MBS965- Think Like a Rocket Scientist with Ozan Varol

In this episode, Matt is joined by rocket scientist Ozan Varol. Ozan is a rocket scientist turned award-winning professor and author.A native of Istanbul, Turkey, Ozan grew up in a family of no English speakers. He learned English as a second language and moved to the United States by himself at 17 to attend Cornell University and major in astrophysics. While there, he served on the operations team for the 2003 Mars Exploration Rovers project that sent two rovers–Spirit and Opportunity–to Mars. He built stuff that went to the red planet and wrote code that snaps photos of the Martian surface.Fortunately, you don't have to be a rocket scientist to think like one as this episode provides you with some practical tips that you can use in your daily life.

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Transcript

SPEAKER_01 0:00

And there is so much unknown, right? Because no one no one has done this before. No one has landed on that particular spot before. So we don't know exactly how it's gonna look like until we actually get there. And so then what do you do? Well, instead of solving the problems that we want it to solve, that we expect it to solve, you'll learn how to solve the problems that Mars throws at you. Um and and so I think right now with what's going on with COVID-19, if the pandemic has disrupted your business, what you're doing, you should ask yourself, how can I solve the problems that the world needs solving right now, as opposed to the problems that I want it to solve? How do I use my skills, products, services in a way that I haven't used them before to solve the problems that currently exist in the world?

SPEAKER_06 0:53

Hi there guys, today we are joined by Ozan Barol. He is a real life rocket scientist, and he's also the author of a book called Think Like a Rocket Scientist Simple Strategies You Can Use to Make Giant Leaps in Work and Life. Now Ozan reveals uh the habits, ideas, and strategies that will apparently empower you to turn the seemingly impossible into the possible, and he is the walking uh example of this. He actually worked on the rover mission in 2003 that put two rovers on the planet Mars, and he was intimately involved in actually coding the operating system of the rovers themselves. But rocket science is often celebrated as the kind of ultimate triumph of technology, but in reality it's not really the case. Instead, it's the apex of a certain thought process, a way to imagine the unimaginable and solve the unsolvable. It's the same thought process that enabled Neil Armstrong to take his giant leap for mankind that allows spacecraft to travel millions of miles through outer space and land on a precise spot. And that brings us closer to colonizing other planets. Today in this episode, we dive into some practical aspects of Ozan's book Nine Simple Strategies from Rocket Science that you can use in your life today and in your business today that can really help accelerate your business, learn a new skill, or create the next breakthrough product. Pay careful attention, guys, to a part of the show where we have a live dial in from a chap called Declan out in KZN. He asks a quite a thought-provoking question. So without further ado, let's get on with the show. Hello, ladies and gentle fiends. We are live again right here on the Map Brown show. It's been a bit quiet the last week. I have my uh 41st birthday coming up. I'm getting old, uh, but welcome to the show today. Um, mate, uh, why don't you uh give us a quick intro? His name is Ozan Verol. He wrote this book, Think Like a Rocket Scientist, Simple Strategies You Can Use to Make Giant Leaps and Work in Life. Uh so uh why don't you give us a quick 30-second rundown? Who are you? What are you about, and uh what do we need to know? What's the headline here?

SPEAKER_01 3:10

Yeah, you're asking me? Yeah, Suzanne Verrol, yeah. Okay, sure, sure, sure, yeah, yeah.

SPEAKER_06 3:13

You're the rocket scientist, bro.

SPEAKER_01 3:17

Just making sure. Yeah, um, so I was, let's see, born and raised in Istanbul, um, became a rocket scientist, worked on the operations team for the 2003 Mars Exploration Rovers mission, and then did a 180, went to law school, became a law professor. I did that for 10 years, and then I pivoted again and became an author and keynote speaker and and blogger and and all of that. Uh, and then I have a new book out called Think Like a Rocket Scientist: Simple Strategies You Can Use to Make Giant Leaps in Work and Life.

SPEAKER_06 3:50

Amazing stuff. Um, so rocket scientist turned author, you don't get uh that uh very often. Um can you describe a bit more for us, or could you speak to some of the rocket scientist type work you were doing? Uh it's not often you meet uh someone you know who does work on rockets and that kind of stuff. So, what were you doing exactly?

SPEAKER_01 4:12

Sure. So I was an astrophysics major in college, and then I worked on the operations team for what was later called uh the 2003 Mars Exploration Rovers mission. So that mission sent two rovers, their names were Spirit and Opportunity to Mars in 2003. And being on the operations team meant doing everything from you know helping pick landing sites for the two rovers, um, designing operation scenarios as to what was going to happen after the rovers landed on Mars. Um let's see, I coded the um the algorithms that would be used by the rovers to snap photos of the of the Martian surface. Yeah, so it's just a little bit of everything that goes into the the planning of the of the mission. We had uh we built the rovers to last for 90 days, and uh Spirits lasted for about six years, and then opportunity, and I still get goosebumps every time I say this, but opportunity lasted for over 14 years into its into its 90-day mission, uh making it one of the most successful interplanetary missions of all time.

SPEAKER_06 5:20

Jeez, how does it make you feel to be part of something like that? That's got to be you know right up there with one of your great, well, if not the greatest achievement, right?

SPEAKER_01 5:29

Yeah, no, it's it's a it's a once-in-a-lifetime experience, especially since there's such a stark contrast between where where I came from and then where I ended up.

SPEAKER_03 5:38

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 5:38

You know, I I grew up in I grew up in very humble economic circumstances in in Istanbul. Um, and I dreamt about you know becoming a part of a Mars mission and maybe even becoming an astronaut one day. Uh and then, you know, fast forward um some years later, and uh all of a sudden I have front row seats to the action. Um yeah, so it was it was incredible. And uh it you know, it dates back to I uh remember when I was like I think three or four years old, we'd get blackouts really frequently where we lived. So the electricity would go out at night, and these would just terrify me. And so my dad came up with this game. He would grab my soccer ball, um, he'd light a candle, and then he'd rotate the soccer ball around the candle to show me how the earth rotated around the sun. Uh, really simple way to like distract me, but those also ended up being my first astronomy lessons, and I was hooked. And my parents, you know, inculcated this belief in me that regardless of where you're coming from, there's really no limit to what you can do. If you want to become an astronaut one day, go for it. You know, they never said, Oh, you can't do that, that's out of reach for you. Um, you know, stop the crazy talk or anything like that. They just got out of my way and allow me to uh pursue my curiosity and just pursue my own self-driven nature, and that eventually led me to work on the Mars mission.

SPEAKER_06 7:05

Yeah, that's incredible. Uh, I watched an incredible documentary about I think I think it was Voyager, Voyager 1 and Voyager 2 from 1977 or thereabouts, uh, where um it was basically you know the technology that was available at that time. And I think it's Voyager 1 or 2. I'm not sure you can correct me here or maybe provide the the truth around the matter, but that spaceship is still going, right? It's still sending stuff back, or is it completely out of our communication range now?

