Awaken Your Genius | Ozan Varol

Ozan Varol is one of the best "out-of-the-box thinkers" I have known and after reading his best seller "Think Like a Rocket Scientist", I started to follow his blog and weekly posts. I get new perspective from what he shares and this makes him one of my best authors. And here is the best book I read in 2024: Awaken Your Genius. No need for fancy introduction, you will understand why I love him so much after having a look at the quotes from his book below. So let's start...

Here’s the thing: No one can compete with you at being you. You’re the first and the last time that you’ll ever happen. If your thinking is an extension of you—if what you’re building is a product of your own genius—you’ll be in a league of your own. But if you suppress yourself, if you don’t claim the wisdom within, no one else can. That wisdom will be lost, both to you and to the world.

A genius, in the words of Thelonious Monk, “is the one most like himself.” Genius, in its Latin origin, refers to the attendant spirit present at birth in every person. Each of us is like Aladdin, and our genie—or our genius—is bottled up inside of us waiting to be awakened.

Once they awaken their genius, extraordinary thinkers share it with the world around them. They channel the energy that brought them into existence and turn it into the art only they can create. They don’t just resist or disrupt the status quo—they reimagine the status quo and change the foundations of what’s possible. In the words of Apple’s “Think Different” campaign, they’re misfits, rebels, troublemakers—round pegs in square holes.

But as Zora Neale Hurston wrote, “There is no agony like bearing an untold story inside you.” This book is here to help you uncover that story, tap into your inner wisdom, and give birth to your genius, your true self—the person you were meant to be.

So let’s stop asking, “What did you learn in school today?” That question perpetuates the outdated conception of education as an endeavor whose only purpose is to teach students the right answers.

Instead, let’s ask, “What made you curious today?” or “What questions are you interested in exploring?” or “How would you figure out the answers?” or any other question designed to get students to think for themselves and to put a question mark at the end of conventional wisdom.

If a child asks you, “How did the dinosaurs die?,” resist the impulse to launch into a lesson about an asteroid hitting the earth. Instead ask, “What do you think could have killed them? How would you figure it out?” When they give you an answer, ask them for more answers. Let them see that there’s often more than one way of framing the question and more than one possible answer to it.

“Every child is an artist,” Pablo Picasso purportedly said. “The problem is how to remain an artist once he grows up.” As student loans and mortgages begin to mount, we get stuck in old patterns and lose sight of the artist within.

As long as you’re reimagining the status quo—as long as you’re disturbing the peace, in James Baldwin’s memorable phrase—anything you do in your life can be art.

If you call your creations “content,” or if you refuse to think of yourself as an artist, the results will reflect that mindset. What you create will be ordinary.

Determination is meaningless if you’re repeatedly doing what’s not working or clinging to something long after it has outlived its purpose.

Make no mistake: Peeling back your old skin is painful and jarring. There’s a certainty to it. You’ve worn it for years, if not decades. It makes you feel safe and comfortable. Over time it has become your identity, so cultivating a new skin requires changing who you are.

Adding is easy, but subtracting is hard—really hard. When we’ve invested time and resources in building something, the sunk-cost fallacy kicks in and prompts us to stay the course. (I’ve spent two years on this project, so I can’t quit now!) We behave like a snake that stubbornly clings to its old, dead skin even as the new skin urgently tries to emerge.

If you keep that dead-end job that sucks your soul, you won’t find the career that allows you to shine and light up the world. If you keep reading a terrible book because you’ve already read the first few chapters, you won’t find that quake book that shakes you to your core. If you remain in a dysfunctional relationship because, despite all its failures, you’re still convinced you can “fix” the other person, you won’t find a relationship that feeds your soul.

As the saying goes, many a false step is made by standing still.

You can do what a snake can’t do: If you miss your old skin, you can put it back on. You can start over. For example, if founding a start-up doesn’t work out for you, you can go back to the corporate world. You’ll still have all the skills that made you successful to begin with, and now you’ll also have the benefit of a founder’s perspective. Returning to where you once were isn’t the same as never leaving. You’ll know you’ve found your place—even if that place is back where you began.

“What hurts a lot of people, particularly famous people,” Kobe Bryant once said, “is they start valuing themselves for ‘what’ they are, the way the world sees them: writer, speaker, basketball player. And you start believing that what you are is who you are.”

When our beliefs and our identity merge, we embrace a belief system simply to preserve our identity. Any attempt to change our minds—whether by ourselves or, worse, someone else—strikes us as a threat. When someone says, “I don’t like your idea,” we hear, “I don’t like you.”

