Ozan Varol
Appearances
Something You Should Know
How to Awaken Your Genius & Is Personality Change Possible? - SYSK Choice
I think there's a number of things you can do to boost creativity, simple things that we often don't do. So I'll give you just one example. My high school soccer coach had a saying that I love. He would say, if you're not in possession, get in position. In other words, if you don't have the ball, move to a different place on the field where you'll be open to receive the ball.
Something You Should Know
How to Awaken Your Genius & Is Personality Change Possible? - SYSK Choice
The same principle applies to creativity. Far too often, we sit in the same room, in the same position, facing the same computer for hours at a time. When we're stuck physically, we often get stuck creatively because our beliefs and perspectives are tied to our environment. If you change your environment, it becomes easier to dislodge what's no longer serving you.
Something You Should Know
How to Awaken Your Genius & Is Personality Change Possible? - SYSK Choice
And by the way, this is why many smokers find it easier to quit when they're traveling, because their environment, the new environment, doesn't have the same smoking associations as their own home. So if I'm in a creative rut, if I get writer's block, I move outside of the room where I normally write, which is associated with the same old thought patterns.
Something You Should Know
How to Awaken Your Genius & Is Personality Change Possible? - SYSK Choice
So I take my laptop and I bring it with me to an entirely different room with different decorations and different books on the shelves, different energy, different everything. And that minor shift in location brings a major shift in perspective. It forces a reset in my mind.
Something You Should Know
How to Awaken Your Genius & Is Personality Change Possible? - SYSK Choice
It creates this blank space where I can project new ideas and ideas that were obscured by the old setting begin to reveal themselves in the new. Walking also helps. So research shows that movement and cognition are activated in the same region of the brain and that walking improves creativity.
Something You Should Know
How to Awaken Your Genius & Is Personality Change Possible? - SYSK Choice
So if you're feeling stuck, go for a walk without an audiobook or a phone call to keep you company, just you and your thoughts. There are so many examples of scientists being stuck in a problem and then walking away from the problem and literally walking themselves into the right answer.
Something You Should Know
How to Awaken Your Genius & Is Personality Change Possible? - SYSK Choice
By stepping away from the problem, stepping away from the same environment where you've been focused on the problem, you're creating space for your subconscious to create new ideas, to marry the old with the new, to generate original insights that you could not have seen before.
Something You Should Know
How to Awaken Your Genius & Is Personality Change Possible? - SYSK Choice
Play is essential to creativity because practice or work is often backward looking. So when we're practicing, for example, you may have heard the term deliberate practice. It's all about looking backward and repeating the same thing over and over again. And so deliberate practice is how you perfect your golf swing or how you get the right chord on the guitar.
Something You Should Know
How to Awaken Your Genius & Is Personality Change Possible? - SYSK Choice
But if your goal isn't to look backward to repeat what you've done before, instead your goal is to look to the future and create new ideas that didn't exist before, then deliberate practice won't help you. because you'd be looking back and repeating the same thing over and over again. Now you have to create room for play.
Something You Should Know
How to Awaken Your Genius & Is Personality Change Possible? - SYSK Choice
Now you have to abandon structures, abandon boxes, and let yourself be free and let yourself play like a child might. Now you might be wondering, well, how do I actually do that? I mean, there should certainly be room in your life for play, for doing things for their own sake. But how do you play when it comes to the traditional area of work?
Something You Should Know
How to Awaken Your Genius & Is Personality Change Possible? - SYSK Choice
I write about an example from the TV show The Office, which was one of my favorite shows of all time. Now, The Office lasted for about 10 years. And it's not easy for writers of the show to maintain momentum for that long. And so inevitably, from time to time, they would find themselves in a creative rut. And when that happened, they would do something really interesting.
Something You Should Know
How to Awaken Your Genius & Is Personality Change Possible? - SYSK Choice
They would stop working on their show and instead they would write, they would take about 10 to 15 minutes to plot out the script of a different show called Entourage, which was on HBO at the time, also a comedy show. And their goal was to play. So they would set their own work aside and they would say, let's just come up with
Something You Should Know
How to Awaken Your Genius & Is Personality Change Possible? - SYSK Choice
silly, playful ideas for 10 to 15 minutes for this other show that we're not responsible for, right? And so that playground activated their creativity muscles. It created an environment where it didn't matter if the plot that they created for Entourage wasn't great, they were just playing. Now, here's the important part.