SPEAKER_01 7:33

Yeah, I think that's right. Uh I think the Voyager 1 mission is like expected to continue until 2025 or something like that. It's pretty incredible.

SPEAKER_06 7:44

It's crazy, right? I mean, we did we had black and white TVs back then. You know what I'm saying?

SPEAKER_01 7:48

Yeah.

SPEAKER_06 7:48

Uh we didn't have we didn't even have smartphones. And that's still it's credible if you think about it. Um the relationship, or at least I in a sp looking at you know the very limited understanding of space travel and the thinking that goes into putting something like Voyager into uh into space or even you know, Rover, the missions you worked on to put them on Mars, like the thinking that must go into something like that should be truly remarkable. Um and I suppose this is a probably a good segue to kind of bring your book into this, right? To think like a rocket scientist. Um, because if you think about the amount of thinking that goes into pulling off that's truly remarkable that hasn't been done before, uh Elon My SpaceX, you know, and and and you know, um the mining of asteroids for new minerals and things like that. Like what? You know, um, and there's so much that the ordinary man in the street, man and woman in the street, uh, doesn't know about the thinking that goes into this these incredible feats. Um, and so I guess we have to ask you about your book. I mean, uh, I'm gonna bring it up on on screen here for everybody. Uh, this is available on uh Amazon, and as I said, think like a rocket scientist, simple strategies you can use to make giant leaps and work in life. Because that's kind of like a great headline, by the way. You know, um, thank you, you know, uh, you know, giant one giant leap for mankind, you know, small step for man, all that kind of stuff. So uh I think there's a lot for us to get into here, but what was the spark for you that kind of you were like, you know, I've done this stuff, I've done rad stuff. This is the book that people around the world need to read. Where did that journey start?

SPEAKER_00 9:24

Stay with us, we'll be right back.

SPEAKER_06 9:28

Hey there, I know being an entrepreneur can be a very lonely experience. You sometimes get stuck, don't you? Well, if you're like me, being stuck sucks. But what if you could access the minds of over 850 CEOs who have built companies generating billions of dollars in revenue and access all of that knowledge in a fraction of a second? Well, the good news is you can't literally do that today. What my team have built is Matt Brown AI. It is trained on all the interviews, over 850 of them that I've done to date, all my books, all the knowledge capital that has been generated over the last 10 years right here on the Matt Brown show. And you can get access to all of that right now for free. So, how do you get access to this? Well, head on over to mattbrown show.com and at the top you'll see community. Hit that link, sign up, it's absolutely free, and you'll be given instant access to Matt Brown AI and a community of over a hundred thousand subscribers.

SPEAKER_01 10:28

Yeah, so um so people find rocket science is very intimidating, right? Hence to saying it's it's not rocket science or it's rocket science. And the science behind rocket science is really intimidating, it's really complicated. So I wanted to write a book not about the science, but about strategies that anybody can understand and anybody can use from rocket science to make giant leaps in their in their work in life. And that's been the story of my life, really. You know, after I left rocket science, I took what I learned: the critical thinking skills, the ability to deal with uncertainty, the ability to deal with failure, um, the ability to make decisions under uh complicated circumstances. I took all of those skills and began to apply them in other fields like law and business and saw how widely applicable those strategies were. But there's such a disconnect between what rocket scientists have figured out and what the rest of the world does. And so I wanted to write a book that that bridges that gap. Um, and I opened the book by telling the story of President John F. Kennedy stepping up to the podium in September 1962 at Rice University Stadium, and he pledged to land a man on the moon and return him safely to the earth before the decade was out. Now, at the time, going back to some of what you were saying, Matt, with respect to Voyager, like at the time, a mission to the moon was quite literally a moonshot. People on the audience thought that thought that JFG was crazy. Um, officials at NASA thought he was out of his mind because so many, so much of what would be required to actually put someone on the moon just hadn't even been invented yet. Like, no American astronauts had worked outside of a spacecraft. Two spacecraft had never docked together in space. Uh, NASA didn't know if the if the lunar surface was solid enough to support a lander, if the communication system would work on the moon. JFK said some of the metals required to build the rockets hadn't even been invented yet. We we just jumped into the cosmic void and hoped that we grow wings on the way up and grow those wings we did just seven years after, less than seven years after Kennedy's pledge, Neil Armstrong took his giant leaf for mankind. And just to put that in context, a child who was six years old when the Wright brothers took their first power flight, which lasted like 10 seconds and uh moved about a hundred feet, would have been 72 when flight became powerful enough to put a man on the moon. That and that is a giant leap taken within a 66-year um lifespan. And that's within a human lifespan, right? That's that's a lifetime right there. And you go from Wright brothers to Neil Armstrong. And a lot of people would attribute that that accomplishment to the triumph of technology, but really it wasn't. It was the triumph of a certain thought process that rock scientists use to turn the seemingly impossible into the possible. And and I wanted to, having been inspired by that uh and having applied that thought process to so many diverse fields, I wanted to write a book about it and share that thought process with the rest of the world.

SPEAKER_06 13:42

That's amazing. It's cool. Um, I would have to ask you uh probably quite an obvious question here, because some people will say, you know, a rocket scientist, I'm not a rocket scientist, you know, I'm gonna the devil's the protagonist, yeah. They all go, listen, you know, I am just an ordinary guy who, you know, got a C at school. I ain't I ain't gonna I don't care what's in this book, rockets, I just will never think like a rocket scientist. Um uh how do you make something intangible tangible through practical sort of steps or strategies, as you say? I mean, can you maybe share maybe one or two examples of how a rocket scientist would tackle uh you know uh an ordinary common day thing like failure? Stay with us, we'll be right back. Hey there, I know being an entrepreneur can be a very lonely experience. You sometimes get stuck, don't you? Well, if you're like me, being stuck sucks. But what if you could access the minds of over 850 CEOs who have built companies generating billions of dollars in revenue and access all of that knowledge in a fraction of a second? Well, the good news is you can't literally do that today. What my team have built is Matt Brown AI. It is trained on all the interviews, over 850 of them that I've done to date, all my books, all the knowledge capital that has been generated over the last 10 years right here on the Matt Brown Show. And you can get access to all of that right now for free. So, how do you get access to this? Well, head on over to mattbrown show.com and at the top you'll see community. Hit that link, sign up, it's absolutely free, and you'll be given instant access to Matt Brown AI and a community of over a hundred thousand subscribers.

