If there’s one key aspect of success that all game changers agree on, it is this: You must be fearless.
That’s not to say that innovators don’t experience fear—everyone does—but unlike most people, game changers refuse to allow this instinct to keep them from stepping into the unknown. Of course, the unknown is usually scary. Remember, your mind is a creature of habit, and it operates based on fear—it is always scanning your environment looking for things to be afraid of, and it makes decisions for you in the interest of keeping you “safe.” But in reality, giving in to fear doesn’t make you safe. And not taking risks makes you weaker, not stronger.
Game changers know this. To borrow a phrase from the legendary self-help author Susan Jeffers, they feel the fear and do it anyway. They educate themselves, keep learning, take action, and stay curious. They create a sense of mission and develop habits that prevent their bodies from hijacking their creativity so they can spend their lives constantly innovating. This is how they end up changing the game for the rest of us.
They also reject the comfort that comes with hiding behind rules and authority. There is no great mystery here: authority figures are created to protect the status quo. Becoming an innovator requires that you think differently. Stagnation is the enemy of innovation. With apologies (and sincere gratitude) to all of my former teachers, innovation doesn’t happen unless you’re willing to break the rules that other people have written. It’s as simple as that.
Law 10: Fear Is the Mind Killer
Failure is scary because as humans evolved, failure meant a tiger would eat you, you’d run out of food, your tribe would banish you, or you’d never find a mate, so you’d die, and so would your entire species. None of those are true today, but the biological fear of failure remains in the automated parts of your nervous system. Learn to face your irrational fear of criticism and failure and do big things anyway. When you learn to make your body less afraid of failure, it liberates enormous energy that you can use to do what you choose. Fear of failure causes failure. Don’t give in to it. Hack it instead.
Ravé Mehta is a game-changing engineer, entrepreneur, and professor, as well as an award-winning pianist and composer. He is changing the way we educate kids through his company, Helios Entertainment, which creates games, music, and books that teach adults and kids to overcome fear while learning complex science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) subjects. I asked him to join me on Bulletproof Radio to talk about fear.
He told me a story about being on a safari in South Africa, where he and a group of others observed a pride of lions from an open-air Jeep. Suddenly one of the lions walked right up to the vehicle and approached him. Ravé was in the front seat, closest to the ground, and as the lion got closer and closer he heard the ranger sitting by his side say quietly, “Stop moving. Stop breathing. Pretend you don’t exist.” Ravé could feel the lion’s breath on his forearm. He was afraid that he was about to die, and he needed to keep himself from making a sound or moving an inch. He began to practice a breathing technique to calm down his parasympathetic nervous system and pull himself into the present moment. Even though he didn’t quite believe it, he told himself that everything was going to be fine. And within moments, the lion turned around and walked away.
At the time that happened, Ravé had spent years studying, hacking, and chasing fear to find out how it worked. But that moment really put his knowledge and skills to the test. If he hadn’t been able to tap into a place of trust and stay connected in the present moment, who knows what could have happened?
Throughout his study of fear, Ravé discovered that all negative emotions—anger, jealousy, insecurity, guilt, shame, and greed—are rooted in fear, while all positive emotions—confidence, grace, humility, courage, gratitude—are rooted in trust. When he broke it down into just those two fundamental states, fear and trust, it became easy for him to see how he could transform fear-based emotions into ones that are rooted in trust.
Ravé believes that there is one life force underpinning all feelings and emotions, which he calls love. This is the force that binds everything together and through which everything is created. George Lucas called it the Force. In China they refer to it as chi. In India it’s called prana. Ravé just refers to it as love. He envisions our ability to access love as a pipe. Fear constrains the pipe so that love can’t flow in, while trust opens up the pipe.
According to Ravé, trust and fear exist on a spectrum. Fear starts with doubt, which leads to skepticism and ultimately ends with paralyzing fear. Trust starts with hope and moves up the scale until you have full trust in the universe, your place in it, and all of the events happening around you. Even though you may or may not know why something is happening, you have a sense of comfort that everything is working in your favor and life is flowing as it should be. When you’re in a state of ultimate trust, you are able to tap into that flow.