A group of blind men come across an elephant for the very first time in their lives.6 Each man inspects this strange animal by touching a different part of its body. One man touches the trunk and says that the animal is like a thick snake. Another feels its side and describes it as a wall. Another touches its tail and says it’s like a rope. In one version of the parable, the disagreements reach a fever pitch. The men accuse each other of lying and come to blows. “It’s a snake, you idiot!” “No, moron, it’s a wall!”

The moral of the story is simple: Perception shapes reality. We don’t see things as they are. We see things as we are.

Remember Haruki Murakami’s advice: “To argue, and win, is to break down the reality of the person you are arguing against. It is painful to lose your reality, so be kind, even if you are right.”

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

There’s no such thing as a universal remedy. Even a “good” thing isn’t good for all people under all circumstances.

Janus was a Roman god with two faces. His superpower was his ability to look in different directions simultaneously. Independent thinkers act like Janus and can consider multiple perspectives at the same time. The goal isn’t to reconcile the contradictions or resolve the oppositions. It’s to embrace them. It’s to live with them. It’s to realize that light can be a wave and a particle. It’s to understand that a meditation practice that works wonders for one person can cause problems for another.

Free your mind (and the rest will follow)

When we operate at a fraction—at a 0.8 or a 0.2 instead of a full 1.0—we compromise the output.

Most of us go through life functioning at a fraction in everything we do. We check email during Zoom meetings. We shove a sandwich into our mouth with one hand while scrolling through our phone with the other. We check our email before we get out of bed and continue to check it more times than we realize (for the average American, the daily number is 74). On average, Slack users check their messages every five minutes—fragmenting their attention at an absurdly high rate. The irony of Slack is that it prevents people from having any.

When we work, we think about play. When we play, we think about work. We inhabit an in-between state—we’re neither fully here nor fully there. As a result, our output suffers. What we produce becomes less than what we put in. We achieve only an iota of our full capability.

“A wealth of information,” as Herbert Simon says, “creates a poverty of attention.”8 If your attention is fragmented and impulsively pulled in a million different directions, you won’t be able to remember much. You can’t make associations, connect dots, and form new insights. You can’t think.

Ask yourself on a daily basis: How do I want to use my most scarce resource today? Where do I want to direct my attention? Also ask, What am I paying attention to that doesn’t deserve it? While I pay attention to that, what am I not paying attention to?

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

Information is like food. Some of it is toxic.

If you consume junk, your life becomes junk. Garbage in, garbage out.

You might feel sorry for the senior citizen mindlessly pulling a slot machine lever for hours. But you’re doing the same thing every day on your smartphone. Every time you pull up your inbox or social-media feed, you’re pulling a lever. Our phones dangle intermittent love outside our cage like rat treats. The goods arrive, just like slot machine rewards, on an unpredictable schedule. We turn into digital vampires, feasting on our feeds and forever seeking the dopamine jackpot.

Remember Annie Dillard’s timeless wisdom: “How we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives.”

So let some of the ice cream melt—and let some bad things happen.

Here’s the thing: Something, somewhere is wrong all the time. So let some emails go unanswered. Let some people complain. Let some opportunities slip by. It’s only by letting the little bad things happen that you can accomplish the great things.

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

I came across this quote from an anonymous NASA employee in the terrific book The Art of Possibility. The quote resonated because we often do the opposite. We fight the alligators instead of crossing the swamp.

As Tim Ferriss writes, “Doing something unimportant well does not make it important.” What makes you a successful venture capitalist is the quality of the deals you close—not the number of your Twitter followers. What makes you a successful writer is the quality of your books—not how often you hit inbox zero. What makes you a great software engineer is the quality of your software—not the amount of time you spend in meetings. What makes your product successful is its remarkability—not the camera angle you use for the TV commercial promoting it. While we’re busy tackling small tasks that we’ve convinced ourselves we have to do, we avoid the more complicated projects that will take us to the next level.

Instead of asking, What’s most urgent right now?, ask, What’s the most important thing I could be doing? And why am I not doing it? Urgent, by definition, doesn’t last. But the important persists.

If you slow down, you won’t get left behind. You’ll use less energy, you’ll go faster, and you’ll go deeper. The pedal-to-the-metal mentality is the enemy of original thought. Creativity isn’t produced—it’s discovered. And it happens in moments of slack, not during hard labor. Taking your foot off the pedal can be the best way to accelerate.