SPEAKER_01 15:34

Sure. So uh with respect to failure specifically, uh, I think right now we have like two extreme approaches to failure. One is to really fear failure so that it becomes paralyzing, right? Because you can't even get started on your project. You know, if you're thinking about launching a business, for example, you can't do it because the fear of failure is so strong. All of those questions like what happens if I fail? What happened, you know, will people point and laugh? What if I make a fool out of myself? All of those questions stop you in your tracks. So that's one extreme. Fear of failure. The other is the celebration of failure, which is on the opposite side of the extreme, and it's really popular in Silicon Valley. It's become uh, I don't know, quite quite popular to celebrate failure, I think to a dangerous degree. Um, companies in in Silicon Valley are now holding funerals for failed startups, complete with like bagpipes and DJ spitting records and alcohol flowing freely. I mean, it's it's it's and and there are now conferences dedicated to celebrating failure. If you pick up a you know, a typical business book, you'll get all this advice about how you should celebrate failure and fail fast and fail often. And I don't buy that either. Neither do rocket scientists. Um, because when you're celebrating something, you're not learning from it. Um and research bears this out, by the way. When people fail, often they'll just blame other people or other things instead of saying, okay, you know what? I that was a bad decision. That was a mistake I made. Let me learn from that, and so I don't repeat it the next time. And so you've got these two two extremes of of celebration on the one hand and then just fear, extreme fear on the on the other one. And I think those are both unhealthy reactions. Rocket scientists take a more balanced approach to to failure. So for them, the goal is not to fail fast, but to learn fast. Um the goal is because they know, you know, in rocket science, and this is true across the board, regardless of what industry you're in, all breakthroughs are evolutionary, not revolutionary. If you're trying to achieve something transformative, you're not gonna succeed on the first try. So Einstein's first several proofs for E equals MC Square failed. Um Thomas Edison famously said, I haven't failed, I just found 10,000 ways that won't work. SpaceX, you mentioned uh you mentioned them before, Matt, um, you know, their first three launches were spectacular failures. The company was on the verge of bankruptcy in 2008 when its fourth launch succeeded. But if you're learning from each failure, if you're doing that sort of soul searching after you fail, and then you're learning from each mistake, it's it's incredible what you're able to accomplish in the long term. So that's one example of how a rock scientist would approach a modern-day problem like failure. And it would happen through this learning lens and also with a with an eye toward the long term. Uh so part of the reason why failure hits us so hard is because we're so focused on short-term outcomes, right? We're we're we're we wanna we wanna a silver bullet, we want something that's gonna work right away so we can start reaping those rewards tomorrow or a month from now or a quarter from now. This is why companies are chasing short-term quarterly outcomes. Politicians chase, you know, short-term electoral outcomes. But if you're able to calibrate your view, your perspective toward the long term, just like JFK did, you know, looking just to the end of the decade, seven years from down, seven years down the road. It's and if you just calibrate it just a couple of years down the road, um, and and you make a point to learn from the inevitable failures that happen along the way, it's it's incredible how far you can go.

SPEAKER_06 19:35

Yeah. Because I believe that all growth is compounded, and learning I'd put into that that same that same frame. It's like, okay, you put a you know, a thousand dollars into um a stock market, whatever that is for you, uh the Nasdaq, whatever it's like, it's gonna compound. It's compounded interest, it's like one of the most powerful forces in the world, right? And so if you take that principle and you shove it into the learning space, that's kind of what you're saying, right? It's kind of like your ability to compound learning through failure is actually what makes you successful at the end of the day. And there's so many parallels uh with what you're describing to you know my audience, which is largely entrepreneurs and business leaders and things like that. Um, you know, if you consider something like the learning graph and what is success and what is failure. I mean, you know, success you know, four months ago is very different to success now, you know, you know what I'm saying? So thanks to C19 and what have you. Um and I wanted to kind of piggy just piggyback on your idea of learning um and the relationship of the rate of learning to success and failure. If you think about uh you know succeeding at something, like a rocket scientist trying to like the rover mission, right? Putting a rover on on Mars. There's lots to get into here. But success uh did that teach you much? Because success really was it was the small successes that put the rover on the moon. But did you learn more from failing in the process of iterating through a number of successes?

SPEAKER_01 21:02

Oh, definitely. I think um I think failure can be the best teacher if you know how to approach it properly. Um and we don't approach it properly. So you mentioned your audience is mostly entrepreneurs, Matt. I I said a research study in the book show uh comparing the failure rates, or I'm sorry, I should say the success rates of first-time entrepreneurs versus failed entrepreneurs. So entrepreneurs who had previously failed in business and then they go out and start a new business again, and comparing the the success rates of those, and the rates are virtually identical. Um so entrepreneurs who started a business before and failed at it do no better at launching another business compared to first time entrepreneurs who've never tried it before. Um and it's because when we fail, we don't ask ourselves the questions that we need to be asking. Uh so for failure, and failure, by the way, can provide you invaluable. Data. And it's data that your competitors don't have. But often that data gets concealed because we create a work environment where people are punished for failing. And there is a difference, by the way, between, you know, when I when I mention failure to executives, sometimes they'll they'll balk and say, well, you know, if we tolerate failure, then we'll create this culture of anything goes, then it'll be okay to fail all the time. And that's not what I'm talking about. There's a difference between sloppy failures and intelligent failures. So sloppy failures happen because someone just didn't care. And it's it's sort of like making the same mistake over and over again. That's sloppy. And you don't need to tolerate that. But intelligent failures, those happen when you're building things that may not work, when you're trying things that haven't been tried before. Um and those failures have to be tolerated. Because if you if you send a message that even intelligent failures are not going to be tolerated in your organization, then you're going to create a toxic environment where people are not willing to take healthy risks. They're not willing to try new things. And by the way, when they do fail, when they do make a mistake, they'll end up concealing it. Uh, because they'll know that, you know, if you if you fail at something, then you're going to be shown the door, you're going to be demoted, or you're going to be penalized in some fashion. And so that data that you would otherwise get from failure ends up being concealed because you haven't created the the right environment for um for that failure to be shared with the rest of the organization. So astronauts are a good counterexample to this. You know, they every time a mistake happens, they document it. Uh, everything is documented in this the this master document called Flight Rules at NASA. Uh how what what happened exactly, how they dealt with the problem. I mean, there's days of debriefing when an astronaut returns to Earth from space, and the the goal is to uncover every single thing that went wrong or every single thing that could have gone wrong and learn from it and document it so that when it happens again, other astronauts know how to respond properly. Uh so if you can create an environment in your business like that where people are taking healthy risks, and when when they do fail, they're willing to actually come out and and share that failure with the rest of the team so the team can learn as a whole, uh you will uncover incredibly valuable data that otherwise would remain concealed.

SPEAKER_06 24:36

Yeah, it's so much to get into around this. Um, I want to ask you about uh the culture of the I'm gonna I'm gonna call it the Rover Project, right, from 2003. Um how can you speak to the culture? I know you you're kind of talking about failure and you know, sloppy failure versus intelligent failure, being able to accept intelligent failure and embrace that and uh almost incentivize that to some extent. Um more broadly, like on top of that, what other attributes of the culture of the Rover mission made it successful?

