Awaken Your Genius: Escape Conformity, Ignite Creativity, and Become Extraordinary

By Ozan Varol

A genius is the one most like himself.—THELONIOUS MONK

What lies behind us and what lies before us are tiny matters compared to what lies within us.—HENRY STANLEY HASKINS

Introduction: It’s Time to Wake Up

“Most people go through life walking through the most convenient door. We follow the path of least resistance and get pulled around by strings we didn’t attach. But those doors may not be the best ones for you. There’s immense power in intentionally creating and opening the doors that accommodate you—instead of shrinking yourself in order to squeeze through the ones already there.”

We sleepwalk through life. 

We get stuck in our rehearsed way of operating in the world. We choose things out of habit, not desire. We reaffirm the same beliefs, think the same thoughts, and make the same choices that lead to the same outcomes. 

In a very real sense, our past becomes our future. What we chose earlier dictates what we do today. 

We drag ourselves into the same predictable tomorrow by reliving yesterday. 

The price we pay for living in this world is betraying who we are—and disconnecting from the genius within. 

Inside you is a vast reservoir of untapped wisdom. 

The first part, The Death, is about eliminating who you are not, so you can begin to discover who you are. Here you’ll enroll in a school of unlearning. 

The second part, The Birth, is about finding your way back to the real you. You’ll learn how to discover your first principles 

The third part, The Inner Journey, is about igniting your creativity. In this part, I’ll explain how to think for yourself, create original ideas, and make something out of nothing by tapping into your inner wisdom and mining yourself for insights. You’ll learn why creativity is less about forcing ideas to come and more about unblocking obstacles that prevent their natural flow. 

The fourth part, The Outer Journey, is about exploring the outer world and finding the balance between what’s inside and what’s outside. I’ll reveal my approach to filtering information and detecting bullshit. 

The fifth part, The Transformation, is about your future. I’ll reveal why life is a jungle gym, not a ladder, how planning can blind you to better possibilities, and how to start walking before you see a clear path. You’ll learn why your safety net might be a straitjacket, how letting go can be an act of love, and why a life lived carefully is a half-dead life. 

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. 

 

We sleepwalk through life. We get stuck in our rehearsed way of operating in the world. We choose things out of habit, not desire. We reaffirm the same beliefs, think the same thoughts, and make the same choices that lead to the same outcomes. 

 

In a very real sense, our past becomes our future. What we chose earlier dictates what we do today. We drag ourselves into the same predictable tomorrow by reliving yesterday. 

 

We say that some people march to the beat of a different drummer. But implicit in this cliché is that the rest of us march to the same beat.

 

Deep down we know we’re destined for more—that we weren’t put on Earth to do what we often do.

The price we pay for living in this world is betraying who we are—and disconnecting from the genius within. 

 

Inside you is a vast reservoir of untapped wisdom. 

 

You are made up of every experience you’ve had, every story you’ve heard, every person you’ve been, every book you’ve read, every mistake you’ve made, every piece of your beautifully messy human existence. Everything that makes you you—a huge treasure waiting to be explored.

 

All that wisdom is concealed under the masks you wear, the roles you play, and the decades of social conditioning that have taught you to think like your teachers, to think like your parents, to think like your tribe, to think like influencers and thought leaders—to think like anyone but yourself. 

 

As a result, we become strangers to ourselves. Many of us go from birth to death without knowing what we really think and who we really are. 

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. 

 

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.

 

By genius I don’t mean great talent or intelligence. 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. 

 

Re-examine all you have been told in school or church or in any book, dismiss whatever insults your own soul. —WALT WHITMAN 

 

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?” 
• “What questions are you interested in exploring?” 
• “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. 

 

“Every child is an artist,” Pablo Picasso purportedly said. “The problem is how to remain an artist once he grows up.” 

 

2 Discard 

Every act of creation is first an act of destruction. 

