Chief Change Officer
#373 Nicole F. Roberts: How a Neuroscience Dropout Built a Life Around Purpose—Part One
Fri, 16 May 2025
What happens when your five-year plan falls apart—and you start to like it that way?In Part One, Nicole F. Roberts—Doctor of Public Health, human rights founder, and co-author of Generosity WINS—shares the real story behind her very unpolished path. From flunking chemistry and walking away from med school dreams to launching a human rights firm mid-dissertation, Nicole proves that success isn’t always strategic—it’s responsive, human, and messy in the best way.We explore how her neuroscience roots shaped her curiosity, why she walked away from Washington policy to chase impact, and what changed when she started listening more to real people than political agendas. This episode is for anyone who’s ever hit pause—and realized the reroute was actually the destination.Key Highlights of Our Interview:When the Neurosurgeon Dream Crashed—and Something Better Emerged“I realized I was terrible at chemistry… and didn’t want to spend life writing prescriptions.”How Policy Lost Her—and Public Health Found Her“Policy’s great—until politics gets involved. I needed to see real change, not just write about it.”A Six-Month Pause That Turned Into Six Years (and a Human Rights Firm)“My dissertation chair died. I got divorced. So I started a human rights firm. As one does.”The Problem with Think Tanks (and the Need to Do, Not Just Think)“I could write papers forever—but what if no one ever acts on them?”When Real Life Rewrote the Dissertation“Those six years gave me a new lens. I rewrote everything—from the topic to the way I thought.”Her Final Research Topic: Why Neuroscience Can’t Scale Without Generosity“It turns out collaboration doesn’t come easy in science. Ownership often trumps impact.”Why Her Dissertation Still Sits on a Shelf“It was supposed to be my first book. I haven’t opened it in years. I just burned out.”Co-Authoring Generosity WINS: When a Business Book Becomes a Neuroscience Playbook“Monty had this premise: success follows giving. I knew the science could back it up—we just had to find the story.”A Business Fable, a Fictional Heroine, and Real-Life Interviews“Every chapter has a QR code that takes you to a real leader’s profile. Fictional story, real lessons.”Why Kindness Is Strategic, Not Soft“You can’t show the ROI of karma—but the people who give are the ones who last.”_________________________Connect with us:Host: Vince Chan | Guest: Dr. Nicole F. Roberts --Chief Change Officer--Change Ambitiously. Outgrow Yourself.Open a World of Expansive Human Intelligencefor Transformation Gurus, Black Sheep,Unsung Visionaries & Bold Hearts.EdTech Leadership Awards 2025 Finalist.18 Million+ All-Time Downloads.80+ Countries Reached Daily.Global Top 1.5% Podcast.Top 10 US Business.Top 1 US Careers.>>>170,000+ are outgrowing. Act Today.<<<
Chapter 1: What inspired Nicole to shift from neuroscience to public health?
Hi, everyone. Welcome to our show, Chief Change Officer. I'm Vince Chen, your ambitious human host. Our show is a modernist community for change progressives in organizational and human transformation from around the world. Today, we are diving into the No Strict Lines journey of Nicole Roberts.
Nicole is a doctor of public health, co-authoring a business book called Generosity Wins with a seasoned CEO, Monty Wood, who happens to be one of our guests on the show. Nicole once posed her PhD to start a human rights firm. Just to give you a sense of how things go, in this two-part series, we talk about what happens when you let purpose guide your work instead of a perfect plan.
We get into the science behind generosity, how real human stories shaped her book, and why the best leaders know when to ditch the rulebook. And she also helps run a brain summit every year during the Super Bowl. So this conversation goes places. Let's jump in. Hi, Nicole. Welcome to the show. Welcome to Chief Change Officer. I feel like I'm meeting an old friend.
You're a co-author in a book called Generosity Wins with Monty Wood. Monty and I had such a great conversation. I can't wait to get his co-author back to the show, which is you.
Welcome again. Thank you. Thank you. I'm thrilled to be here. Monty raved about his time with you. I heard all about it. And so when you sent a note and said, I'd like to talk, I was like, absolutely. Yeah. So thank you. I love the idea of getting, I'm sure you'll come to find that we are very different people. We share like a mission, which is what brought us together, but we are very different.
So I'm interested to also hear like on the back end, you can pick it apart.
Yeah. Sure. Let's start with your journey, your history, and then we'll dive into different elements of your past and your present.
