To Get Ahead, Care Less and Focus More

An entrepreneur who has raised over $100 million has some advice for people who are struggling to build a business and a life: Care less.

Earlier this week I gave a talk, Navigating the Science of Leadership, at Women Leadership Summit. After my talk, a panel I produced took the stage. It was, literally, the brainiest panel at the conference. Moderator Sandra Upson assigns, edits and writes articles for Scientific American Mind. Previously, she was an editor at IEEE Spectrum, for which she traveled the globe in search of the world's most interesting engineers. She has two master's degrees from Columbia University's School of Journalism and a bachelor's degree from Stanford University in symbolic systems, a multidisciplinary major that combines computer science, linguistics, philosophy and psychology. Before becoming a journalist, Upson worked for Bosch's research division, developing a conversational dialogue system for cars.

The panelists, Dr. Katrina Firlik, Dr. Heather Berlin and Dr. Denise Barbut, are all brain specialists. Firlik is a neurosurgeon turned entrepreneur (she is a co-founder of HealthPrize, which focuses on medical adherence). Berlin, a specialist in creativity, is a cognitive neuroscientist and Assistant Professor of Psychiatry and Neuroscience at Mount Sinai School of Medicine who explores the complex interactions of the human brain and mind with the goal of contributing to improved treatment and prevention of impulsive and compulsive psychiatric disorders. She is also interested in the neural basis of consciousness and dynamic unconscious processes.

Barbut is the one who made the comments about not caring. She trained as an internist and subsequently as a neurologist in Great Britain and the USA. She became Professor of Neurology at Weill-Cornell Medical Center and ran the Neurovascular division and the stroke research program. Barbut is sole author or lead author on close to 300 issued or pending patents, mostly relating to methods for neuroprotection, the treatment of pain and of hypertension. Barbut has founded 9 medtech and biotech companies to date, for which she has raised over $100M.

A person who has done so much to alleviate human suffering obviously cares, but not in the way women are conditioned to care about every little perceived slight and offense on the path to greatness. Barbut’s comments about not caring came in response to two questions. One: how does she function in a male-dominated field? She just doesn’t care. She doesn’t notice. She doesn’t let the behavior of other people slow her down. Two: how does she juggle a work life balance as the mother of twins? Answer: she doesn’t think about that kind of feminism. She does everything herself. She views the decisions of parenthood and the education of her children as her responsibility and she doesn’t have the time or inclination to stop and second-guess that strategy now.

Barbut’s view is not for everyone. Firlik shares parenting with her husband and their nanny, a beloved figure in their family life. Berlin is about to find out what kind of challenges motherhood will pose in her career. As the subject of STEM (science, technology, engineering, math and I would add, the arts) and how to inspire more girls to enter the field becomes a hot subject, one that commands a lot of my own time, I have to admit that I favor the view shared by the panelists. Berlin says that when she’s asked to speak on the subject, she doesn’t like to talk about “women in science” but instead she shows what she has accomplished and lets girls draw their own conclusions about what is possible. When Firlik was asked on an interview early in her career about whether she can operate a drill, she graciously didn’t offer to demonstrate her skills on the skull of the guy asking the question, because she understood that he had simply never seen a woman operating a drill before.

Obviously, it's critical to care, or we wouldn't have any motivation to create a better world. Science is EXTREMELY hard work. But the same way we think about businesses that scale, we need to think about emotions that scale and stop getting hung up on the inconsequential insults that serve no purpose aside from motivating self-sabotage. One way to change things is to practice the new way. It’s a true warrior’s mentality to fight for progress by living it every day instead of waiting for society to agree that what you’re doing is the new normal.

During my talk I showed Galileo’s telescopes and reminded the audience that living on the edge has always been dangerous. He was killed, after all, just for stating the truth: the earth revolves around the sun. Now that we all know this is true, we are horrified at the historical reality of having killing Galileo for challenging prevailing norms. (Correction: Galileo was forced to recant the truth and spent the rest of his life under house arrest). We can’t reasonably expect society to openly embrace challenging ideas, because at no point in human history have we demonstrated ourselves capable, in the mainstream, of doing so quickly and comfortably. We can, however, live the changes every day until slowly but surely, a new reality takes root and seems as obviously true as the earth going around the sun.

The little insults and grievances are despicable, but to be expected as we plow forward into a new reality. Caring less doesn’t mean not feeling. It just means not reacting or letting yourself be slowed it stopped. Caring less means having more time to focus on the creation of technologies that might save the lives of people who would insult you on the street or in the lab. Those little insults are just the last remnants of monkey brain chattering away, but we still have the serious business of changing the world ahead of us.

Image Credit: James Jorasch took the picture of Galileo's telescopes at the Museo Galileo in Florence, Italy.

@RitaJKing