—ATTRIBUTED TO PABLO PICASSO 

 

The skin you live in 

• The snake is the ancient symbol of transition. Unlike human skin, the skin on a snake doesn’t grow as the animal grows. During its lifetime, the snake’s insides outgrow its outsides, and the animal reaches a point where it must discard the older skin in favor of the new. 
• This process is uncomfortable. The snake rubs and scratches until it’s able to literally crawl out of its old skin. When the snake succeeds in completing the process, a new vibrant skin emerges in place of the old. But when the snake fails to shed its skin, it can grow blind and die. 
• Over the course of my life, I’ve worn and shed many skins: Rocket scientist. Lawyer. Law professor. Author and speaker. 
• Each transformation was preceded by an uncomfortable feeling that something wasn’t quite right. I’d make some adjustments here and there, but there came a point where my old skin couldn’t sustain my inner growth. What once made sense no longer did. 
• To discard was to temporarily lose my balance. But not discarding would have meant losing myself. 
• We often mistake ourselves for our skin, but our skin isn’t us. Our skin is just what we happen to be wearing right now. It’s what suited us yesterday. Yet we often find ourselves unable to leave what we’ve outgrown. We stick to a job that’s great on paper but soul-sucking in practice. We remain in a dysfunctional relationship, refusing to recognize that it’s not working out. We sacrifice the possibility of what could be for the self-constructed prison of what is. 
• When you’re not changing who you are, you’re choosing who you are. The decision to remain the same is a choice—and it’s not the natural one. Our physical skin changes every month or two. But the skins made up of our beliefs, relationships, and careers are far more sticky. 
• What you did yesterday doesn’t have to control what you do today. 
• We crave what we don’t have, but we fear losing what we do. 
• If you’ve been successful on a path you’ve outgrown, you’re up against another formidable foe: your ego. The part of you that gets off on titles, pay raises, and accolades 

 

Your desperate ego will ask, If I stop doing this thing that I’ve been doing for years, if I abandon the title of lawyer or senior director, what will I lose? More importantly, who will I be? 

But there’s another, more important question you should be asking: 

What will I gain if I let this go? 

• Many of the positive impacts in my life have come from subtractions, not from additions. I’m more proud of what I have stopped doing than of what I have done. 

 

You are not your identity 

I have already lost touch with a couple of people I used to be. 

—JOAN DIDION, SLOUCHING TOWARDS BETHLEHEM 

 

• Brick by brick, we build an identity for ourselves that defines what we can do, what we can believe, and what we can achieve in our lives. We then expend an extraordinary amount of energy defending and maintaining these identities. 
• Our identity is a construct. It’s a story we tell ourselves, a narrative we craft to make sense of our selves and our place in the world. We then become a prisoner to this narrative, constricting our thinking and adjusting our behavior to fit our identity. Our language often reflects this inflexible posture. “I’m a Democrat.” “I’m a Republican.” “I’m vegan.” “I’m Paleo.” 
• We confuse identity with self, but identity obscures the self. Identity tricks you into believing that it is you when identity prevents you from becoming you. You are not your diet. You are not your political party. You are not your résumé or your LinkedIn profile. You are not the house you own or the car you drive. To describe yourself with a single, fixed identity is to insult your vastness and conceal and suppress the multitudes within you. 
• We end up serving our identity rather than changing our identity to serve us. Our narratives become self-fulfilling prophecies. 
• The fewer labels that follow “I am . . .,” the more freedom you have to step into who you are. This is what Buddhists call unbeing—dropping the veil of identity so that your true self can emerge. “To become no one and anyone, to shake off shackles that remind you who you are, who others think you are, 

 

To give birth to yourself—to the person you were meant to be—you must forget who you are. 

You are not your beliefs 

You’re going to find that many of the truths we cling to depend greatly on our own point of view. —OBI WAN KENOBI,

• Facts don’t drive our beliefs. Our beliefs drive the facts we choose to accept—and the facts we choose to ignore. 
• 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.” Criticism turns into verbal violence, and simple disagreements become existential death matches. 

 

A group of blind men come across an elephant for the very first time in their lives. 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. 

• Now when I disagree with someone, I try to take a different approach. Instead of immediately assuming they’re wrong and I’m right, I ask, 
  • What would have to be true for their perspective to be accurate? What are they seeing that I’m not seeing? What part of the elephant am I missing? 