So I grew up in the South and in the Midwest, but then moved to go to school. And school, yeah, we can talk about that. That was a long process. It was not a linear, not a straight line. We'll say that. But I did college, I did a master's degree and then a doctorate. My doctorate is, I'm a doctor of public health, but my background is actually a bit more in neuroscience.
And so where I've always loved to work is in global public health, solving big problems, but also in that behavioral space. Why do people do the things they do? How do we I don't love this term, but it came to me, meet people where they are. And if you're trying to make people healthier, happier, you have to start with where people are, though. You can't just say, do this.
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Chapter 2: How did personal challenges impact Nicole's career path?
Someone who drives cars is someone very different from someone who has to walk or take public transportation. So you really have to think about why do people make the choices they do and how do we influence those choices for good if and when we can.
You studied public policy and later focused on public health. What originally drew you to public policy? Especially being in Washington, DC, a place so closely tied to politics and government. I know you also spend time in politics. So I'm curious, not just about the shift from point A to B to C, but also about the thinking behind those transitions.
Sure. So before all of that, actually, I, in undergrad, I was psychology and biology. I ran a double major, and my goal was actually to go to medical school. And I had this idea that I was going to be like the greatest neurosurgeon or neuroscientist of all time. And then as I got towards the end of undergrad, I realized... I was terrible at chemistry. I thought, oh no.
And this was right at the height of like the pharmaceutical rep and all that kind of stuff right around the early 2000s. And I just I panicked and I thought, oh, my gosh, I'm going to go to medical school and I'm going to end up in the middle of my class. I'm going to end up at some hospital writing prescriptions and that that's going to be my life. And I just I froze.
And so I was like, how can I change the system, the health care system in particular? How can I work in healthcare but really make change, not just one prescription at a time, right? And so I thought public policy. I thought I can change policy. And so I went to UChicago and I got a master's in public policy and moved to Washington, D.C. And then I learned...
a lot, real quick, about policy and politics. They are two very different things, but I find at least in the last 20 years, that Venn diagram has overlapped more and more. And so it's hard to make good policy that is removed from the politics, particularly in healthcare. And so it really broke my heart. And I started seeing that, especially international work, I could have a huge impact
Small things could have a huge impact. And that was so meaningful to me. And it's not the kind of work you get a raise for promotion or a thank you or a title bump. But you can actually see change. You can see people change. like get healthier, be happier, have access, right? When children have access to food, for example, girls can go to school.
Like it's simple, like food security can change family dynamics. Children are allowed to go to school and they don't have to work They're not married off at a younger age. There's all these things. And to me, that's all public health. And I decided to do my doctorate in public health. And that journey was its own side quest because I started a Ph.D. program.
And my dissertation chair was a wonderful man. I hit some bumps in the road that included divorce. So my personal life derailed and then my dissertation chair died and I didn't know what to do. And I thought I would take like a six month or one year break. to reset, refocus, change my topic. And I had access to all these children's data.
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Chapter 3: What is the relationship between policy and politics in healthcare?
And actually, the University of North Carolina essentially called and went, there's a window on a doctorate. I said, oh, didn't notice. It's safe. You need to re-enroll or we need to go our separate ways. And I said, no, I'm coming back. I'm going to finish. And what was amazing, though, is I then got to complete that journey, take my tests, do my dissertation, but with a whole new mindset.
I got to write a dissertation, work from a place that had years of work experience and was really happy with the space I was in, as opposed to just writing books. essentially like a book to write a book to check the boxes and graduate. So for me, it worked out perfectly. But no, it was starts and stops and twists and turns.
And I ended up everywhere from Missouri to Chicago to North Carolina to get it done.
You clearly have a very strong passion for driving public policy. But along the way, you realized that policy and politics are two different things. Very different. Did you find politics didn't sit well with you? What was it that didn't feel right?
yeah i found it so frustrating and the natural place for someone like me with an academic background is like a think tank writing papers which i do enjoy obviously i read a book like i enjoy writing but that idea of just for me at least being in one place and writing about things and saying if you did this it would help people but then not seeing action come from it drives me nuts and yeah it
It's just not where I derive my joy. We'll say that.
You are clearly a thinker, but also very much a doer. You are someone who wants to drive real change and not just talk about it. You want to see it, build it, make it tangible. And that's something I really value. On this show, I've said it many times. I love working and talking with leaders who walk the walk, talk the talk. Because these days, talk is cheap.
Honestly, you can just drop a topic into AI tools, say, check GPT, get a polished script, memorize it, and suddenly you're saying the right things. but that's not leadership. Talk is getting commoditized. What really matters now is the walk. And with you, I see someone who does both. You've got the sharp thinking, the public policy background, the communication skills, but you also want to act.