SPEAKER_00 25:14

Stay with us, we'll be right back.

SPEAKER_04 25:17

We were hiring when we were making 50 to 100k monthly losses. And why? Welcome to episode one. I can't think of a single founder who's been around for a decent amount of time in business who hasn't had their tunnel of year. This was that year. We're gonna be okay, yeah, Sherry. Uh some are gonna hear this and think you TDP. But hear me out. You only have to do the math to understand that very soon we were half a million dollars down.

SPEAKER_01 25:50

Yeah, that's a great question. Uh so in addition to learning from failure, and we failed a lot a lot, even before I got on board. I mean, the my boss, who was the principal investigator of the mission, you know, he submitted proposals for this Mars mission for 10 years, uh, failing and failing and failing. But each proposal was better than the one they came before it. And and eventually his his mission was chosen uh to go to Mars. So and so he very much brought that um that mindset into the group, and he led by example. Um so that was part of it. The other part of it was to create, and I think this is directly applicable to businesses too, to create this this environment of cognitive diversity. Um what do I mean by that? So you have different people in the room, scientists, engineers, uh, and the rovers, by the way, are so complicated that there isn't like a single person that understands how they work. They're they're very much a part of a collective mindset and you understand how they work collectively. Um and scientists and engineers, uh, just to give a little bit of background, I mean, they tend to butt heads quite a bit because their priorities are different. So scientists tend to be the idealistic truth seekers, right? They are trying to uncover scientific truths and then they tend to be more sort of dreamy uh and more idealistic as compared to the engineers who tend to be more pragmatic uh because they have to contend with like constraints, budgetary constraints, technical constraints. They have to actually build the equipment that will take the scientific data that the scientists are looking for. And if you create, if you don't create the right environment, the relationship between scientists and engineers on a mission can turn sour very quickly. Uh, because again, they're they're built to pursue or they're trained to pursue slightly or actually dramatically differ different ends. And so if you don't create the right environment for them to communicate with each other, then that relationship can go sour really fast. And so in a business, this can be like the um, you know, the marketing people and the product people, they also might be butting heads. So one of the things that my boss did really well was to create an environment where the scientists and the engineers got along so well. Uh, it ended up being like a really happy, healthy marriage, and that certainly contributed to the success of the mission. So, what was the secret for doing that? Well, he basically um told the engineers that they had to learn some science, and he told the scientists that they had to learn some engineering. Um, and so he created this environment. Uh it required people to switch perspectives and look at the mission and look at the world if you're a scientist through the engineer's shoes, and vice versa. Um, and that ended up being really, really um helpful in in so many different ways. I mean, if you walked into like one of the team meetings and just sat in and listened for a few hours, it'd be hard for you to tell which people were the scientists and which people were the engineers. Because they were so well versed in the in each other's language, they were so uh well trained to see the world from different perspectives that it would it just became this really fluid work environment where um the the total really became more than the sum of its parts. Uh, and that was you know directly as a result of of the leadership that that my boss Steve Squires put forth and really trying to create this environment where not only failures are being shared, but also the team being able to look at the issue from from a dramatically different perspective.

SPEAKER_06 29:50

I got uh quite a few questions here. I've got one from Tabo Makama, more like he's saying it's just probably it's a bit late now, kind of you know spoken a little bit further on, but you want to bring it in here. He says, would just making it in this current challenging time be seen as a measure of success, quote, survival success. Um what's the relationship do you feel to C19 context to rover? Because if you think about it, you don't really get do-overs, right, in the rover space. It's kind of like we need to pull this off, and we've got to be. I don't know whether you guys had unlimited budgets, probably not. I don't think that sort of thing really existed apart from you know the 1960s moon the story uh from JFK. Obviously, he was like, We pay for the thing, whatever it costs. Right. Uh stick it to the Russians. Um and um, but uh, but certainly, you know, it's the survival mindset, right? I think the survival mindset is a terrible mindset to have ever, like ever. Um, I keep I did this talk to my whole team uh whole company uh on Monday last week about the about fixed mindsets versus growth mindsets. So a fixed mindset believes that it's all IQ, right? So I I either I'm very intelligent and the because the level of my IQ will then determine my success, and as an example, there's other things, but that's one. And then there's the growth mindset, which is actually about well, it's about how much effort I put into something. And the more effort I put into something, the more time I spend on something, that is the mindset that will make me successful. And my my success is directly, you know, and inextricably linked to that idea. So if you think about all the work and the thinking that goes into putting a rover on the moon, which is what you did, that's totally growth mindset, right? It's about accepting failure, embracing failure, and using that to then you know move the needle forward. Uh what are your what's your view around mindsets, fixed mindset, growth mindset, survival mindsets, C19? What does the rocket scientist have to say?

SPEAKER_01 31:50

I think uh growth mindset is extremely important. Uh so is being willing to embrace and dance with uncertainty. And I think that is directly relevant to what's going on right now. I mean, that's the the the world is just in this state of constant change and enormous uncertainty. Um and there is so much of that in rocket science. Um, so I'll give you an example and then and then share some tactics for how you can take how rocket scientists approach uncertainty and apply them in your own life. Uh so with the rovers, for example, that we sent to Mars, we had some idea. So they ended up going to two very different landing sites on Mars. They were like on the opposite sides of the planet. We had some idea of what to expect from the landing sites, having seen photos from orbit that were taken from orbit. But where we landed ended up being just completely different from what we expected. Um and there is so much unknown, right? Because no one, no one has done this before. No one has landed on that particular spot before. So we don't know exactly how it's gonna look like until we actually get there. And so then what do you do? Well, instead of solving the problems that we want it to solve, that we expect it to solve, you'll learn how to solve the problems that Mars throws at you. Um and so I think right now, with what's going on with COVID-19, if the pandemic has disrupted your business, what you're doing, you should ask yourself, how can I solve the problems that the world needs solving right now, as opposed to the problems that I want it to solve? How do I use my skills, products, services in a way that I haven't used them before to solve the problems that currently exist in the world? Um, so with the rovers, for example, God, so many things went wrong. Like Spirit's front wheel got stuck at one point, uh, there was a malfunction with it, and then the navigators just figured out how to drive the rover backward for the rest of its mission. Um, Curiosity, which was another rover that I did not work on, but the drilling mechanism on the rover broke. Um, and then the engineers on the ground figured out a new way to drill using the existing uh components on the rover. They tested the system on Earth, they beamed up the commands to to the rover on Mars, and it worked beautifully. Uh, I think many of us get stuck on, you know, here is here are the tools in front of me, and these are the tools I'm gonna use, and these are the problems I'm gonna solve. And then the the universe throws a cosmic curveball at you instead of adapting and changing, instead of driving your your own proverbial rover backwards, we just get stuck with what we did yesterday. We don't change at all. Uh, so that's the fixed mindset, right? We're we're sort of like we're doing what we did yesterday because that's what we've always done. Instead of being more versatile and agile and saying, all right, let me just take the tools in front of me and put them to uses that that haven't in a way that I haven't used them before. Um and that ability, I think, to say, yeah, the world is an uncertain place, and I'm not gonna try to control what cannot be controlled. Instead, I'm gonna focus on what is mine to shape, and I'm gonna do it with a growth mindset and and use my tools and resources in a way that I haven't used them before. I think the businesses and people that are able to do that um have an just an extraordinary advantage to to define the future.