In this state, you can allow yourself to become vulnerable because you trust that you will not get hurt, either physically or emotionally. Vulnerability, Ravé says, increases your ability to achieve a state of flow. He says that allowing ourselves to be vulnerable and trusting strengthens our “emotional immune system”—our ability to protect ourselves from painful experiences. This system can become weak when we are constantly inoculating ourselves from getting hurt by blocking our true feelings. When we practice being vulnerable, we become more resilient to life’s inevitable blows. It’s the knowledge that vulnerability creates resilience that inspired me to share the hard parts of my own story throughout this book.
Ravé breaks fear down into three pillars:
TIME
When you are fully trusting, you are present and receptive in the moment. It’s when you move away from being present that you allow fear to come in. This normally takes the shape of “what if” questions. What if that lion attacks me? What if I die? Fear will always take you out of the present moment, because fear is based on what might happen in the future, not what is happening now. When you allow fear to enter, it disrupts the present moment. However, when you’re completely present, there is no room for fear and you have access to unlimited love, or flow.
ATTACHMENTS
The idea of being attached to ideas and material objects has a bit of a bad reputation, and at first Ravé believed that we shouldn’t have these attachments at all. Over time he realized that there was nothing wrong with attachments themselves. It’s the nature of those attachments that can become problematic.
According to Ravé, there are two main types of attachments. The first is a rigid attachment, which is like a steel beam that connects you to the object of your attachment and creates stress. The other type is a gravitational attachment. In this case, there is a secure connection between you and the other person or object, but it is more flexible than a rigid attachment. As Ravé says, nothing is holding you in place other than your own gravity and the gravity of the object of your attachment. You rotate around each other without any stress on the system. As dynamics change, you can naturally gravitate either away from each other or closer together. For example, if you have a rigid attachment to another person, you will try to control him or her. In the case of a gravitational attachment, however, you are more confident in your connection and focused on yourself and becoming a better person. This will attract the right things into your space and push the wrong things away. This requires a slight shift in mind-set: instead of focusing on something else, focus on yourself, and everything will correct itself.
EXPECTATION
The third pillar of fear is expectation. Ravé defines expectation as being attached to a specific outcome—wanting to see a certain result of your efforts. Having expectations is a lose-lose scenario: if you achieve your expectation, there’s no joy in it because it’s merely what you expected to happen. But if you don’t achieve the outcome you’d expected, you feel disappointed or possibly even angry, guilty, or ashamed. All of these negative emotions inhibit your flow state.
This doesn’t mean that you shouldn’t ever desire an outcome or goal. Ravé encourages us simply to shift our expectations to preferences. This way, if you achieve your desired outcome, you will feel elated, but you won’t be dismayed if you don’t. You’ve left the door open for other outcomes. The one you wanted was merely a preference.
Ravé says that all three pillars—time, attachment, and expectation—have to be active for fear to exist. If you knock down even one of them, fear will get up as that lion did and quietly walk away.
This is incredibly important because fear can hijack more than just your creativity; it can also hijack your cells. When I interviewed the cell biologist Dr. Bruce Lipton, who is one of the fathers of epigenetics—the study of how the environment affects our genes—we had a fascinating conversation about the ways in which fear impacts our biology. That was not the topic that had brought him to Bulletproof Radio—I had actually sought him out to discuss cellular function—but we ended up talking about how emotions impact our health at the cellular level.
Dr. Lipton’s groundbreaking work began in 1967, when he was cloning stem cells in his lab. At the time, he was one of a handful of scientists in the entire world who even knew what a stem cell was. Stem cells are embryonic cells that remain in your body after you are born. They have the potential to give rise to multiple other cells. Dr. Lipton was fascinated by stem cells because he knew that no matter how old we are, every day we lose hundreds of billions of cells due to normal attrition. Old cells die, and the body has to replace them. For example, the entire lining of the digestive tract, from your mouth to your anus, is replaced every three days. So where do all those new cells come from? Stem cells.
Dr. Lipton put one cell into a petri dish by itself and saw that it divided every ten or twelve hours. After a week, he had fifty thousand cells, and his most important observation was that every cell was genetically identical. They came from the same parent stem cell. Then he split those genetically identical cells into three different petri dishes and altered the chemistry of the culture medium a little bit in each of the dishes, effectively placing the genetically identical cells into three slightly different environments. In one dish, the cells formed muscle, in another dish, they formed bone, and in a third culture medium, they formed fat cells.