Research shows that the more we try to convince others, the more we convince ourselves— and the more rigid our beliefs become. Instead, the goal should be to understand and get curious about the other person’s view of the elephant—to try to figure out what they are seeing and why. “Tell me more” instead of “You’re wrong and here’s why.” 

• 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.” 
• Every time you spot a new perspective, you change how you see the world. The world itself hasn’t changed. But your perception of it has.

 

The beauty in complexity 

Out beyond ideas of wrongdoing and rightdoing, There is a field.
I’ll meet you there. —RUMI, “A GREAT WAGON” 

 

I see you 

• Sawubona is a standard Zulu greeting.
  But its meaning goes far deeper than your typical hello. Sawubona literally means “I see you.” It refers to seeing in a more meaningful sense than the simple act of sight. 
• Sawubona means, “I see your personality. I see your humanity. I see your dignity.”
• Sawubona says you’re not an object to me. You’re not a transaction. You’re not a title. You’re not just another person standing in line between my Starbucks macchiato and me. You’re not the jersey you’re wearing or who you voted for in the last election. 
• You exist. You matter. You can’t be reduced to a label, an identity, or a tribe. You’re a memory to someone. You’re a living, breathing, imperfect human being who has experienced joy and suffering, triumph and despair, and love and grief. 
• The traditional response to sawubona is ngikhona. It means “I am here,” but its meaning also goes deeper: “It tells the observer that you feel you have been seen and understood and that your personal dignity has been recognized.”
• When we feel understood in this way, we vibrate on each other’s frequency and see each other’s perspective, instead of moving past it. 
• Sawubona doesn’t involve any grand gestures. It means becoming curious about someone else’s view without trying to convert them to our own. 

It means engaging with others even when we don’t endorse all their actions. 

It means resisting attempts to slice and dice us into groups and subgroups. 

It means reminding ourselves that beauty thrives in diversity— including diversity of thought. 

It means seeing difference as a curious delight to learn from instead of a problem to be fixed. 

It means remembering our common humanity even when we disagree. 

It means choosing to see in a world that has stopped seeing. 

 

3 

Detox 

There are many things of which a wise man might wish to be ignorant. —RALPH WALDO EMERSON, “DEMONOLOGY” 

And then the message hit me: 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. 
• 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. 
• Your most scarce resource isn’t your time or money. It’s your attention. There’s a reason why we call it paying attention. Treat it like you would your money (because it’s more important than money). Save it, invest it, and spend it where it matters most. And remember: Today’s “free” services—like social media—aren’t free at all. You’re paying a fortune in terms of fragmented attention and lost focus. 
• Attention doesn’t scale: We can pay attention to only one thing at a time. That’s why it’s worth so much. 
• From one moment to the next, your reality is defined by what you pay attention to. Your attention empowers and magnifies its object in your mind. The easiest way to change your reality is to change how you use your attention. 
• When people meet a great leader, they often say, “She made me feel like I was the only person in the room.” Imagine giving that type of complete attention to everything you do—and making that thing the only thing in the room. 

 

Not just deep work, in Cal Newport’s memorable phrase. But deep play. Deep rest. Deep listening. Deep reading. Deep love. Deep everything. 

• This mindset requires being aware of your own limitations. 

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. And even healthy information can become toxic in high doses. Once ingested, information can wreak havoc on your mind, taking up precious space in an already cluttered environment. In-form-ation forms us from within. If you consume junk, your life becomes junk. Garbage in, garbage out. 
• Imagine that someone collected all the information that you ingest daily—your friends’ Facebook status updates, clickbait articles, meaningless Tweetstorms—put them in a book, and said: I want you to read all this from start to finish. You’d almost certainly say no. Yet the same information handed to us in micro installments scattered throughout the day becomes more digestible. It’s death by a thousand cuts. 

Consider these eye-opening statistics. The average person spent 145 minutes per day on social media in 2021.The average adult reads 200 to 260 words per minute.12 The average book is roughly 90,000 words. If the average adult read books instead of using social media, they would read anywhere from 118 to 153 books a year. Every moment you spend ingesting junk information is a moment you’re not spending on a book that can transform you. 