SPEAKER_06 35:29

Yeah, I agree with you. And that's come up in my show loads, by the way, that I think I speak about that quite a lot around, you know, what because the thing is when when stuff goes south that's out of your control, it's like that those are the things that really hit you, right? In in in the uh in the goads, right? But um, but you know, when it goes right, then everything, everything's great. It's but it's like when it goes wrong and it's not in your control, that's the issue. If it's in your control and then you can take accountability for it, it's like, well, I mean, the Mars, it like it got its wheels stuck. That whose fault was that? It was no one's fault. There's nothing you can do about it. The obstacle is the way you have to go through and push through, you know what I'm saying? Like the only way then is through. Uh, there is no go back. And I think that's that's a really important point. You mentioned this idea of cognitive diversity earlier, um, Ozan, um, and this was uh from Debbie on Facebook who says everybody wants to talk about diversity and inclusion, but the concept of cognitive diversity scares the hell out of people. Uh, anyone with new ideas or who has questions is perceived as a threat and ultimately iced out. What do you think about that?

SPEAKER_01 36:38

Yeah, um, that's a great question and a and a difficult one to to answer here. So cognitive diversity is extremely important, and yes, it does scare people. Um, in part, well, there are a couple of reasons for it. One, you can't really quantify it, um, you can't really measure it in a in a substantive way, so that means it gets ignored. Um and and as you said, or as a question or asked, it also the people who raise their hands and offer a contrary viewpoint, um, then get shunned. And and if you do have a toxic environment like that, if you are in a workplace where like people are unwilling to raise their hands and share a dissenting opinion, um, I mean, that is a recipe for long-term failure. Um and and you know, like NASA fell victim to this with the Challenger and Columbia space shuttle disasters. In both cases, there were engineers that raised their hands. Um, so talking about cognitive diversity, they raised their hands and said, There's something wrong here. I'm not gonna go into the technical details, but in both missions, there were people, engineers on the ground raising their hands and saying we need to do something about this problem. Uh, just six months before the Challenger disaster in 1986, an engineer wrote a memo saying that if we don't fix this issue, the result is gonna be a catastrophe of the highest order, the loss of human life. But his memo was ignored by the managers. Uh, the manager said, Look, we've been really successful. And as long as we repeat the same process that led to success in previous missions, nothing can go wrong. And all of these ascenting voices were completely, uh, completely silenced. So I think the takeaway from this is uh we need to work to create workplaces where where people feel psychologically safe. Um, and that's the term I'm getting from Amy Edmondson, who's a professor at Harvard Business School. So psychological safety is really important to building a team of cognitive diversity. And by the way, the first time I heard the term, I like dismissed it as new age fluff. Like it just, you know, the whole concept of psychological safety brought to my mind of like people just gathered around the conference table and holding hands and sharing their feelings. And that's not what it's about. Uh, it's basically about the ability to create an environment where people are willing to raise their hands and say, hey, this is a blind spot. This might go wrong. This is an assumption that's outdated. Um, and so if you are in a workplace that doesn't have that kind of culture, well, what can you do about it? Um well, there's a number of things. If you're in a leadership position, I think leading by example becomes really important. Uh, there's a bunch of research studies in the from the medical context where actually this is from Amy Edmundson again, where she studied um surgery teams. And the surgery teams that tend to perform better are led by surgeons who actively say, you know, I'm gonna make mistakes. Uh and here's how I failed in the past, by the way. Uh and when when you see something, I need you to tell me. I want you to tell me, because I am not invincible here. Um, those teams ended up performing a lot better. And there's so many examples of this across the business world, too. Um, the the example that popped to mind is from Sarah Blakely, who is the uh the founder and CEO of Spanx, the underwear company. She went from selling uh fax machines door to door to becoming the world's youngest self-made female billionaire. And one of the things she does at new employee orientations is to share her mistakes and failures with the new employees um to create that environment of psychological safety and say, hey, look, I am going to fail. I am not a god. Um even in you know, even if people might put me on a pedestal, I am not divine. Uh, and here's how I failed in the past. And so when you do fail, I want you to share with the rest of the group. And when you see something, say something, right? Raise your hand. Um, and then following through on that, of course, right? Not just giving lip service to tolerating dissent, but actually valuing those opinions. If you're able to create a work culture like that, I mean your business will will um will go much farther than than uh than a toxic environment which inevitably ends up generating a catastrophe.

SPEAKER_06 41:20

How's it guys? Just a quick one to say. Did you know that due to COVID-19, that the small business sector in South Africa is currently at risk with close to five hundred and twenty-five thousand formal SMEs locally, employing six point six million people. These businesses are at greater risk today than ever before. You know, as a community, we need to do as much as we can to help SMEs succeed and survive during this time. And to this end, I've decided to give away three copies of my number one Amazon best-selling book, You're in the Game Today, which shares the twelve principles that high-impact entrepreneurs, billionaires, and world champion athletes use to overcome the impossible and achieve the extraordinary. If you'd like to get your hands on a copy or maybe share a copy with an entrepreneur that you feel could benefit from this incredible story, please head on over to mattbrownshow.com, hit the your inner game link, put in your details, and we'll deliver a digital copy to you instantly. And for more information, guys, about the book and more developments around the Matt Brown show, head on over to Matt Brownshow.com. Cool, I've got uh the studio lines going nuts here. I've got Declan on the show. Well, he's wants to chat to you, so I'm gonna phone him. There he is, yeah. Declan Hello mate, how are you? Yeah, good, thank you. I've got uh Ozan Verole on the line all the way from uh where in the States are you anyway?

SPEAKER_01 42:59

I'm in Portland, Oregon.

SPEAKER_06 43:00

Portland, Oregon, okay cool. So Declan, where are you? Um and then yeah, what's your question for Azan?

SPEAKER_05 43:06

I'm in um Hilton in South Africa. And um I actually have two questions. Yeah, and this is this is too fast in in a way. So you're the diminishing to returns to how fast one can go.