A slogan commonly attributed to the Navy SEALs: “Slow is smooth, smooth is fast.”

One of the biggest lies we’ve been told is that productivity is all about doing. But your best work will come from undoing—from slowing down and giving yourself time and space.

Mother Nature is a great teacher. She obeys an ancient formula: Sit still. Wait for things to come. Trees don’t try to produce fruit year-round in an absurd attempt to be more productive. They lie dormant through the fall and the winter, shedding their leaves and conserving resources. You can’t make a tree grow faster by tugging on it or watering it more than the soil can absorb.

Visit ozanvarol.com/genius to find worksheets, challenges, and exercises to help you implement the strategies discussed in this part.

People often want to “aim for the biggest, most obvious target, and hit it smack in the bull’s eye,” the musician Brian Eno says. “Of course with everybody else aiming there as well that makes it very hard to hit.” The alternative? “Shoot the arrow, then paint the target around it,” Eno explains. “Make the niches in which you finally reside.”

You can’t be liked by all and disliked by none. If you aim for that unachievable objective, you’ll only reduce the force of your magnet—the very source of your strength. The only way to attract people who like purple is to show your purple.

Most of us have given up control—to recipes that other people use and to recipes we’ve used in the past. Process, by definition, is backward looking. It was developed in response to yesterday’s problem. If you keep doing what you’re doing—if you keep planting the lightning rod where lightning struck last—you will, at some point, stop being remarkable and lose what makes you great. Regaining control requires being intentional about what you do, instead of blindly copying what others are doing or mindlessly repeating what you’ve done in the past.

And being intentional requires knowing why you’re doing what you’re doing.

Instead of copying tools, tactics, and recipes, master the principle behind them.

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

Take a moment to tease out your own basic building blocks—the Lego blocks of your talents, interests, and preferences.

What makes you you? What are some of the consistent themes across your life? What feels like play to you—but work to others? What is something that you don’t even consider a skill—but other people do? If you asked your best friend or partner, what would they say is your superpower—the thing that you can do better than the average person?

Treat yourself like your financial investments and hedge your bets. Once you’ve figured out your first principles, mix and remix them. Pursue multiple interests. Diversify yourself. If you have a diversity of traits and skills that you can recombine and repurpose, you’ll enjoy an extraordinary advantage to evolve with the future.

Diversifying isn’t octopus-like color shifting—changing who you are to blend into your environment. It’s stepping into the fullness of you—all of you. It’s understanding that you are an unfinished, and unfinishable, human being. To think that you are only one thing—that there is a single, static you—is inconsistent with the very nature of a life, where you learn from each experience and evolve.

If you put a seed upside down in the ground, the sprouting plant will right itself. Roots know which direction they need to point in order to grow and will turn themselves until they get there. But unlike plants, most people who know they’re pointed the wrong way will still keep growing in that direction simply because that’s what they’ve always done. As a result, they end up living a life out of alignment with who they are.

Ask yourself: What do I want from my life? What do I really want?

Deciding what you want can be incredibly hard, particularly if you’ve spent your life—as most of us have—going along with what others want for you or chasing what you’ve been told you should want.

Be careful about chasing moments that make you feel happy.

If you pursue only happiness, you won’t ever leave your comfort zone. Because stepping outside your comfort zone is, by definition, uncomfortable.

Also ask yourself, In my ideal life, what does a Tuesday look like? That’s a question I learned from acting teacher Jamie Carroll. It’s easy to dream about the Saturday night moments: getting promoted, booking an amazing acting role, or landing a book deal. But those moments are few and fleeting. The rest of the time, it’s the Tuesdays—the everyday.

Finally, consider your life’s purpose. What is your “why”?

If there’s any formula I’ve followed in my life, it’s this: Stop overthinking and start experimenting, learning, and improving.

Experimenting beats debating. Action is the best teacher. You can make all the pros-and-cons lists you want, but it’s hard to know what will work and what won’t work unless you try.

When will the experiment end? “Someday” isn’t a good answer. Pick a firm date when you’ll evaluate whether the experiment is working and put it on your calendar. It’s much easier to start things than to end things, so it’s important to have an exit plan.

We want to be chosen by the people who were chosen before us. We want the external validation, the pat on the back—the gold medal. We let someone else determine whether we’re good enough. Once we get approval, life becomes a tightrope to not lose that approval.