At the time, Dr. Lipton was a professor at a medical school. He taught his students the well-established belief that our genes control our lives, but he was seeing in his laboratory that that wasn’t true. The genes did not control the cells’ fate; the environment did. That led him to look at how cells are altered by their environment inside the body, our blood. He found that as we change the composition of our blood, we change the fate of our cells. So what controls the composition of our blood? The brain is the chemist. What the mind perceives, the brain will break down into complementary chemistry.
For example, if when you look at the world you see joy and happiness, the brain will translate that joy and happiness into chemistry, such as a dopamine release from feeling pleasure. This chemistry enhances growth. If you look at the world through a lens of fear, it will cause the brain to release stress hormones and inflammatory agents that will put you into a state of self-protection, which halts growth. It became very clear to Dr. Lipton that the chemistry of the blood, the cell’s culture medium, changes based on our view of the world. This greatly impacts the fate of our cells.
As Dr. Lipton explained on the podcast, when you are in a state of fear, driven by your ancient survival mechanisms, your body focuses on survival rather than growth. This would be a good thing if a saber-toothed tiger were chasing you, but if you are in a chronic state of fear, you are continuously inhibiting your growth and potential. To make matters worse, the stress hormones that halt growth also shut down the immune system in order to save energy. Then you have two strikes against you. Dr. Lipton believes that this is the root of over 90 percent of disease. He ended up leaving his position at the university because he no longer believed in what he was teaching. The medical community claims that our genes control our lives and that we are the victims of our heredity. But Dr. Lipton saw that we are not powerless; we are responsible for our own lives and our own destinies. That is a profound insight, and I’m so grateful that he rejected authority and stayed curious enough to keep asking the hard questions that led to such game-changing answers.
In my quest to hack my own fear, I’ve tried a lot of crazy things, but nothing quite as extreme as Jia Jiang, an entrepreneur, speaker, blogger and author, has done. You may be familiar with Jia from his Ted Talk about rejection, which went viral and has now been viewed more than 4 million times. I reached out to interview him when I heard about his unconventional fear-hacking approach, which he calls “rejection therapy.” He figured that if his body got used to experiencing rejection, it would no longer shift into a fear state when faced with the possibility of being rejected.
Jia set a goal of being rejected once a day for a hundred days by asking strangers for outlandish things. He went to a fast-food restaurant and asked for a “burger refill” after he’d finished eating his burger. He knocked on a stranger’s door and asked if he could play soccer in his yard. He asked strangers for money. And so on. His goal was to get to “no” every day.
The funny thing is that even though Jia set out to get rejected (which he was many times), people said yes to him far more often than he’d expected. On the third day of his experiment, he went to Krispy Kreme and asked an employee to make doughnuts that were interlinked to look like the symbol of the Olympics. When the woman in charge said yes and proudly presented one to Jia, he almost cried. He was blown away by her kindness.
Even when people couldn’t give Jia what he wanted, they often tried to give him something else instead. That made him wonder how many things he’d previously missed out on because he’d been so afraid of being rejected that he hadn’t bothered to ask for what he wanted. He realized that by doing so he had been saying no to himself.
To hack your own fear, Jia recommends celebrating failure. When you play it safe, you won’t be rejected. If you are willing to try something audacious enough that it fails, celebrate that. It is an accomplishment in and of itself.
Everything that Ravé, Dr. Lipton, and Jia said about fear deeply resonated with me, particularly Ravé’s ideas about the spectrum of fear. When I work with executive clients over the course of five days of neurofeedback at 40 Years of Zen, I teach them about what we call the “emotional stack.” Apathy and shame lie at the bottom of the stack. This is the least conscious state you can be in. Above apathy and shame is sadness, above sadness are anger and pride, above anger and pride is fear, and above that fear sit happiness and freedom. Here is a diagram to help you remember.
Happiness and Freedom
Fear
Anger and Pride
Sadness
Apathy and Shame
To prioritize your survival, your body will always try to steer you toward the lower emotions. The stack is useful because it is always right. If you’re feeling shame about something, ask yourself what you’re really feeling sad about. Then look for anger or pride. When you figure that out, look for the fear, because when you feel fear, happiness is right around the corner. And when the stack has hacked your negative emotions enough times, you start to learn that it always leads to your hidden fears.
The sad truth is that your body believes that if you are happy, you will fail to focus on external threats and you won’t be safe. It wants you to remain vigilant, ready to run away from, kill, or hide from threats (and eat doughnuts or reproduce if there are no threats nearby). To trick you, your body sets up this hierarchy to keep you from experiencing happiness and instead focus on threats. This would all be well and good, except that fear inhibits growth and creativity. Plus, you probably want to be happy. So you have to reset your programming.