SPEAKER_01 44:11

Okay. Uh great question. Um so there is definitely something to be said about speed um and becoming action-oriented. And that's certainly the mindset that rocket scientists take, right? You can sort of come up with all the theory you want, but you actually have to build the equipment and then test it out in the in the real world. And that's no different than like building a prototype for a product or building an app and actually launching it. Um so there is definitely something to be said about speed. I do think that speed and in this quest to just like um hustle and you know get get get the app launch as fast as possible, there's definitely room for sloppiness to creep into the mix as well. So I think you're right to be on edge in the in the sense that like, you know, things are going well, uh, but that doubt should always be there, right? Uh especially when things are going well. Um it's it's harder often for a business to survive its own success than to survive its failure. Um because when we succeed, when things are going well, we're you know, popping champagne corks, lighting cigars, we're we're in the celebratory mode, and we're not doing the sort of soul searching that's required to actually learn from success. Um we talked about learning from failure, but learning from success is is just as important uh because it's possible for you to do some things wrong and still succeed. It's called getting lucky, right? You make a bad decision, you launch an app, but you still you still succeed. Uh, but you may not, but just because you're in a hot streak doesn't mean you'll beat the house. And so if you are in the celebration mode and you're not really looking back and at the successes you've had and asking yourself, what went right with the success? Certainly you should ask that question. But also what went wrong with the success? What was what was a mistake we made here? Uh and the goal should be to identify those what I would call like small stealth failures that tend to get masked or concealed by the glory of success. But if you don't do something about them, if you don't identify them and fix them, over time they can snowball into something that that you can't control.

SPEAKER_06 46:29

Great. Declan, do you have another question?

SPEAKER_05 46:33

Yeah, so um so the last question is a bit more of a personal one. The rest of the team um should be listening. Is we with your typical university made story where we got together, this would be a cool idea. Um making an income from it. So we have to register the company. And maybe we get to that difficulty where we have to deliver the company monthly. It gets to that difficult point of where someone has been uh than others, some people are more valuable than others. Um and yeah, how do you have that how do you have that conversation? Because it's gonna happen this Sunday.

SPEAKER_06 47:23

Yeah, no pressure, good luck with that, bro. Can I take that one, Azan? Do you mind? Sorry. Usually this is a getting brown question.

SPEAKER_01 47:31

Uh yeah, yeah, yeah. Please do, Matt. Yeah, please do.

SPEAKER_06 47:34

Thanks, Did. So um so basically, uh you're never gonna get to sit. Well, if you're lucky, first option will be if there's four of you, 25% each, and you just agree that that's where it starts. Um, and then you put a shareholder agreement in place that then determines, well, based on certain deliverables, you know, uh you'll be able to at the end of the year certain shares become available, and depending on who's done what, you get to buy a bigger share of the business based on literally a share swap. So that's one way to do it. The other way to do it is to literally say 100% of the company is owned by nobody, uh, it's owned by a trust or something like that. Um, and then what you do is you kind of reverse the same process. You say, Cool. So here's here is the kind of value uh deliverables or deliverables that essentially create quantifiable value for the business, and then you and then you weight them. So then basically, let's just say Declan does three out of the five, you would get a certain percentage. If somebody else does five out of five or seven uh things, it goes above and beyond, then at the end of the year um you basically get uh uh an equity share that's relevant to the value of each person within the business. The other way to do it is that you say 50, you know, go, let's just say you know, four of you, so forty percent of the business will be allocated in shares, and the other sixty percent will be put into a share table. Then basically you have to work your ass off to get the access to the other sixty percent. Do you see? So it's all basically around and actually you can probably even weigh in here around like what you've done specifically, right? Um uh around incentives to get people to create as much value as possible. I think that might be a way a way to start. But but Declan, I think that's probably where or how I would do it, right? Because otherwise you must just be equals up front and then you go with it that way. So, but look, at the end of the day, as you say, uh value is different. Like Azan is a rocket scientist, Matt Brown is very different to him, you know, and and likewise, if you were a business partner of the three of us, like your value would be different. So you need a way to measure that and actually extrapolate that or connect that to a shareholder value, I would say.

SPEAKER_05 49:43

Okay. Thank you very much.

SPEAKER_06 49:47

Thanks, Declan. Thanks for your for calling in or taking my call. Great.

unknown 49:51

Okay, cool.

SPEAKER_06 49:52

Thanks for that, man. Cheers, dude. Good luck on Sunday. Tell them what I told you. Thank you for letting me go. All right, cheers, man. Bye. Yeah, we get a lot of that stuff. Um, so I have to ask you um about this idea of IQ versus EQ. So one of the things that um, you know, it's like IQ's great, right? It's just it's nice to be smart, but there's different degrees of smart, and it's actually how you like apply that in certain contexts that matters. So like recognizing when like in sales, recognizing when someone is not going to buy from you, you know, or when to push hard versus when to back off. So be able to read a room, uh, someone's body language, their tone, you know, and and to to get them to starting line. It's it's all EQ in a way. What is the relationship now, being the IQ guy? Uh if you have these incredible ideas, right? And you and you're battling to get these ideas sold, because either you're being sold to or you're being sold, right? So um, so I hope I said that the right way. So you're either selling or someone selling you, so that's probably a better way to say it. Um, so if you have these great intelligent ideas like uh Declan there, and you know, these four guys got together, they have this an idea, there's an app to do something. We'll have to figure that out. Um, and then in a later show, but EQ is the thing where it really starts to then leverage, right? What have you learned about the relationship between IQ and EQ?