• Instead, the goal is to be more intentional and less impulsive. 
• When you find yourself reaching for your favorite source of distraction, pause for a moment. Observe the itch without scratching it. Ask yourself, What need am I trying to fulfill? What is driving this desire? We often reach for our distractions to satisfy an unmet need for excitement, escape, or intrigue. 
• How would you like to spend your limited time here on Earth? Do you want to look back on your life and realize that you spent huge chunks of it keeping up with the Kardashians? Or do you want to focus on what matters and create art that you’re proud of? 
• Remember Annie Dillard’s timeless wisdom: “How we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives.” 

 

The biggest thing holding you back 

• “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.
  The swamp is a scary, uncertain place. We may never reach the other side. And if we do cross it, we’re afraid of who we might become. 
• So we fight the alligators to hide from the discomfort of crossing the swamp. We spend our time doing what we know best— tackling our emails, attending endless meetings—instead of finishing this project or launching that product. The alligators are visible—they’re right in front of us—but the shore seems distant in time and space. On any given day, a random email sent our way takes priority over the things that actually matter. 
• It’s simple. Decide what’s important and relentlessly prioritize it. Make it one of your to-dos to determine whether you’ve got the right to-dos. 
• Identify the alligators in your life—the shallow concerns that aren’t helping you cross the swamp. Ask yourself, 
  • What do I do just to make myself feel productive? Is this helping me cross the swamp? Or is it an alligator that’s distracting me from what’s important? Then get to work on erasing those alligators from your to-do list. 
  • Stop trying to do more things and start doing the things that matter. 

 

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?” 

• 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. 

This sentiment is captured by a slogan commonly attributed to the Navy SEALs: “Slow is smooth, smooth is fast.” These people work with sniper rifles and grenade launchers. Your PowerPoint presentation pales in comparison. If SEALs can slow down, so can you. 

Humans also have seasons. In some seasons, it’s time to act. In others, we’re better off easing up, stepping back, and allowing space for the water to be absorbed. The artist Corita Kent, during one of her dormant periods, would sit idle and watch a maple tree grow outside her window. “I feel that great new things are happening very quietly inside of me,” she said. “And I know these things have a way, like the maple tree, of finally bursting out in some form.” 

 

PART II 

The Birth 4 Spectacularly You 

They laugh at me because I’m different.
I laugh at them because they’re all the same. —ATTRIBUTED TO KURT COBAIN 

• Becoming extraordinary requires becoming more like yourself. When you do that, you become a magnet that attracts some people with the same force that repels others. 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. 
• Step back and ask, What is our edge? What can we offer our customers that will delight them (and us!)? How can we share our unique personality in a way that will set us apart from every other business offering the very same thing? 
• “You have two options,” Joni Mitchell says. “You can stay the same and protect the formula that gave you your initial success. They’re going to crucify you for staying the same. If you change, they’re going to crucify you for changing.” 

Master the principle behind the tactic 

• • It’s the beauty of life that the exact same ingredients and the exact same recipe can produce wildly different results for different people. 
  • Yet it still feels safe to copy other people’s recipes. If you fail—if the same tactic doesn’t produce the same result for you—you can blame the cookbook. 
  • But when you blindly follow other recipes, you grow dependent on them. You can’t understand the logic behind the recipe or master the foundations of cooking. You just go through the motions.

• 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. 

The first principles of you 

• This is the power of first-principles thinking—of distilling a system into its core ingredients and building it back up in a different way. 
• You can also use this thinking to find the raw materials within yourself and build the new yous. Take a moment to tease out your own basic building blocks—the Lego blocks of your talents, interests, and preferences. 
• Here are some questions to consider. 
  • 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? 

Consider the skills behind each activity in which you excel. For example, if you’re great at organizing events, that doesn’t just mean you’re a good event organizer. It means you can communicate well, rally others, and create memorable experiences. Those skills may suit you for a much wider array of pursuits than you realize. 