At 40 Years of Zen there is a process called “Neurofeedback Augmented Reset Process” that is designed to help clients stop automatically responding to things that aren’t actually threats. You use neurofeedback to help find a situation that triggers a negative emotion, re-create the sensation as accurately as you can, and then find one thing, however small, that you can be grateful for in the given situation. Gratitude turns off the fear. Then you summon a feeling of profound forgiveness toward whatever or whoever caused the situation.
With the help of neurofeedback technology, this is easier than it sounds, but it’s still challenging work to actually feel a negative emotion on purpose, find something good in it, and then let go of your hard feelings. Yet when you do it, you are liberated from the fear, and it doesn’t come back. I’ve spent four months of my life doing this work, and as a result, I have very few buttons that get pushed without my permission. Still, I’m grateful to assist others on the rare occasions when I get to lead a session with clients at 40 Years of Zen. Watching someone relentlessly reset his or her fears always teaches me something about my own path.
You can derive similar benefits (though it may take longer) from any meditation practice that teaches forgiveness, gratitude, or compassion, as long as you apply those tools both to whatever caused your fear and to yourself. The most important thing is to be aware that the critical voice in your head is not you; it’s your ancient survival instinct, and it is working desperately to keep you from turning off the fear it thinks will keep you alive. When you know what it is, guilt and shame melt away, and you can work your way up the stack to happiness. It’s real—the only thing you have to fear is fear itself.
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Law 11: Average Is the Enemy
The people who create the most positive change most quickly are by definition disrupting the way things are. The world will push back at them, which leads to fear or uncertainty in even the strongest innovators. Throughout history, people with new ideas have consistently been criticized, disparaged, or worse. Manage your emotional response to critics and forge ahead despite encountering obstacles. Learn to face criticism and follow your path with joy. The last thing you want to be is average.
Today, Dr. Daniel Amen is widely regarded as one of the world’s foremost brain specialists. He’s a ten-time New York Times bestselling author, the founder and CEO of Amen Clinics, and someone who to a great extent was responsible for my decision to become a biohacker.
In 1991, Dr. Amen was a practicing psychiatrist when he attended a lecture on single-photon emission computed tomography (SPECT) medical imaging that radically changed the course of his career. SPECT is a nuclear medicine technique. Whereas CT scans and MRIs are anatomical techniques that show what brain structures look like physically, SPECT reveals what’s happening in your brain by mapping your blood flow and activity, revealing the areas of your brain that “light up” when performing certain tasks or experiencing particular emotions.
Dr. Amen was fascinated by SPECT scans and began using them in his clinical practice to help diagnose and treat patients, many of whom quickly saw vast improvements. Yet he received no end of grief from his colleagues, who complained that such a technique was not the proper standard of care and called him a charlatan. No one enjoys being diminished and belittled when he is working to help people. It took a lot of courage for him to keep going despite those accusations, but he was curious. If he couldn’t look at the brain, he argued, how could he understand how well it was working? How could he help his patients feel their best? He wanted to see what he was treating, so he persevered despite facing backlash.
Then his sister-in-law called him late one night and said that out of the blue, his nine-year-old nephew had attacked a little girl on the baseball field. Dr. Amen asked his sister-in-law, “What else is going on with him?” She said, “Danny, he’s different. He’s mean. He doesn’t smile anymore.” Dr. Amen went to their house and found two pictures his nephew had drawn. In one of them he was hanging from a tree, and in the other he was shooting other children. He turned to his sister-in-law and told her, “You have to bring him to my office tomorrow.”
When Dr. Amen sat with his nephew, he asked, “What’s the matter?” The boy said, “Uncle Danny, I don’t know. I’m mad all the time.” Dr. Amen asked if anyone was hurting him or teasing him or touching him inappropriately, and he said no. So Dr. Amen scanned his nephew’s brain and found a cyst the size of a golf ball occupying his left temporal lobe. His nephew was actually missing the space in his scan where his left temporal lobe should have been. It was the first time Dr. Amen had seen that, but he’s seen it many, many times since. Back then, a normal psychiatrist would likely have focused on the emotional symptoms without examining the function of the brain with a scan.
