Beware of the "Made it" Trap

Leaping to a new S Curve of Learning? can be overwhelming. As we transition from being at the top of our field to a new and unfamiliar trajectory, our emotions and anxieties can get the best of us. From what I’m hearing, it’s clear that many of us feel, during the pandemic, we are on the bottom of an S Curve in some area of our lives.

One way to help us better navigate personal and professional disruption is to think like a rocket scientist. This was my takeaway from a timely conversation I had with Ozan Varol, a recent guest on the podcast. Ozan is a renowned professor, bestselling author, and speaker. He writes and speaks about creativity and critical thinking. And, yes, he is a rocket scientist.

Ozan is a case study in personal disruption. He's a Turkish émigré to the United States, a rocket scientist turned lawyer and award-winning law professor. Today, he’s an author, podcaster, and speaker. His latest book is: Think Like a Rocket Scientist: Simple Strategies You Can Use to Make Giant Leaps in Work and Life.

One of the questions people often ask me is, “How do you know when to disrupt yourself? How do you know when you are at the top of an S Curve of Learning??” For Ozan, there are two clear signals—disconnect and boredom. “Boredom usually goes hand in hand with a number of other variables. Learning stops. Discomfort stops completely,” he said. “I know exactly what I’m doing, but I’m not failing. I’m not making any mistakes. And that means I’m smack in the middle of my comfort zone.”

To identify those two warning signs Ozan pays attention to his body and mind. He is aware and attuned. He knows how to stay engaged, continue to grow, and can instinctively feel when it’s time to learn, leap, and repeat. “I've always been operating from my rational brain and thinking that anything of importance is going to come from there, but I've become much better at listening to my body. And reestablishing that connection has actually been really helpful in it picking up that flicker when it does arise.”

Guardrail # 6 on the S Curve is “Give Failure It’s Due.” One of Ozan’s book chapters is similarly titled, Why Nothing Fails Like Success. In this chapter, he explains how industrial accidents happen when people settle into a routine, become complacent, and stop paying attention to the real dangers they deal with every day. This is the same in the business world and professional careers. As Ozan wisely shares, “I try to keep that in mind when I find myself in that danger zone of thinking I've made it.” We all need to be aware of disengagement – of thinking we have “made it”.

The “made it” trap doesn’t stop there. Many professionals find themselves relying on their experience, offering their opinion without gathering all the facts.

“The moment I think I’ve made it is the moment I stop learning and growing,” shared Ozan, “The real you is deeply imperfect and beautifully imperfect, the real you is and always will be a work in progress."

In my interview with Ozan we also learned that when you examine the history of scientific discovery, we see a very messy process with a lot of failures before the actual “EUREKA!” moment occurs. It’s not a clean linear process as it so often appears in textbooks. “Failure is very much a part of the story that often doesn't make the cut,” Ozan said. “Breakthroughs in science and in other fields are [most often] evolutionary, not revolutionary. You're not going to succeed in achieving something transformative on the first try. As long as you're learning from each failure and as long as each iteration is better than the one that came before it, you'll end up going so far in life.”

Rocket scientists focus on the variables they can control and ignore the rest.

“Wanting something to be different when you can't change anything is a profoundly useless exercise. What's far more useful is to say, ‘Okay, well, I can't control what happened, but I can control how I respond. So, how can I take what I planned and pivot to a different format? How can I take my skills and resources…and apply them in ways that I hadn't envisioned before?"

When we think about jumping S Curves, we often think about planning them out perfectly with the right timing – taking control of new trajectory. But, let’s face it, that doesn’t always happen. We are not always in control of when or how we disrupt. And, as Ozan shared, there is a lot of failure, trial and error, along the way.

I find some of the best lessons are learned in the failures and it is where true character is formed.

When you are up against an obstacle, how can you think like a rocket scientist - focus on the variables you can control and pivot in a new direction?

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Whitney Johnson is the founder and CEO of WLJ Advisors, a boutique consultancy that helps leaders and the people they work with become fluent in the language of growth. Whitney is one of the leading management thinkers in the world, according to Thinkers50, the author of the bestselling Build an A Team and critically-acclaimed Disrupt Yourself, both published by Harvard Business Press. She is a world-class keynote speaker, frequent lecturer for Harvard Business School's Corporate Learning and an advisor to CEOs. She is a member of the original cohort of Dr. Marshall Goldsmith's 100 Coaches, and was selected as MG100 / Thinkers50 #1 Coach on Talent. Whitney has 1.8 million followers on LinkedIn, where she was selected as a Top Voice in 2018, and her course on Fundamentals of Entrepreneurship has been viewed more than 1 million times.?