• Your first principles as a person are often the qualities you suppress the most—because they make you different from others. 
• Your inner child often holds the key to unlocking your first principles. Originality consists of returning to the origin.
• What did you love doing as a child—before the world stuffed you with facts and memos, before your education stole the joy from what you enjoy, and before the word should dictated how you spend your time? 
• What made you weird or different as a child can make you extraordinary as an adult. Tap into those faint memories and use them as inspiration for what you do now. 
• Once you’ve deconstructed your key components, build yourself anew from the ground up. But don’t just copy what was there before. Reimagine as you go. Recombine your first principles in new ways to seek out potential new futures. 

 

Diversify yourself 

I am large, I contain multitudes. —WALT WHITMAN, “SONG OF MYSELF” 

• The obstinate grip of a single identity also affects people. We’re taught to show only one part of ourselves—one dimension, one personality, and one profession. Hence the cliché questions, “What will you be when you grow up?” or “What do you do for a living?” The underlying implication is clear: You are defined by what you do—you’re a doctor, a lawyer, or an engineer—and what you do is a single, static thing. 
• The only escape, the only path to genuine resilience, is through diversity. 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. 
• 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. 
• Diversification doesn’t just ensure your resilience. It also becomes a source of new strength. “To create,” as François Jacob said, “is to recombine.” Successful creators tend to follow their curiosity and branch out 

5 

Discover Your Mission 

“People of accomplishment rarely sat back and let things happen to them. They went out and happened to things.” —AMERICAN AVIATOR ELINOR SMITH 

The screenplay of your life 

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

• Forget following your passion, which is far too difficult to figure out. Instead, follow your curiosity. What do you find interesting? 
• Say yes to the tiny internal clues nagging you to learn more about botany, take welding classes, or pick up that sewing hobby you abandoned. The things that pique your curiosity aren’t random. They will point you to where you need to go. Unlike your appetite, indulging your curiosity will increase your curiosity. The more you follow the breadcrumbs, the more they tend to appear. 
• Ask yourself: What would I do if no one could know about it— if I couldn’t tell my friends about it or post on social media about it? The principle behind this question is simple: It doesn’t matter how good it looks or how prestigious it is. 

 

Any choice is a poor choice if it doesn’t bring you alive. 

“Don’t ask what the world needs,” as Howard Thurman says. “Ask yourself what makes you come alive, and go do that because what the world needs is people who have come alive.”

• To figure out what brings you alive and what leaves you depleted, keep an energy journal. Track when you feel engaged and enthusiastic—and when you feel bored and restless. 
• Follow the subtle signals from your body—when it relaxes and expands, when it tightens and contracts. The more specific your observations, the better (“When I was answering emails this afternoon, I noticed I was clenching my gut”). Sometimes you can’t explain why you love something, but you know that it warms you and delights you. Since we spend a lifetime ignoring these internal signals, it’s easy to miss them unless we’re paying close attention. Learn the signals your body sends you when you come alive and start following those signals. 
• Be careful about chasing moments that make you feel happy. In the most important moments of my life, I didn’t feel happy. I felt anxious about the path ahead. I didn’t feel good enough. I didn’t feel ready enough. I felt heavy—intimidated by a load that I was sure I couldn’t carry. 
• Yet I still did the thing. Happiness came only after a wave of other emotions washed through me (and knocked me around a bunch). 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? 

Finally, consider your life’s purpose. 

• What is your “why”? Why are you here? If you were writing your own obituary describing your life, what would it say? If you were lying on your deathbed, what would you regret not doing? Your life’s purpose is often connected to your first principles. Review them again and consider how you can use your first principles to express yourself. 

Once you’re clear on what you want, say no to things that don’t matter and opt out of meaningless races that don’t bring you closer to it. If you don’t decide your guiding principles ahead of time— out of the heat of the moment—you’ll let the seemingly urgent crowd out the important. 

 

“You can fail at what you don’t want, so you might as well take a chance on doing what you love.” – Jim Carey 

 

Life Mission

• In finding our life mission, we often run away from what we don’t want instead of running toward what we do want. We make our choices based on “fear disguised as practicality,” as Carrey says. It can be scary to go after what you want. Because if you go for it, you may not get it. 
• Carl Sagan dedicated his life to looking for evidence of extraterrestrial life. He failed. He never found it. But he got millions of people—including me—excited about the stars. He made numerous contributions to humanity that transcended his own life and helped us understand the cosmos we are lucky to live in. 