SPEAKER_01 51:23

Yeah, they can be mutually exclusive. So a lot of really high IQ people don't uh you know score very low on the EQ EQ scale. And I think the the people who are able to marry the two, uh, those are the just the transformational leaders. Um, you know, I gave the example of my boss Steve Squires, but he was an incredibly smart guy, but his EQ was also off the charts. Um, he had a way of seeing other people's perspectives uh and recognizing them. I mean, he's the best boss I ever had. I remember uh when I first started working on the mission, he he had received some award, uh like an important award, uh, for a mission that another mission that he had worked on. Um and he uh he crossed out his name on the award and wrote in the names of the team members who worked on it and gave the award to them. Uh and so someone like that, man, there's just like I'd do anything for him. Um, and so so being able to marry the two is really important. And this is really important in business as well. You can build the perfect product, but if you can't look at your product from the perspective of your of your customers, of the people that you're trying to serve, then you're not gonna get very far. Uh, and I see this in business all the time. There's such a disconnect between the the products that the businesses are are producing because they're so focused on you know PowerPoint decks and projections and forecasts, they lose sight of the people that uh that they're supposed to serve. Um you know, I tell the story of uh uh IDEO, which is a design firm, um, and uh they were called to revamp the patient experience at this hospital. Um and as you know, hospitals are like they're supposed to nurse patients back to life, but they tend to be just soul-sucking places. Like they're just white rooms and lit by these headache-inducing fluorescent lights. And so when idea was brought on to improve the patient experience at this hospital, they actually um they uh the the final product, or one of the components of the final product that they gave back to the hospital was a six-minute video clip. And the clip showed nothing but the ceiling of a hospital room. Um and and the the idea designer said, you know, when people check into your hospital, this is what they look at all day. And it's a really shitty experience. And they, you know, and it's so obvious, right? Of course, you look at a hospital ceiling all day. Uh, but the way they figured it out was one of the designers actually checked into the hospital as a patient and documented the entire experience on video camera. And so this was one example of literally walking in your in your in your customers' shoes, in the shoes of the people that you're serving. And that one video clip was enough to spring um hospital executives into action. They like decorated all the ceilings in the in the hospital rooms, they put rearview mirrors on stretchers so that the patients could speak and could see the doctors and nurses that are wheeling them around. They put up like whiteboards for visitors to leave messages for the for the patients. And so when we're so stuck in our own perspective, when we don't have uh when we're scoring low on the EQ scale, it becomes so hard to lose sight of other people's perspectives, and it becomes so hard to see somebody else's else's truth. And so here's an exercise you can do to be able to boost the EQ of your team. Um, you know, suppose you're you're building shoes. Ask yourself why are people justified in buying the shoes of our competitors? And really like get into the shoes of the people who refuse to buy from you and who instead, you know, if you're Nike, they buy from Adidas. Ask yourself why are they making that choice? It's not because they're stupid, it's not because they're wrong and you're right. It's because they see something that you're not seeing. It's because they believe something that you don't believe, it's because they're telling themselves a different story. And you're not gonna be able to change that story through PowerPoint presentations, you're not gonna be able to change that story by throwing data at people. You're only gonna be able to change that story if you switch your perspective and look at the world um from from from from your consumers.

SPEAKER_06 56:01

Um, I think that's such a an important point, right? Because your perspective isn't true, it's just a perspective, and equally the same as it's you know, it's like uh I think it was uh Howard Mann, he runs a business turnaround uh business in New York. He was on the show um about a year ago now, and he basically said, Look, when you're stuck inside the bottle, you can't read the label. And you know, if you're trying to solve these hard problems, like we all are as people, it's like you know, in your case, you're trying to put Rover on Mars, it's a bliming hard thing to do. Um in many cases, it's like it hasn't been done before, like SpaceX, blah blah. And also in the space of entrepreneurship, we're always trying to find a gap in the market, we're trying to commercialize that gap. And what that means is we have to solve a problem. So it's all about problem solving. And life is actually one big problem, and then you die, and you've got to figure out how to solve those problems and in such a way that it creates value. And when you figure that out, then you'll always be well, might be broke for a period of time, but you always have cash, and that's kiff for me. Like I love that idea uh quite a lot. Um, because then if the business fails, it's fine. Just start another one, yeah. You know what I mean? Like just be relentless and unreasonable with yourself around your capacity to create things. Uh, but as you say, it comes down to you know your ability to to um to recognize the perspective that counts. Uh, and so it's like, you know, it's it's it's so important because sometimes you can't see through the bottle at the problem. You need to share with someone and say, Hey, I actually need help here. Like Declan. He couldn't see through the bottom, the he couldn't read the label, he was stuck inside. What should I do on Sunday? Well, I've got these idea are we gonna do? I don't know how to do this meeting. I know it's probably gonna go badly, you know what I'm saying? Uh so he the perspective was the one that we gave him, right, on that problem. And it's it is all about looking for the perspectives that you don't see, right? That's that is that is where you find the breakthrough. Is that your experience?

SPEAKER_01 58:00

Absolutely, and this is why so many of the transformative companies in the modern world are led by outsiders. So, like Elon Musk, for example, was an outsider to to the space industry, to the aerospace industry, and that it can he could see he came from, you know, he co-founded PayPal and um he learned rocket science by reading textbooks. Uh and he was able to see so many of the outdated assumptions that all of the established players were were taking for granted. Um, Jeff Bezos started Amazon, he was in the finance world before. Uh Reed Hastings, um, the co-founder of Netflix, he was a software developer before he he disrupted the the video rental industry. Um and so outsider perspective is is so, so, so important. And this doesn't have to be like an expensive consultant that you bring in. It can be as simple as asking someone who's on a different division in your company or asking someone who, you know, just a friend who knows nothing about your business to come in and ask you questions. Uh so tell them what you're doing and ask them for feedback. And it's amazing how we tend not to do that because we're like, well, they don't know what they're talking about, right? They haven't built an app before, they haven't launched a product like this before. But it's precisely because of those reasons that their opinion is is so valuable because they can see things. You're too close to the problem often as an expert to think differently. But an outsider can come in and ask those what we call pejoratively call dumb questions that are actually not dumb at all. They go to some fundamental aspect of the problem that you're working on. Um, and allowing room for that to happen is is just incredibly valuable. Um, one of my favorite examples of outsider perspective is uh J.K. Rowling, the author of Harry Potter, when she first submitted the first Harry Potter book to publishers, the publishers were unanimous in their opinion. They all thought the book was not worth printing. Until the book landed on the desk of Nigel Newton, uh, who's the head of Bloomsbury Publishing in the UK, and he saw promise in the book when others had missed it. And his secret was his eight-year-old bookworm daughter, Alice. Uh Nigel ended up bringing a chapter from Harry Potter home and just gave it to Alice to read. Alice took the the chapter to her room, read it, came back down and said, Dad, this is so much better than anything else I've read. And that input from an eight-year-old convinced Nigel Newton to write a check for£2,500 to J.K. Rowling to acquire the rights to publish Harry Potter. And this, by the way, is like probably the best bet made in publishing history because J.K. Rowling is now a billion-dollar author. And it's all because Nigel Newton was willing to get the perspective of somebody who's an outsider to the publishing industry, but who is part of the target audience that the book is is supposed to be for.

SPEAKER_06 1:01:13

Yeah, totally. Um, except when it comes to opinions, though, because that's the thing, also, people always tell you why it won't work, you know what I mean? So you have to be careful about who you get whose opinion you want, because um, you know, it's like that context you gave, it's like, well, I'm a publisher, I'm not the audience here, I'm gonna give this thing to my eight-year-old, whatever. And so I got that's okay. Looking to get an opinion about an idea that you have or whatever, like no one's gonna tell you you suck to your face, you know. Um, and so, or that the idea they're gonna go, yeah, yeah, go, Johnny, go and do your thing, you know, and then at the end, like, but then they've that the kids are gonna fail, you know what I mean?