You want to take all that insight and actually make something happen. But I imagine that's where the frustration comes in when politics and economics, invisible or visible hands, don't always align with action. They don't always support the walk, even if they are filled with talk. Is that how you experience it?
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Chapter 4: What led Nicole to start a human rights firm?
You mentioned about you, after those six years of doing your own practice in human rights, you went back to school, you finished your dissertation, but you changed the topic. I was wondering how those six years of experience, what happened there that helped you to change from one topic to another? And what was your topic? What was your final topic at the end?
So, I don't know how it is in every program, but at least in mine, you take on a piece of your dissertation chair's work, right? You gravitate towards them. They gravitate towards you because you share common interests, you know, whatever it is that brings you together, that you work with them during your doctorate. They're your mentor, your guide. And so mine was wonderful.
He was not only an economist, but he had worked in maternal and child health. And so I thought this is where I could have a big impact in particularly children's health. That time away, especially running my own company and doing other things, I knew I wanted to focus more on getting back to that neuroscience side of things, the behavior side of things.
And where I had found my greatest frustrations is what ended up being my dissertation. And it was how to build public-private partnerships. And in healthcare, as I was just talking about with politics and policy, but we... I say we, like for people who work in healthcare generally, like so many fields are not good at collaboration. And others are excellent at collaboration.
And for example, in the 1990s, Bush, President Bush declared in a presidential proclamation at the 1990s, he called it the decade of the brain. He promised, because research was moving at such a pace, that by the close of 1999, we would solve a whole array of things that had to do with the brain, from Alzheimer's to other forms of degeneration and whatnot. And we've made very little progress.
And yet you see fields like cancer, where we've got moonshots, countries literally working together, sharing their data. And so anyway, I ended up writing my dissertation on how to build public-private partnerships in healthcare, but specifically in neuroscience. And what it allowed me to do was to interview all these brilliant people about what works and what doesn't.
I got to go to people from different fields. Like, why does this work in your field? Why is it that neuroscience, like, why have we never been able to do X or Y? How is it that Canada has this huge, every university is connected to one brain bank sort of thing? Why can't we do that? I learned so much about how not only we communicate as humans, but how we build trust or lack of trust.
And what it takes to truly give in a space like neuroscience, where anything you learn, anything you do, create, find, could be some novel breakthrough. And so people hold on to that really tightly. There's such a sense of ownership, but that gets in the way of collaboration.
and sharing and trust and so i it was a really fun frustrating don't get me wrong i'm not gonna say like a dissertation is fun to write but it was fun to interview all these really different people Take all their different experiences and lay them out in a spreadsheet, if you will. Most of the time it was like on whiteboards and things.
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Chapter 5: Why did Nicole's dissertation topic change after six years?
And to be honest, I assumed it would be my first book. I thought when I finished the dissertation part, I would take it and turn it into an actual book that was readable by people. And then I was just so burnt out. Honestly, it's still sitting on a shelf in my office. It's still there. All the interviews, the transcripts, it's all there. And there are nice little binders.
And I tell you what, I haven't opened it in years because I just see it and I'm like, no, I don't have the energy for that.
These days, with AI and all the available data, you could possibly turn your lectures or content into something interactive. Maybe even develop your own AI agent.
with the right tech team your expertise could be transformed into a tool that riches and helps even more people have you thought about doing something like that i hear you and i love ai actually i've used it for several things like especially asking questions or how do i say something in a different way the idea of asking it to in any form to write my work for me just feels dirty Yeah. Yeah.
I think in this case in particular, because I did so many hours of interviews, there's something there. I don't know, but this actually, I'm doing the thing I just said we shouldn't do in a sense, which is like that sense of ownership of like all that information was hand collected and tracked and monitored. So to give it to a machine and go make it like, I don't know. It just, it feels weird.
Now going back to your book, generosity wins. What brought you in the very first place to write something like this and with Monty as your co-author?
So I had always wanted to write a book and not for the sake of writing a book. It's because I just I had ideas. I've actually outlined, I think, three books at this point, like full outlines. And I took one of them. So I've written Health Care for Forbes. maybe like 14 years now. I feel like that really ages me, but I've written for Forbes for a very long time.
And it started with Forbes because they launched a book line. And of course they started with some of their longest running writers who they had written columns and columns. And so, you know, would you be interested in writing a book? Here's our book line. Here's what we're going to do. And so I submitted my first big idea to them and they were very helpful, helped with my first outline.