“I have made the most wonderful discovery,” Napoleon is purported to have said. “Men will risk their lives, even die, for ribbons!” We focus on collecting ribbons—social-media followers and impressive job titles—forgetting that vanity metrics rarely move the needle on what matters. We seek applause instead of improvement. We pursue goals that are unaligned with ourselves. We play meaningless games and win meaningless prizes.

The more we value vanity metrics, the more we fear failure. The more we fear failure, the more we strive for guaranteed success. And the more we strive for guaranteed success, the more we color inside the lines and the less remarkable we become.

A simple question for you: Is this within my control?

So ask yourself: What does “enough” look like for me? How will I know when I get there? The beautiful thing about “enough” is that defining it is up to you. Once “you decide you have enough, then you do,” as Seth Godin writes. “And with that choice comes a remarkable sort of freedom. The freedom to be still, to become aware and to stop hiding from the living that’s yet to be done.”

Ask for it. Create it. Because the best things in life aren’t on the menu.

“I don’t have time to think” really means “Thinking is not a priority for me.” A commitment to deep thinking is shockingly rare even in professions where the value of original ideas is clear. But shallow thinking produces shallow ideas—along with bad decisions and missed opportunities. Breakthroughs don’t happen in 60-second bursts of thought between meetings and notifications.

Ideas, as the filmmaker David Lynch puts it, are like fish: “If you want to catch little fish, you can stay in the shallow water. But if you want to catch the big fish, you’ve got to go deeper.”

Underlining or highlighting passages in what you read isn’t enough. It’s also not enough to ask, What does the author think? You need to also ask, What do I think?

Where do I agree with what I’m reading? Where do I disagree? Just because Gordon Wood wrote it doesn’t make it right—and his perspective certainly isn’t the only one. In addition to reading between the lines, also write between them—scribble in the margins and hold imaginary dialogues with the author.

The goal of reading isn’t just to understand. It’s to treat what you read as a tool—a key to unlocking what’s inside of you. Some of the best ideas that come up when I’m reading a book aren’t from the book. An idea I read will often dislodge a related thought in me that was previously concealed. The text will act as a mirror, helping me see myself and my thoughts more clearly.

If you stay focused for too long, your thinking will stagnate. So follow a period of focus with a state of unfocus. Let your mind wander. Don’t turn to social media or email, which won’t give you the break you need. Instead, stare out the window, take a shower, listen to music, or meditate.

My high school soccer coach had a saying that I love: If you’re not in possession, get in position. If you don’t have the ball, move to a different place on the field where you’ll be open to receive the ball. The same principle applies to ideas.

A terrible idea is “often the cousin of a good idea, and a great one is the neighbor of that,” as Astro Teller says.

There’s a reason why the best artists of the Renaissance went to Florence. And there’s a reason why Newton needed input from his friend to finalize his theory. “If I have seen further,”

Newton famously wrote, “it is by standing on the shoulders of giants.”

Find or create your own Florence—your own community of the un-like-minded who can help you spot the big fish swimming in your depths.

Stop fishing for support. And start farming for dissent.

We don’t stop playing because we grow old; we grow old because we stop playing.

—UNKNOWN

If you want unconventional results, pick an unconventional name. Find your own words that ignite your imagination and prime you for what you’re trying to achieve.

Because that’s you in the corner.

And that’s you in the spotlight.

Playing this game of life.

The key is to forget the noun and do the verb instead.

You are a terrible judge of your own ideas. You’re too close to them to evaluate them objectively.

“Care about other people’s approval, and you become their prisoner,” as Lao Tzu writes in Tao Te Ching.

In life, there’s no one-size-fits-all timeline. “It’s never too late to be who you might have been,” as George Eliot purportedly said. So honor where you are right now and how far you’ve already come.

My battery is low and it’s getting dark. Those were the final words of the Martian rover Opportunity, as reported by numerous media outlets. The rover, lovingly nicknamed Oppy, fell silent in June 2018 after getting stuck in a massive dust storm. NASA officials beamed up hundreds of commands to the little rover, asking it to call home, but with no success. Oppy was officially pronounced dead in February 2019.

Here’s the problem: The story is false.

Right before it went silent, Oppy beamed a bunch of routine code to Earth that reported, among numerous other things, its power levels and the outside light reading. A journalist—who didn’t let facts get in the way of a good story—took a small part of this random code, paraphrased it into English, and tweeted to the world that these were “basically” the rover’s last words.

