dark for a truth that one feels, but cannot express; the intense desire and the alternations of confidence and misgiving, until one breaks through to clarity and understanding, are only known to him who has himself experienced them.”14

Without an informed public willing to question confident claims, democracy decays and misinformation spreads.

If you solve enough problems, you get to land your rovers on Mars. If you solve enough problems, you get to build the Roman Empire. If you solve enough problems, you get to land on the Moon. That’s how you change the world. One problem at a time.

In the end, if we don’t prove ourselves wrong, others will do it for us. If we pretend to have all the answers, our cover will eventually be blown. If we don’t recognize the flaws in our own thinking, those flaws will come to haunt us. As cognitive scientists Hugo Mercier and Dan Sperber point out, a mouse “bent on confirming its belief that there are no cats around” will end up as food for those cats.51

ALICE: There’s no use trying. One can’t believe impossible things. WHITE QUEEN: I daresay you haven’t had much practice. When I was your age, I always did it for half-an-hour a day. Why, sometimes I’ve believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast. —LEWIS CARROLL, Through the Looking-Glass

Certitudes then replace all thinking. They become a substitute for understanding. They bend reality to match the narrative. They create stark divisions that alienate people with a different perspective.

Reality begins to emerge only when we set aside our tendency to think in clean categories and realize that almost all things exist on a continuum. Along that continuum, answers change depending on time and context. An answer that’s closer to right today could be closer to wrong tomorrow.

If you can let contradictory thoughts dance with each other without your head exploding, they’ll produce a symphony brimming with additional music—in the form of new ideas—far superior to the original. When you adopt this mindset, you gain the magic of perspective and see through the smoke and mirrors created by one-dimensional stories. In the end, there’s so much beauty in complexity. A world of multitudes is far more interesting—and accurate—than a world of certitudes.

It took the most trivial of distinctions for the participants to divide themselves into “us” and “them.” Simply telling people that they belonged to one group and not the other was sufficient to trigger loyalty toward their own group and bias against the other.

Be careful if you find yourself in a place where only acceptable truths are allowed. Taboos are a sign of insecurity. Only fragile castles need to be protected by the highest of walls. The best answers are discovered not by eliminating competing answers, but by engaging with them. And engagement happens in groups built, not on taboos and dogma, but on a foundation that celebrates diverse thinking.

Every time you spot a new perspective, you change how you see the world. The world itself hasn’t changed. But your perception of it has. If I’m stuck over here only able to touch the elephant’s ear, the only way for me to understand the tusk is through another human being. This doesn’t require you to change your own mind. It simply requires you to see someone else’s point of view. “It is the mark of an educated mind,” Aristotle once said, “to be able to entertain a thought without accepting it.

...our ideas and opinions—just like ourselves—are works in progress, continually changing and improving.

...tell your ego it wasn’t wrong. ...tell yourself that you were right given what you knew—given your partial view of the elephant. But now that new information has come to light about other parts of the elephant you couldn’t see before, your beliefs should change. This way, you’re not canceling your past self. You’re simply updating it.

Take one of your firmly held beliefs. Ask yourself, What fact would change my opinion on this subject? If the answer is, No fact would change my opinion, you don’t have an opinion. You are the opinion.

Once you prune what’s no longer serving you—once you stand naked before the wind with layers of old skin shed—you’ll begin to see yourself.

But it’s better to be uncomfortably uncertain than to be comfortably wrong.

When you’re not changing who you are, you’re choosing who you are.

Perception shapes reality. We don’t see things as they are. We see things as we are.

To argue, and win, is to break down the reality of the person you are arguing against. It is painful to lose your reality, so be kind, even if you are right.

It is the mark of an educated mind,” Aristotle once said, “to be able to entertain a thought without accepting it.

The goal isn’t to reconcile the contradictions or resolve the oppositions. It’s to embrace them. It’s to live with them. It’s to realize that light can be a wave and a particle.

0.8 * 0.2 = 0.16. There’s now a Post-it note on my desk with that equation. It serves as a constant reminder to live deep instead of operating at a fraction of my capacity.

Creativity isn’t produced—it’s discovered. And it happens in moments of slack, not during hard labor.

Remarkable happens when you stop copying others—especially your own past self—and start making the art that only your current self can make.

There must be intention to your attention and purpose to your focus.

the goal is to be more intentional and less impulsive.

How we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives.