We started the process and I was told then, No one buys healthcare books. And it's true. The data validates that. People will buy books that are like longevity, right? Because it's a bit more in the self-help category. But books on actual like healthcare, how to fix the system, our social determinants of health. No, people are not interested.
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Chapter 6: How does generosity play a role in success according to Nicole?
I really, especially because I was in graduate school, didn't have to force something. It just didn't feel right. And then... I had this wonderful experience where actually one of those people that I had known from the Forbes world was no longer there. They were working for a different publisher. And they reached out and said, there's someone I really want you to meet. He's writing a book.
He's thinking about a co-author because he wants someone who has a different perspective. And he said, I'm going to put a few people in front of him. And he probably said this to everybody, but he said, I'm going to put a few people in front of him that I know, but I think you're one. I think you two just would work so well together.
And he said, I know you're deeply passionate about what he wants to do. And that was it. He said, can I just make an introduction and set up a Zoom call? And I said, okay. But I had no idea. I was like, what I want to do? What does that mean? And I met Monty Wood. And Monty, he had me not at hello, but about five minutes in, he had me.
And he had this premise for a book that he was calling Attract Success. I don't know if he told you this part. I actually intentionally, I was going to listen to his episode. And then I thought, no, I don't want to because I don't want to be biased. But he had this book idea. It was called Attract Success.
But his premise was when you put good out into the world, when you are generous, particularly because he is a business expert. Monty is the go-to guy and mentor for business. And that when you genuinely hear about and give of yourself to your colleagues, to your teams, to your family, to people, they will give back to you.
And what they will give back to you will propel your success, whether it's in the business or it's in your family life. And so the premise for him was to attract success, to be successful. You actually have to give back. And that was the key. To receive, you must give and you should give first and freely of yourself. It can't be transactional. Otherwise, it's not really giving.
And so he had me, right? At that premise, I'm like, absolutely. And I said, there's plenty of science to back this up. I said, what you're not going to be able to find that I know of is real literature and data to show the ROI. You can't show... In data points, you can't show karma. Yep. Yep. And so I say, this is a really tough thing to think about from a science perspective. And I slept on it.
We talked. And then it hit me that I needed to stop thinking about all these different things. I was like, public health is what I know. And, you know, neuroscience. And so I took this different lens and I said, someone we have to talk to is named Beth. And I told them all about Beth. And I said, she's the person I would go to ask a bunch of these neuroscience questions about.
It's not just job, career, business. It starts in here. When we give, what happens? We know the dopamine, the oxytocin, you get like a runner's pie, like those sorts of things. But then that cascade event, because it actually improves your health. People who are truly generous have marriages that last longer. They're literally healthier and happier. The Harvard study is almost 100 years old now.
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Chapter 7: What lessons can we learn from Nicole's unpolished journey?
worked on what does the outline look like what is the book read is it a self-help thing is it like a business be successful climb the mountain the things felt exactly right they all felt like they were circling around the answer but none of them were like that's it we got it and then it bent and the idea was presented to us and we went yeah we get it
And it was, let's do something that I don't think has ever been done before, which is always scary, especially in the publishing world. They don't love the let's do something. They love painting. Yes. Yeah. And it said, why don't we write a business fable? Who moved my cheese? Some of those classics. But... You keep talking about all these people that you want to talk to and interview.
So why don't we use the real people? And it's an easy read. In fact, I've had multiple people tell me they knocked it out in two days. Yeah. Like they'd started on a plane and then they'd finish it the next day. Because it's a story. It's a story about a woman named Emily. And she thinks things are great in her career. They're not going. She thought it's a hard lesson.
But she's sent on this sort of work mission. And along the way, she... is tasked with interviewing people and she then discovers what like her real purpose is. And anyway, I won't give away the ending. So it's an easy read, but every person that Emily meets along the way is a real person. And what we did is we added a QR code at the end of each chapter.
So you can, it literally takes you to their LinkedIn page. So you can actually meet, talk to all the people who are in our book.
That's it for today. We've traced Nicole's unexpected path from neuroscience to human rights to public health. But there's more. In part two, we get into the backstory of her book, Generosity Wins. While the main character is fictional, but the lessons are real. and how a rain summit landed in the middle of Super Bowl weekend. It's one of the most creative takes on leadership I've heard.
Don't miss it. Thank you so much for joining us today. If you like what you heard, Don't forget, subscribe to our show, leave us top-rated reviews, check out our website, and follow me on social media. I'm Vince Chen, your ambitious human host. Until next time, take care.
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