Something You Should Know
How to Awaken Your Genius & Is Personality Change Possible? - SYSK Choice
When they went back to working on the office, when they went back to working on their own show, they brought that playful mindset with them to their own work. So the creativity that had been hampered before, if they were feeling blocked or feeling in a rut before,
Something You Should Know
How to Awaken Your Genius & Is Personality Change Possible? - SYSK Choice
Having that playful mindset carry over from working on the entourage would allow them to generate ideas that they otherwise would have missed. And you can apply this playful mindset regardless of what you do for work. You don't have to be a writer. Let's say you're a marketer and you're trying to come up with a marketing campaign for your product.
Something You Should Know
How to Awaken Your Genius & Is Personality Change Possible? - SYSK Choice
and you're feeling, you know, you're in a brainstorming session and you're feeling stuck, take just 10 minutes creating a marketing campaign for a competitor's product. Just play around with wild, silly, unreasonable ideas, and then come back to your own work. And you'll find that the ideas that you generate for your own work will be a lot more creative as a result.
Something You Should Know
How to Awaken Your Genius & Is Personality Change Possible? - SYSK Choice
I write this story, share the story of Jimmy Breslin, who was a journalist and he was tasked with covering the assassination of John F. Kennedy. And just like every other reporter in the country, he went to the White House, to the White House press briefing room to get answers from the official executive branch mouthpiece.
Something You Should Know
How to Awaken Your Genius & Is Personality Change Possible? - SYSK Choice
There were hundreds of reporters in the room and he looked around the room and he thought to himself, I can't make a living here. Everyone's going to have the same story. Everyone's looking in the same place. So everyone's going to be writing the same piece, basically, or similar versions of the same idea. So he decided to leave the White House and look where other reporters were not looking.
Something You Should Know
How to Awaken Your Genius & Is Personality Change Possible? - SYSK Choice
He went across the river to Arlington National Cemetery. and where JFK would be buried. And he found the person who was digging JFK's grave. And he wrote this masterful column telling the story of JFK's assassination from the perspective of the person who was tasked with preparing JFK's final resting place. And he ended up winning the Pulitzer Prize as a result of that.
Something You Should Know
How to Awaken Your Genius & Is Personality Change Possible? - SYSK Choice
And that's one example of someone who is actively stepping out of where other competitors, other journalists are hanging out and looking where others aren't looking. Because the problem with looking where others are looking is you're getting the same information.
Something You Should Know
How to Awaken Your Genius & Is Personality Change Possible? - SYSK Choice
And so you're going to be thinking or you're going to be writing or you're going to be creating very similar things, which means there is so much value in diversifying, in changing where you look.
Something You Should Know
How to Awaken Your Genius & Is Personality Change Possible? - SYSK Choice
Exactly. There is this, it's a fancy Latin word, but I'll explain what it means. A logical fallacy called post hoc ergo propter hoc. It means after it, therefore, because of it. So in the case of a success story, the assumption, the fallacy being this person did A, B, and C, and that's why they became successful. And if I do A, B, and C as well, then I will also become successful.
Something You Should Know
How to Awaken Your Genius & Is Personality Change Possible? - SYSK Choice
And it's a flawed assumption because ABC may have nothing to do with their success. It might be that they got successful because of X, Y, and Z. It might be that they got successful because they were lucky. They were at the right place at the right time. And you can copy and paste exactly what they did and get very different results.
Something You Should Know
How to Awaken Your Genius & Is Personality Change Possible? - SYSK Choice
which is why it's so important to not blindly try to copy and paste someone else's path to success, but certainly learn from people who came before you, but test that knowledge in your own world. Ask yourself, does this resonate with me? Run experiments for yourself in the way that we already talked about to try to figure out whether the steps that they followed will actually work for you.
Something You Should Know
How to Awaken Your Genius & Is Personality Change Possible? - SYSK Choice
We live in a world where there's so much conformity, so much copying and pasting, and much of conformity is genetically programmed. We are conditioned to follow the herd. Thousands of years ago, conformity was essential to your survival. If you didn't conform, if you didn't fit in, then you would be rejected, ostracized, or worse, left for dead.