Being idle isn’t the same thing as being lazy. A vacuum isn’t something to be automatically filled. As the saying goes, it’s the silence in between the notes that makes the music. It’s only by letting go that you can receive and by becoming empty that you can be filled.

Great new things are happening quietly inside of you.

Belonging is being accepted for you. Fitting in is being accepted for being like everyone else. If I get to be me, I belong. If I have to be like you, I fit in.

Once you know what the principle is—once you know the why behind the tactic—you can create your own extraordinary how.

If there’s any shame, it’s in not promoting something that can move others and enrich their lives.

It’s only in the unconventional places that you’ll find the connections—and ultimately the targets—that no one else can see.

Write one true sentence” was Ernest Hemingway’s remedy for writer’s block.14 It’s also the key to finding your voice. If you speak your truth—if you share what you really see, feel, and think—it will be uniquely yours.

Focus on things that age well.

Comparison is the thief of joy.

When I say authentic, I mean living a life according to your own metrics, not someone else’s.

Stop trying to predict the future. Create it instead.

A life lived carefully is a half-dead life Because the purpose of life isn’t to be fine It’s to be alive

So be you—unapologetically and spectacularly you.

Tribalism becomes dangerous when it turns rivals into enemies, when it suppresses diverse thinking, and when it pushes individuals to do things they wouldn’t do on their own. This type of dangerous tribalism thrives in a sea of disconnected people looking for belonging. And who doesn’t crave belonging these days? We are disconnected from our neighbors, disconnected from nature, disconnected from animals, disconnected from the universe, and disconnected from most things that make us human. Tribes are the magnet that attracts the metal of our craving to belong. They assure us that we’re right and morally superior. They force us into a different reality where it becomes impossible to see—let alone comprehend—another worldview. We become “the Few, the Proud, the More or Less Constantly Appalled at Everyone Else,” as David Foster Wallace put it.

Over time, the tribal identity becomes our identity. Once identity and tribe fuse, we let our tribe determine what’s appropriate for us to read, watch, say, and think. We pick up social-media cues about what our tribe is thinking, and we toe the line. If our tribe hates Joe Rogan, we hate him too. If our tribe believes that immigrants are destroying our country, we believe it too. We forfeit our voice. We forfeit our choice. That warm, fuzzy, satisfying feeling of belonging trumps everything else—including thinking for ourselves.

Research shows that people are biased in their expression of empathy. The members of our own tribes get empathy. Others get a punch to the gut. We belittle them (I told you so). We ostracize them (If you’re not with us, you’re against us). We ridicule them (What an idiot). We see others, not as people trying to make sense of the same elephant from different angles, but as morally corrupt or unintelligent.

She went from selling fax machines door-to-door to becoming the world’s youngest self-made woman billionaire. She credits her success partly to a question that her father would ask her every week when she was growing up. “What have you failed at this week?” If Sara didn’t have an answer, her father would be disappointed. To her father, failing to try was far more disappointing than failure itself.

The political strategists James Carville and Paul Begala tell a story about the choice a lion faces in deciding to hunt for a mouse or an antelope. “A lion is fully capable of capturing, killing, and eating a field mouse,” they explain. “But it turns out that the energy required to do so exceeds the caloric content of the mouse itself.” Antelopes, in contrast, are much bigger animals, so “they take more speed and strength to capture.” But once captured, an antelope can provide days of food for the lion.

The political strategists James Carville and Paul Begala tell a story about the choice a lion faces in deciding to hunt for a mouse or an antelope. “A lion is fully capable of capturing, killing, and eating a field mouse,” they explain. “But it turns out that the energy required to do so exceeds the caloric content of the mouse itself.” Antelopes, in contrast, are much bigger animals, so “they take more speed and strength to capture.” But once captured, an antelope can provide days of food for the lion.

If we explore only well-trodden paths, if we avoid games we don’t know how to play, we’ll remain stagnant. Only when you’re dancing in the dark, only when you don’t know where the light switch is—or even what a light switch is—can progress begin.

Unless you consider the best-case scenario along with the worst, your brain will steer you toward the seemingly safest path—inaction. But as a Chinese proverb goes, many a false step was made by standing still. You’re more likely to take that first step into the unknown when there’s the proverbial pot of gold awaiting at the end.

Instead of letting your original vision—or the visions of others—shape the path forward, you abandon all allegiances to them. You hack through existing assumptions as if you’re hacking through a jungle until you’re left with the fundamental components.