As long as you enjoy the journey—and as long as you create art you’re proud of—who cares if you don’t reach your destination? 

You’ve already won. 

Dreamers and doers 

• Discovering your life mission requires action. You must pull on the threads, push the buttons, and experiment to discover your next steps. 
• Most people don’t experiment. Some don’t act at all and remain stagnant. These are the armchair adventurers.

 

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. 
• To experiment is to be humble—to acknowledge that you’re uncertain how your idea will pan out. Experiments also reduce your attachment to a particular idea. 
• The goal isn’t to be “correct.” It’s to discover. As you walk down different paths, you’ll sometimes hit a dead end. Or you’ll discover that a path you tried wasn’t the right one for you. 
• Lion trackers call this “the path of not here.” As lion tracker Boyd Varty writes, “Going down a path and not finding a track is part of finding the track. . . . No action is considered a waste, and the key is to keep moving, readjusting, welcoming feedback. 
• The ‘path of not here’ is part of the ‘path of here.’” The worst mistake, whether on the trail or in life, is being paralyzed by the options and failing to try any of them. 

Here are three questions I ask when I run experiments. 

1. What am I testing? You’re running an experiment, so you need to know what you’re testing. Will I enjoy podcasting? Do I want to live in Singapore?
2. What does failure look like? What does success look like? Define your criteria for failure and success at the outset, when you’re relatively clearheaded—before your emotional investments and sunk costs cloud your judgment.
3. 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.

 

• The best experiments have an “I wonder what will happen” quality to them. It’s that uncertainty that unlocks the door to possibility. Experiments that produce unexpected results tend to be far more valuable than experiments that confirm what you already think. 
• With this mindset, life turns into a forever experiment in your very own laboratory. Instead of fixating on a static self, you try on possible selves. Instead of making firm plans, you experiment with different futures—and allow your path to emerge as you discover what works for you and what doesn’t. 
• 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. 

 

If you base your internal compass on external metrics, it will never be stable. The compass needle will always waver because approval is fickle. Stability requires a compass that’s based on your own values, not the values of others. 

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

• Don’t hand the controls of your life over to any other pilot. You have your own sense of direction and balance. Focus on what’s yours to shape—and ignore the rest. 
• So ask yourself: What does “enough” look like for me? How will I know when I get there? 

 

To doubt everything or to believe everything are two equally convenient solutions; both dispense with the necessity of reflection. —HENRI POINCARÉ, SCIENCE AND HYPOTHESIS 

Worrying is a giant waste of your imagination. 

Surrender can be liberating, not defeating. Surrender doesn’t mean giving up responsibility or walking away from problems. It means focusing on what you can control and letting go of what you can’t. 

It all boils down to one question: Will it help?
Will it help to worry about the future?
Will it help to refresh your favorite news site for the umpteenth 

time this hour?
Will it help to hand over agency and responsibility for your 

state of mind to self-proclaimed prophets spewing comforting yet misleading predictions? 

If the answer is no, let it go.
Stop trying to predict the future. Create it instead. 

We try to control the future in part because the future is uncertain, and uncertainty is scary. We don’t know what’s going to work or what’s going to come next. So we try to eliminate uncertainty by looking for certainty. We cling to our old skin, we attach to our plans for the future, and we look for a proven formula, a recipe, a process. 

What we cling to defines us—and confines us. 

We become hostage to our vision of the future. 

Think back to the most noteworthy moments of your life. If you’re like most people, these moments weren’t carefully charted and planned. They transpired precisely because you relaxed into possibility and kept yourself open to mystery. They unfolded in ways far more magical than you ever could have predicted. 

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. 

Yet, when it comes to life, we demand a detailed guidebook, a line-by-line script of how things will pan out. But life is more like a jungle gym and less like a ladder. It defies predictions, logic, and order. Nothing in nature is linear. There are no straight branches on a tree. 

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. 