Something You Should Know
How to Awaken Your Genius & Is Personality Change Possible? - SYSK Choice
Number one, our education system in many ways conditions us to look externally for answers. So in school, we're taught that there is one right answer that's been determined by someone far smarter than you are. And your only job is to memorize that answer and spit that back out on a standardized test.
Something You Should Know
How to Awaken Your Genius & Is Personality Change Possible? - SYSK Choice
And that conditioning gets reinforced year after year after year, and then we move on to the workforce.
Something You Should Know
How to Awaken Your Genius & Is Personality Change Possible? - SYSK Choice
The tendency that most people have isn't to just ask, well, what do I actually think about this? The tendency is to jump on Google and start searching for answers on Google instead of looking first within to see what we actually think.
Something You Should Know
How to Awaken Your Genius & Is Personality Change Possible? - SYSK Choice
Step one is to think before you research. Let's say you're curious about, for example, where good ideas come from. Instead of jumping on Google or instead of reading the latest hottest book on that topic, think for yourself first. That would mean you take out a notepad or you open up a new Word document on your computer,
Something You Should Know
How to Awaken Your Genius & Is Personality Change Possible? - SYSK Choice
And you jot down some theories about where good ideas might come from, what might boost creativity. Once you've done that, then you can turn to what other people have read. But if you switch the order, if you go immediately to the research, then other people's opinions will end up anchoring your own and your own ideas will end up deviating only marginally from what you've read.
Something You Should Know
How to Awaken Your Genius & Is Personality Change Possible? - SYSK Choice
So it's much better to first think yourself and then turn to the research.
Something You Should Know
How to Awaken Your Genius & Is Personality Change Possible? - SYSK Choice
Research is important for sure. And I'm not saying don't research at all or don't read what other people have written or don't listen to smart people. That's not what I'm saying at all. The only thing I'm saying with respect to this topic is to start by thinking for yourself first. before reading what others have written on it.
Something You Should Know
How to Awaken Your Genius & Is Personality Change Possible? - SYSK Choice
When we're stuck physically, we often get stuck creatively because our beliefs and perspectives are tied to our environment. So if I'm in a creative rut, if I get writer's block, I move outside of the room where I normally write, which is associated with the same old thought patterns.
Something You Should Know
How to Awaken Your Genius & Is Personality Change Possible? - SYSK Choice
And yes, to some answers or to some questions, there is a single right answer, but those questions tend not to be very interesting or very relevant because there is only one right answer and the answer has already been determined. But for life's harder questions, especially the type of personal questions that we struggle with, like what should I do with my life?
Something You Should Know
How to Awaken Your Genius & Is Personality Change Possible? - SYSK Choice
Or have I chosen the right career for myself? What do I think about this important personal topic? On those questions particularly and on the life's more interesting questions where there isn't a single right answer and the answer depends on
Something You Should Know
How to Awaken Your Genius & Is Personality Change Possible? - SYSK Choice
the perspective that you have, the experiences you've had in your life, then it makes sense to start by thinking about it first yourself and then absolutely turn to what other people have written and read them and turn to get advice from others as well. But don't pause your own thinking.
Something You Should Know
How to Awaken Your Genius & Is Personality Change Possible? - SYSK Choice
Yeah, the cliche of winners never quit and quitters never win, and you need more grit and persistence in your life. Look, some people do need more grit and persistence in their lives, but others need less. And persistence, if it means chasing the same thing that is clearly not working out for you or walking down a path, even though you've exhausted what you can get from that path,
Something You Should Know
How to Awaken Your Genius & Is Personality Change Possible? - SYSK Choice
If that is persistence and if that's grit, that can certainly backfire. Because look, you're going to change over time. The commitment that you made, for example, by going to law school 10 years ago, that commitment may be very different from how you're feeling right now about the practice of law. I'll give you an example from my life. I was a law professor for 10 years.
Something You Should Know
How to Awaken Your Genius & Is Personality Change Possible? - SYSK Choice
and shortly after i got tenure i realized that that career was no longer for me i loved teaching when when i was teaching law the first six or seven years but i remember distinctly walking into the classroom one day and feeling my whole body sink my shoulders collapsed my heart sank with this feeling of
Something You Should Know
How to Awaken Your Genius & Is Personality Change Possible? - SYSK Choice
not again, I can't believe I'm about to teach the same class in the same way that I've taught it dozens of times again. And instead of pushing that voice down, instead of saying, I made a commitment to be a law professor six or seven years ago, I'm just gonna keep going down this path even though my body is sending very strong signals
Something You Should Know
How to Awaken Your Genius & Is Personality Change Possible? - SYSK Choice
that what was once the right path for me is no longer the right one. And I leaned in with curiosity to that voice. And over the next several years, I experimented with different futures and ended up picking a career as an author and speaker and ended up doing what many of my colleagues thought would be the unthinkable, which is to leave a tenured job, the ultimate safety net.