The left temporal lobe is an area of the brain that studies show is linked to violence.1 When Dr. Amen found a surgeon to take out the cyst, his nephew’s behavior returned to normal. The surgeon said the cyst had been putting so much pressure on Dr. Amen’s nephew’s brain that it had actually thinned the bone over his left temporal lobe. If he had been hit in the head with a basketball, it would’ve killed him instantly.
At that moment, Dr. Amen stopped caring if people thought he was a charlatan. He thought about all of the people who are in jail or who have died because their doctors didn’t know they had problems with their brains that could have been identified with the help of a SPECT scan, and he made it his mission to use the tool to help as many people as possible.
I am one of those people. When I first learned about Dr. Amen in 2002, he was the target of huge criticism, but his science was incredibly solid. I was getting my MBA at Wharton while working full-time at a start-up, and I was desperate. I was pushing as hard as I could, but I was becoming less successful in my career, barely passing my classes, and absolutely not successful in my relationships. I was floored when one of Dr. Amen’s scans told me that my brain looked toxic. When Dr. Amen saw the results, he said, “If I didn’t know you and I saw your brain scan, I’d guess it was the brain of an addict living under a bridge.” Compared to a healthy brain, my brain had really low activity in a pattern that he says he often sees in drug addicts or people who have been exposed to environmental toxins such as toxic mold. He says the scans showed that I actually had chemical-induced brain damage. There was clearly something wrong with my brain.
This may sound odd, but I was thrilled to hear that news. I finally had some hope because I had something concrete that I could work on. My whole life I had thought I was just weak and not trying hard enough, even though I was outwardly successful. But the SPECT scan showed me that it wasn’t a character issue, it was a hardware issue. I had been exposed to toxic mold as a child and again before I started business school. With Dr. Amen’s help and lots and lots of biohacking, I was able to rehabilitate my brain, which then allowed me to take it to levels beyond what I’d expected. I’m so grateful that he persevered and stayed curious enough to use SPECT when others were content to mock him while they treated patients without the benefit of fully knowing what was happening inside their brains. If I hadn’t looked at mine, I would never have known how to fix it, and I certainly wouldn’t be where I am today.
Even when they haven’t directly changed the course of my life, I constantly seek out experts who have rejected authority with great results. When I read one of Dr. Gerald Pollack’s books, Cells, Gels and the Engines of Life, I was fascinated by his discovery of a fourth state of water. The guy told every biochemist on the planet that they’d missed a huge fact about the nature of something as simple as water, which turned the field of cellular biology on its head. Of course he has critics, but he also had the data from his research. I wanted to hear more about his work and what had led him to study something as seemingly mundane as water.
Dr. Pollack is a distinguished professor of bioengineering at the University of Washington, the executive director of the Institute for Venture Science, and the founding editor in chief of the journal Water. He is also a founding fellow of the American Institute for Medical and Biological Engineering and a fellow of the American Heart Association and the Biomedical Engineering Society. In other words, he is a biohacking badass, although I’m pretty sure this is the first time he’s been called that.
Dr. Pollack became interested in water when he was studying muscles and how they contract. It struck him that when we think of muscles at the molecular level, we typically consider only how the proteins interact to produce force. But muscles contain not only proteins but also water. In fact, two-thirds of our muscles, by volume, are water, even more than that if you consider the number of water molecules. More than 99 out of every 100 molecules in our muscles are water molecules.
It struck Dr. Pollack that other scientists had discounted 99 out of 100 molecules when trying to figure out how muscles work. How could they be insignificant? The prevailing theory about how muscles contract dated back over sixty years. But in his lab, Dr. Pollack found that the evidence didn’t fit the theory. He realized that the missing element was none other than water. All of those tiny water molecules did in fact play a significant role in how our muscles function compared to the dominant theories.
That led Dr. Pollack to set aside the research of muscles and begin to study water itself, and what he found was disruptive. Most of us have learned that there are three states of water: solid, liquid, and vapor. But Dr. Pollack discovered that there is actually a biologically important fourth state of water that is between a solid and a liquid. This fourth state of water is highly viscous, kind of like honey. It’s called exclusion zone (EZ) water.
Dr. Pollack may have been the first to discover this fourth state of water, but there were others more than a hundred years ago who predicted this discovery. It seems that all those years ago, a group of scientists was close to discovering the fourth state of water, but they faced a great deal of criticism. So they gave up. The detailed study of water molecules in biology lost respect in the scientific community, and more and more people then became reluctant to pursue it. It wasn’t until Dr. Pollack and his colleagues allowed their curiosity about water to take over their studies of muscle contractions that they were able to make their discovery and change the study of water.