Far too many people wait to make a move until they know exactly what comes next—which means they never move. Life often lights the path ahead only a few steps at a time. There’s no trailer previewing the trails ahead and no flashlight powerful enough to illuminate what’s to come. As you take each step, and as you experiment with different paths, you go from not knowing to knowing and from darkness to light. 

The only way to know is to start walking—before you see a clear path. 

Sometimes you’ll surf the waves of uncertainty. Other times the waves will surf you. But if you swim only in familiar waters, you’ll never discover the unexpected. 

There’s always a gap between the world as it is and the world as we wish it to be. 

We can see the gap as a threat. 

Or we can see the gap as our own blank canvas, ready to bring out our creative best. 

Which will you choose? 

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

 

13 Metamorphosis 

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

—FRIEDRICH NIETZSCHE, THUS SPOKE ZARATHUSTRA 

 

I don’t know where we are going but I know exactly how to get there. 

—BOYD VARTY, THE LION TRACKER’S GUIDE TO LIFE 

Your next life 

• To become a butterfly, the caterpillar must accept its own death. 
• My epiphany: I realized that my safety net had become a straitjacket. In other words, the same net that once provided me with safety and comfort—the career that I once loved—was now confining me. I couldn’t fully step into who I was becoming without completely letting go of who I once was. 
• A safety net that’s there to catch you can also restrain you. It can make you believe that you’re safe only above the net. 
• Make no mistake: Rotting isn’t fun. And you can’t bypass the disorder, the collapse, and the decay of what once was. You’ll doubt yourself the most when you’re closest to your next transformation. Just when the rotting begins, you’ll be tempted to go back to your life as a caterpillar. Society will do its best to convince you to resist that transformation and keep participating in business as usual. Look what you’re about to leave behind, they’ll say. You’re about to turn into waste—and to digest everything you’ve worked so hard to build. 
• But digesting doesn’t mean forgetting. Quite the opposite: Letting go requires remembering your past and the clues the caterpillar left you to navigate life as a butterfly. Economists call these sunk costs—the time, money, and effort you expended to major in art history, go to law school, or start a business. But these aren’t costs. They are gifts, from your former self to your current self. 
• Was your job a failure if it gave you the skills you need to thrive? Was your relationship a failure if it taught you the meaning of love? Was your art history major a failure if it gave you the tools to appreciate creativity? 

And remember: You don’t owe anyone the caterpillar you used to be. Your metamorphosis might trigger people who’ve grown accustomed to seeing you as a caterpillar. Your transformation might remind them of their stagnation. Your rebirth might cause them discomfort, but it might also wake them up from their own slum- ber. And if they don’t want to wake up—or if they can’t wrap their head around your transformation—it’s their problem, not yours. 

Steps forward often require steps down. 

• “Our next life,” Glennon Doyle writes, “will always cost us this one. If we are truly alive, we are constantly losing who we just were, what we just built, what we just believed, what we just knew to be true.” Any real change requires you to die before you are reborn—and know that dying can be the beginning, not the end. 
• As you emerge out of your chrysalis, the possibilities will appear endless. You’ve got wings, and you can fly in a million different directions. 
• You can look at that infinite abyss and feel paralyzed. Or you can loosen your grip on your past and see where the universe leads you—wingbeat by curious wingbeat. 
• The Greek word for butterfly is psyche. And psyche means soul. 

When you undergo a metamorphosis, you won’t lose yourself. You’ll discover the depths of your soul. 

 

A life lived carefully 

You never
Face failure
Walk off the beaten path Leap into the unknown Change your routines Eat forbidden fruits
Sing really loudly
Dance really badly
Go outside in the rain Show your imperfections Cry wild tears
Confess your love
Get your heart broken 

You paint all your walls white
Look ahead only to the safe course
Stifle your finest impulses
Shrink away from your calling
Say what others expect you to say
Punish your inner child for wanting to play Dismiss your thoughts because they’re your own Stay with the danger of no danger
Walk the same paths
Defer your dreams
Squeeze yourself into boxes others have drawn Extinguish the fire that burns in your heart
Dim the light that dances in your eyes
And slaughter a little piece of your soul every day 

A life lived carefully is a half-dead life 

Because the purpose of life isn’t to be fine It’s to be alive