Something You Should Know
How to Awaken Your Genius & Is Personality Change Possible? - SYSK Choice
But that was absolutely the right path for me. And if I had said grit and persistence and keep doing what you're doing, you probably would not be listening to this conversation right now.
Something You Should Know
How to Awaken Your Genius & Is Personality Change Possible? - SYSK Choice
Well, that's the whole point, right? And that's the reason why I write that grit and persistence can backfire. And that's how I led the answer by saying some people need more grit in their lives. Others need less. So it's all personal. But I'm sharing that story because you often don't hear stories like that. You hear stories of grit and perseverance and how you're never supposed to quit.
Something You Should Know
How to Awaken Your Genius & Is Personality Change Possible? - SYSK Choice
because winners never quit, but you don't often hear the stories of leaving the path, of abandoning grit and persistence and going off and doing something else. And yeah, that was the right thing for me to do at the time. Doesn't mean it's the right thing for you, which is why personal reflection and thinking for yourself
Something You Should Know
How to Awaken Your Genius & Is Personality Change Possible? - SYSK Choice
instead of blindly copying and pasting somebody else's path to success becomes really important.
Something You Should Know
How to Awaken Your Genius & Is Personality Change Possible? - SYSK Choice
When I first became a professor, I would pause from time to time during class and ask, Does anyone have any questions? Now, nine times out of 10, no one would raise their hands and I would move on confident that I'd done a stellar job of explaining the material. Well, I was wrong. The exam answers made it clear that there were plenty of students who weren't getting it.
Something You Should Know
How to Awaken Your Genius & Is Personality Change Possible? - SYSK Choice
So I decided to run an experiment. Instead of asking, does anyone have any questions? I began to say, I will now take your questions. Or even better, I would say something like, The material we just covered was really confusing. I'm confident there are plenty of you with questions. Now is a great time to ask them. the number of hands that went up increased dramatically.
Something You Should Know
How to Awaken Your Genius & Is Personality Change Possible? - SYSK Choice
And I realized in hindsight that does anyone have any questions was a stupid question. I had forgotten how hard it was for, and I taught these big first year classes with hundreds of students in them. I'd forgotten how hard it is for someone to raise their hand and admit that they didn't get something in front of all of their friends and friends. and future colleagues.
Something You Should Know
How to Awaken Your Genius & Is Personality Change Possible? - SYSK Choice
The way that I reframed the question normalized confusion. It normalized the fact that the material was difficult. And by doing that, I made my expected outcome, which is more questions from the students, the norm, not the exception. And we ask stupid questions all the time outside of the classroom setting too. So if you're, for example, a business leader,
Something You Should Know
How to Awaken Your Genius & Is Personality Change Possible? - SYSK Choice
and you ask a team member, are you facing any challenges? Now, most people will say no because they'll fear that their admission of a challenge will be seen as a weakness. You're more likely to get a more insightful response, insightful answer if you say something like, we just finished a really tough quarter. Everyone is facing significant challenges. I'd love to hear about yours.
Something You Should Know
How to Awaken Your Genius & Is Personality Change Possible? - SYSK Choice
Now, again, now you've normalized challenges and you've created psychological safety for that team member to come forward and share a more honest response with you. That's a great idea. I like that. So many professionals could use more of this.
Something You Should Know
How to Awaken Your Genius & Is Personality Change Possible? - SYSK Choice
So if you're listening to this and you're a doctor, for example, and you just went over a really complicated diagnosis with a patient, don't just ask, do you have any questions? Instead, say something like, you know, I just threw a lot of information at you. Lots of acronyms and lots of jargon, probably. And I'm sure... That information was confusing. And I'm sure you have plenty of questions.
Something You Should Know
How to Awaken Your Genius & Is Personality Change Possible? - SYSK Choice
Now is a great time to ask them. Now you'll get a lot more insightful responses from the patient instead of if you just went in and said, do you have any questions?