The implications of this fourth state, EZ water, are limitless. This is the type of water we have in our cells that supports our mitochondrial function. The more EZ water we have in our bodies, the better our cells are able to function. Dr. Pollack has found that infrared light, natural sunlight, and vibration all create more of this type of water. Since speaking to him, I have made increasing EZ water in my cells a priority, and I can feel the results in my performance. In fact, I’m so convinced of its health-conferring and performance-enhancing benefits that I funded additional research at his laboratory. And guess what he discovered? When you mix butterfat (ghee) into water, it creates a huge amount of EZ water.
That solved the mystery of Bulletproof Coffee. I’ve always been annoyed by the fact that if I try to eat butter and then drink black coffee, I don’t feel the burst of clarity that I get when I take the time to blend them together, and now we know why. Blending butter into coffee creates EZ water. Dr. Pollack’s groundbreaking discovery solved another mystery!
Along the way to discovering EZ water, Dr. Pollack faced his fair share of doubters, but he stayed on his path and ended up having the last laugh. That’s what game changers do: they stick to their guns when they believe they are right, even if it takes years for them to prove it.
And speaking of outliers, when I created the special-process, antijitter, lab-tested, mold-free coffee beans that are part of Bulletproof Coffee, the market for it was exactly zero. It was a crazy idea that attracted critics right away (not even counting the idea of adding butter). I was obsessed with the idea after I had to give up drinking normal coffee because it kept giving me anxiety, jitters, and a crash. I created a special process for roasting the beans and put them on the market anyway. Six years later, in 2018, people have drunk more than 100 million cups of Bulletproof Coffee made with those special beans, and thousands of people who had problems with standard types of coffee have thanked me for enabling them to drink coffee again.
Along the way, more critics popped up. Most were trolls looking for a reaction, and the best-known critic was clearly financially motivated, but my favorite was a coffee magazine writer who said that it simply wasn’t possible for a computer hacker like me to change the process of making coffee because I wasn’t a coffee industry veteran. My success came from curiosity followed by doing what I believed in even when that success drew critics.
That’s why having a mission is so important—it gives you the power to stand your ground. It’s also why gratitude is so important (see chapter 15 for more on this). The voice in your head will worry that other people might believe the critics. You can change your story by reminding yourself that every time a critic talks about your work, he or she is drawing more attention to it no matter what he or she says. In today’s world of social media, no one believes what critics say without verifying the facts on Google first. At Bulletproof, no matter what annoying or worrying story was running in my head, sales actually rose every time a critic with a powerful online presence attacked the science, and I was energized when I realized that people who shared my mission would happily step up to its defense. So I still say a silent “thank-you” every time I see baseless criticism online. Remember, offering gratitude to the people who challenge you is part of overcoming fear. And being able to thank your critics feels pretty awesome.
We all owe a huge debt of gratitude to scientists such as Dr. Amen and Dr. Pollack, who were willing to speak up and keep digging when they discovered something contrary to conventional knowledge. Both overcame tremendous obstacles in order to change their fields and pushed through the fear that came with being maligned by their peers. Without that level of curiosity and courage, there would be no innovation, and the game would remain forever the same.
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Law 12: Don’t Lead a Horse to Water; Make It Thirsty
Game changers don’t get bored. They seek out the things that fascinate them, and that make them want to leap out of bed in the morning. Without passion and purpose, there is no happiness, so find the things you care about and devote your life to their pursuit. Put passion before money, and success will follow—but don’t ignore the money, either.
Naveen Jain is a classic American success story. He came to the United States as a student from India with five dollars in his pocket and rose to become the billionaire founder of seven companies. His work has changed the game for information (his company Infospace was a major internet company), the solar system (he started Moon Express, which is sending the first robot miners to the moon this year), and he is now bringing his visionary approach to uncover the mysteries of the human body with his company Viome.
Naveen wants more hours in a day. He sleeps for only four hours a night because he loves what he does and that’s all the sleep he requires. At almost sixty, he’s as energetic as I am at forty-five. He wakes up in the morning and jumps out of bed because he’s so excited about what he might learn that day. He says that the day you stop learning is the day you die and that most people who are bored are actually already dead. Where is there room for boredom with everything there is to see and learn in the world? Naveen believes that the minute your brain is no longer growing, you become a parasite on society because you are no longer contributing. The day you stop dreaming and being intellectually curious, you become a zombie.