SPEAKER_01 1:01:52

So, you know, but like so so one one thing I do that that's that's a great point, and one thing I do to prevent that from happening when I'm trying to get honest, raw feedback is to tell people, and I did this with my book. I gave early drafts to trusted friends and I said, tell me what's wrong with this. Like, I don't need to know what you love, I don't need you to, you know, to to cheer me on. That can come later. I need to know what's wrong with this, what I need to take out, what doesn't make sense. Tell me the flaws in this book. Um, if you don't do that, then yeah, you you tend to get the yeah, go do it, go launch that business or write that book. Um, you need to be proactive about giving people, and these need to be trusted people, right? I'm not just asking strangers on the street. These are people whose opinions I value. But then I took the additional step of actually affirmatively asking them to share our disagreement.

SPEAKER_06 1:02:43

Yeah, totally agree. I will say this though, lions don't listen to the opinions of sheep. Think about that. Um, and then uh I wanted to uh just two more questions and I then we've got to wrap up. Uh, long-term thinking versus short-term thinking. So, like, you know, the Rover project ran for how many years? It was kind of like all this work to get up to the big show there, you know what I'm saying? When you put the rocket into actual space, it's like years of work. Um, and so um, what's the what have you learned about long-term thinking versus short term thinking uh and the dynamics between the two? Um, what have you learned there? Is one better than the other? Should both be worked at the same time? Yeah. Should we be using one versus the other?

SPEAKER_01 1:03:25

I think most of us would benefit from recalibrating our thinking towards the long term because I think just looking at the world around me, uh, there's too much short-term thinking going on. And and the actions that are most valuable tend to be a little bit painful in the short term, but tend to pay off in spades in the long term. And I think the people and businesses who get ahead in life are willing to endure some pain in the short term uh because their time horizon is much longer than everybody else's. Um and so I think we could use a lot more long-term thinking. I mean, this doesn't mean you don't do any short-term planning, but again, just looking at the world around me with so many people chasing silver bullets, so many companies just looking at the next quarter as opposed to five years down the line. Um, and those businesses and people tend to fizzle out, and the ones that survive are willing to calibrate their thinking for the long term.

SPEAKER_06 1:04:17

Yeah, great. I I totally agree with you. It's like the short wins, short-term wins, you know, to get to the long-term picture. I don't know. I don't know. I think I think yeah, I it's you know what it is there, it's because of social media, it's instant gratification. It's like, okay, cool, I'm gonna order Ubi Eats by the time I hang up this this video conference with you, it's gonna be at the door. You know what I'm saying? We've just been conditioned for everything to be instant. And that's actually a big problem with young entrepreneurs, is that they they think that you know they read a magazine. This is another thing. You mentioned Silicon Valley, it's like, you know, if you if you read Entrepreneur Magazine and it's like yeah, from zero to a billion dollars in like six months, you know, and you only see the headline. You don't like it, maybe not in six, they go from like zero to three hundred and fifty billion or whatever, you know, and it's like the headline, and then you don't know that it took them 15 years to make a quick buck, you know what I'm saying? So it's like, and then when you start the business, you're like, yeah, but I've been doing this for a year, why am I not rich?

SPEAKER_01 1:05:14

You know, the glass reflects more than it reveals. Um, we see the final product, but not the messy reality behind it. Um, and and I think, yeah, that's that that whole thing about like clickbet headline, and I see this with authors too. Um, they're like, well, how do I how do I become a New York Times bestseller? And it's like, well, that that requires years of work, years of building platform. You know, my email list, I I was writing a new article every week for the first year. Uh, and I think at the end of year one, I had 800 subscribers. Uh and then people are reading these articles, like, oh, how to get to you know, 50,000 subscribers in six months, and it's like, ah, probably not gonna happen. Um, but if you're if you're looking the right now, I have close to 25,000 people on my email list, and that's that's been three years. So the growth has been exponential. But initially, in the short term, if you're just looking at it for a year, it's really, really slow. Um, it takes really long for for people to to achieve success in life, but everybody's talking about their success. And so you're not seeing the the messy reality, the mistakes, the failures, the face plants that happen um on the road there.

SPEAKER_06 1:06:30

Totally agree with you. I mean, no one listens to this show. It's been five years. I'm still going at it. Uh dear. So listen, uh, let's wrap this up. Uh Ozan, why do you do what you do? Like, what gets you out of bed in the morning?

SPEAKER_01 1:06:45

My goal, my life's purpose is to help people and businesses reimagine the status quo, question conventional wisdom and find uh a better way forward. Um and and so that is what gets me up in the morning. That's also the filter that I use for any decision I make. Like if if some offer comes in, regardless of how lucrative it might be, if it's not gonna move the needle on that mission, then the answer is is a no. Um, yeah, so that's my North Star. Amazing stuff.

SPEAKER_06 1:07:20

So there you go, guys. Uh, that concludes this edition of the Map Brown show. Go and check out Think Like a Rocket Scientist by uh Ozan uh Verrill on Amazon. Uh I'm definitely gonna read this one, dude, and then I'm gonna hit you up uh with some more questions. But uh listen, thank you really. It's been a privilege and honor to to have you on the show and to get your perspective. See what I did there uh on uh on the world of uh of rocket science and life. So thank you uh for for your time today, and uh very importantly, thank you to all of you who've been tuning in uh alive on social media and who've joined the studio line. It's been uh great to have you here, and uh without you the show would not be possible. So thank you guys once again, and we'll see you again soon. Cheers. Thanks for listening to the MapRound show, guys. Don't forget, you can catch me on all social media platforms for the latest updates, news, and a show history. So if you've been catching this on the podcast, please head on over to our YouTube channel and pound that subscribe button. It would be great to catch the video version there. And if you want a free copy of my number one Amazon best-selling book, Your Inner Game, for free right now today, you can grab that on mapbrownshow.com forward slash ebook. Ever wanted to become a best-selling author? Well, I'm in the influence business and I work with business owners and CEOs and business leaders to help them scale their influence. And we do this as a team by helping you to become a best-selling author, sought after speaker and industry influencer in only 30 days. My team and I have developed a system that delivers a best-selling book and a launch campaign 300% faster and a 50% less cost than anyone else in North America. This system is incredibly efficient. One of my clients, haiku, went from a 2% share of voice globally to an 11% share of voice globally in only seven days. If you'd like more information, head on over to showworksmedia.com for more. That is showworkswithinx.com. Ever wanted to become a best-selling author? Well, I'm in the influence business and I work with business owners and CEOs and business leaders to help them scale their influence. And we do this as a team by helping you to become a best-selling author, sought-after speaker and industry influencer in only 30 days. My team and I have developed a system that delivers a best-selling book and a launch campaign 300% faster and a 50% less cost than anyone else in North America. This system is incredibly efficient. One of my clients, haiku, went from a 2% share of voice globally to an 11% share of voice globally in only seven days. If you'd like more information, head on over to showworksmedia.com for more. That is showworkswithinx.com.