Millions of people then hit the retweet button and a chorus of media outlets published stories about the rover’s final transmission—all without pausing, contemplating, or bothering to ask, “How does a remote-controlled space robot spit out fully formed English sentences designed to tug at people’s heartstrings?”

What author Jonathan Swift wrote in the 18th century still applies today: “Falsehood flies, and the truth comes limping after it.”

Instead of asking, “Does anyone have any questions?,” I began to say, “I’ll now take your questions,” or even better, “The material we just covered was confusing, and I’m confident there are plenty of you with questions. This is a great time to ask them.”

My reframed question made it easier for students to raise their hands. It made it clear that the material was difficult and I expected questions. With this reframing, my desired outcome (more questions from students) became the norm, not the exception.

If you’re not inspired by life, you’re not paying attention.

—IN-Q, “ALL TOGETHER”

Talent hits a target no one else can hit, but genius hits a target no one else can see,

“Knowing how to look is a way of inventing,” as Salvador Dalí put it.

Think for yourself, or others will think for you without thinking of you.

—UNKNOWN

To paraphrase Haruki Murakami, if you consume what everyone else is consuming, you’ll think what everyone else is thinking. If you head over to the White House with a thousand other journalists to get the same answers to the same questions, you’ll write the same story as everyone else.

Extraordinary ideas often grow out of overlooked ideas. And overlooked ideas don’t make a grand appearance on the front page of the New York Times.

It’s only through the inconvenient that you’ll find diverse inputs that will expand your thinking and spur your imagination.

The George Clooney effect: For some things in life, aging is more of an asset than a liability.

This is a mantra that Amazon’s Jeff Bezos lives by. “I very frequently get the question: ‘What’s going to change in the next 10 years?’” he observed. “I almost never get the question: ‘What’s not going to change in the next 10 years?’” It makes more sense to invest in what’s not going to change—what people will still care about and will still use even 10 years from now.

Original doesn’t mean new. “It’s not where you take things from —it’s where you take them to,” as Jean-Luc Godard says. Once you put your own take on existing ideas—once you bring your own quirky perspective to them—they will be original. No one can look at the world through your two eyes. “Write one true sentence” was Ernest Hemingway’s remedy for writer’s block.14 It’s also the key to finding your voice. If you speak your truth—if you share what you really see, feel, and think—it will be uniquely yours.

So don’t just ask, “What’s new?” Also ask, “What’s old? What will still be around 10 years from now?”

If your goal is to create ideas that last, remember the George Clooney effect: Focus on things that age well.

Not I, not any one else can travel that road for you, you must travel it for yourself.

—WALT WHITMAN, “SONG OF MYSELF”

Keep in mind: What’s called the “industry best practice” isn’t necessarily the best practice. It often consists of people putting extra armor in the most obvious spots.

“Be careful when a naked person offers you a shirt.”

The best way to escape comparison is through authenticity. “Authentic” has become so overused that it has lost much of its meaning. When I say authentic, I mean living a life according to your own metrics, not someone else’s. If you’re pursuing your own goals—and avoiding ego-driven vanity contests—comparison becomes futile.

In fact, the more unique your life is, the more comparison loses its meaning. If you crave what others also crave, you’re more likely to get caught up in a rat race. There are a limited number of rungs on that corporate ladder, so someone else’s gain becomes your loss. But if you invent your own ladder—if you’re pursuing an idiosyncratic bundle of activities—then it becomes harder to make an apples-to-apples comparison.

There’s a logical fallacy called post hoc, ergo propter hoc. That’s a fancy Latin phrase that means “After it, therefore because of it.” A person did a, b, and c and became a billionaire. Therefore, a, b, and c must have led to their success. Not necessarily. Other factors like x, y, and z could also be the cause.

Remember: The best advice doesn’t dictate precisely what path you should take. Instead, it helps you see the many possible paths ahead and illuminates what’s in your blind spot—so you can decide what to do yourself.

Life is a dance, but it can’t be choreographed. It requires leaning into curiosity about what will come next instead of demanding that the dance conform to our carefully scripted steps. When we attempt to force outcomes and next steps—when we try to predict what can’t be predicted and when we try to control what can’t be controlled—we get tangled up and can’t tango on.

The future favors the open-eyed and the open-minded. If you don’t stick to your script—if you let go of what you expected to see and open your eyes to what’s actually there—you’ll notice what you’d otherwise miss.

One must have chaos in oneself to give birth to a dancing star.

—FRIEDRICH NIETZSCHE, THUS SPOKE ZARATHUSTRA