Naveen believes that remaining intellectually curious is one of the most important things you can do. He does not understand how people can talk about playing golf—to him, if you have so much spare time in your life that you can spend eight hours on a golf course, your life is not worth living anymore. (Unless, of course, golf excites you and creates real joy. Naveen’s idea is that you should focus on what you care about and what actually moves the needle, and golf doesn’t move the needle for many people.) Though people talk about being passionate about something, Naveen says you should be obsessed instead: find the one thing you are so obsessed with that you can’t sleep and will pursue that subject with all of your being.
To find out what you are obsessed with, imagine having everything you want in life. You have billions of dollars, a wonderful family, and everything else you want and need. Now what are you going to do? Your true obsessions are the things you would pursue if you already had what you want in life, when it’s not about making money or reaching a goal. Naveen says that making money should never be the goal. Instead, making money is a by-product of pursuing the things you care about. Naveen says that making money is like having an orgasm: If you focus on it, you’re never going to get it. But if you enjoy the process, you will eventually get there.
Naveen encourages you to dream so big that the people around you will think you’re crazy. And then, when people start to tell you that you’re crazy, take it to mean that you’re still not thinking big enough! This requires never being afraid to fail. Naveen says that you fail only when you give up. Everything else is just a pivot. If the things you’re doing are not working, you change, adapt, and pivot, and then, unless you give up, you still have not failed. Every idea that doesn’t work is simply a stepping-stone to a bigger success. Success comes when you are still curious and still learning.
As a parent, Naveen believes his job is to encourage and nurture intellectual curiosity in his children. People often say that you can lead a horse to water but you can’t make it drink. Naveen believes that you should never lead a horse to water, just make it thirsty. If a horse is passionate, thirsty, and obsessed with finding water, it is going to go out and find its own water, and it’s going to drink.
I wish this were the goal of all education systems—to make children so intellectually curious that they enter the workplace fired up and passionate about making a difference. To learn more about how we can encourage as many people as possible to make the greatest potential impact, I sought out Subir Chowdhury, a management consultant who works with top Fortune 500 CEOs to improve their performance. If you want to improve your performance, there’s probably no better way than to pay attention to what he has to say, particularly about the link between passion and action. Subir came on Bulletproof Radio to talk about what he does to help the most powerful CEOs in the world, but he also shared much more. His most recent work is focused on how to develop a caring mind-set as a path to personal performance and how to make entire corporations start caring.
Subir told me about a young woman named Trisha Prabhu. One day, Trisha, who was thirteen at the time, found out that an eleven-year-old girl had committed suicide after suffering the abuse of cyberbullying. Trisha was devastated to learn that a girl who was so young had taken her own life. She began to research cyberbullying and found that there were many other adolescents who had taken their own lives for the same reason. And she found that social media sites weren’t doing enough to stop the problem.
This became an issue about which Trisha cared deeply, and she decided to take action. She created an app called ReThink, which uses patented technology to pick up on potentially offensive messages and then asks a user to stop and consider the damage he or she might cause before posting something that might be hurtful or offensive. She found that when teens were asked to stop and reconsider their decision, they changed their minds about posting something harmful a whopping 93 percent of the time.
The thing that impressed Subir the most about Trisha was that she didn’t ask adults or any sort of authority figures to help her. She saw a problem, and she took action to solve it. Trisha embodies the four human attributes that Subir says make up a caring mind-set: straightforward, thoughtful, accountable, and results driven.
To become a more caring person, Subir says, ask yourself how you can apply these four attributes to every aspect of your life. Can you be more straightforward in the way you communicate? Do you think about your actions before you take them, even the little ones? Do you own both your failures and your successes? Do you care enough to do things that create results? We’re all stronger in some areas than others. He finds that accountability is a common weakness. When something happens, many of us assume that it’s someone else’s problem. How easy would it have been for Trisha to leave the solution to cyberbullying to social media sites or other authority figures? Instead she took matters into her own hands and accepted responsibility.
Mother Teresa said, “Do not wait for leaders, do it alone.” Game changers don’t let fear get into the way of doing the things they care about. When you care enough, are passionate, and have no fear, your actions can truly make a difference.
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