How to Awaken Your Inner Talents

——Conversation with Rocket Scientist Ozan Varol

“Source: "Yinuo's Dialogue with Ozan Varol: How to Awaken Your Inner Talent?" Live Stream Highlights. Original conversation video available at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vAxor2GIIb8&t=6s”

In addition to this already highly appealing identity, his personal journey is also quite fascinating—just imagine, a 17-year-old boy who grew up in Istanbul, shortly after arriving at Cornell University in the United States to study astrophysics, how miraculously he managed to join the Mars rover mission as an undergraduate and a foreigner, speaking a language he was still learning. After that, he smoothly transitioned to law school—a highly competitive field even for native English speakers. Nevertheless, after graduating and working for a few years, he entered a top-tier university—Lewis & Clark College—and became a tenured professor at its law school.

Hearing this, people might say: Hey, this is a story of a successful person, or they might set such achievements as a lifelong goal. Yet, after accomplishing so much, he once again chose change and challenge. So, I really want to take this opportunity to ask Oz, in your incredible journey, are there any methods we can learn and bring into our own lives?

Chasing the North Star in Your Heart

Ozan: Yes, there is indeed a "North Star" in my life, and that is curiosity—follow your curiosity. You might often hear "follow your passion" in graduation speeches or popular sayings, but I think passion is something that's hard to figure out. However, when people ask me, "What are you curious about?" it's much easier to answer. I believe curiosity is innate to humans. Observe how babies or children interact with the world—they are always driven by curiosity, wondering what others are doing, curious about their toys and the world around them. They look at the world with wonder and curiosity, and their every move is completely governed by it.

Unfortunately, I believe we have lost our curiosity, which is largely due to the structured nature of the education system. Of course, this is also true for children growing up in Turkey—curiosity is replaced by conformity. What we receive are not questions, but answers. Your only job is to memorize these answers, decided by people much smarter than you, and then regurgitate them in standardized exams. That is the entire education system.

Unfortunately, I have no room to say, "Hey, I want to learn more," or "I want to study this," nor any room to rebuild the education system. Yet these are the skills you need as an adult to thrive in society, because when you enter the workforce, problems are often not handed to you directly—you must discover them yourself, then overcome and change them. You must ask yourself if there are better problems to solve here, but none of this is considered in school. In fact, it's even worse—much of the innate curiosity is unfortunately "cured"—it is taken away from students.

So my lifelong journey has been about rediscovering curiosity. Do you know what led me to law school? I was simply curious about how the legal system is structured, how humans behave, and how they organize themselves around rules. This curiosity prompted me to take a course, which I thoroughly enjoyed, and eventually led me to law school. I was also curious about mentoring others, curious about online writing, and still curious about starting a podcast. So, while I was still a law professor, I began exploring these things, all just to satisfy my curiosity. Of course, putting it into practice is another story, but how can you know if you like something without trying?

Many things in my life have unfolded from this: try something out, start a podcast, record ten episodes, see if I enjoy it, see if an audience starts to form... Around this idea, I tried online writing, which I really enjoyed. I discovered that I truly loved it, and then readers began to form. Over time, the readership grew, eventually leading to the publication of my first book, *Think Like a Rocket Scientist*.

I believe this is the true inner journey, and for me, everything begins with curiosity. I tend to think that inner curiosity is like breadcrumbs, leaving traces along the path of your life, and you simply follow them, not knowing where they will lead.

Ticket to a Brave Life

Ozan: That's a good question, and a tough one.

First, you can succeed at things you dislike or no longer enjoy; you can also fail at things you like or are curious about.

Succeeding at something I no longer enjoy is, in itself, a form of failure—it means I have not respected my own voice, my own desires, and my curiosity. It is a betrayal of myself. Therefore, if I were to persist as an armchair law professor, I might still achieve success, but I would be deeply unhappy inside, so I would not consider that true success. For me, success means listening to what I am currently thinking, what I am curious about, and the signals my body is sending me—to honor these voices rather than suppress them. As you said, this is truly difficult to do, especially for intellectuals. As a mental laborer, I often neglect my body. I used to think its only function was to feed my brain, serving as a container to carry my mind around. But I no longer think that way. The more I listen to my body, the better my life becomes.

Next is the fear of failure, and here I will only mention two points.

First, for me, not trying comes at a cost, and trying and failing also comes at a cost. Therefore, I believe that failing at something you attempt, along with the price you pay for it, is the admission ticket to a courageous life. I am more than willing to pay that price, and I have done so many times. The other cost is the price of not trying. This regret stems from my curiosity about the world that I never explored. If you look back on your life on your deathbed, you might think: I wish I had gone to law school, I wish I had taken that course, I wish I had started a podcast... I don’t want to regret the pain of suppressing that desire, of stifling curiosity.

Second, failure is inevitable—I have experienced many failures in my own life. As you mentioned, you could start a blog, but perhaps no one except your parents would read it. So, how do you keep going? I’ve already touched on one aspect of this: I believe saying, "Hey, I’m curious about this, and I respect that curiosity enough to give it a try!"—that in itself is a victory.

Therefore, if we view failure as a learning opportunity, then it is no longer a failure.

For example, I started a podcast. Although it wasn't successful, I learned how to interview people, how to conduct background research on guests, and I met some incredibly interesting individuals, even forming lasting friendships with a few of them. Looking back at the things you've failed at and writing down what you've learned from them can truly be liberating for me, because none of it was a waste. You can apply what you've learned to whatever you do next.

Another challenge is that in conformist societies, the types of failures are widely recognized, such as losing a good job or a prestigious title… These kinds of failures seem particularly severe because you might hear related discussions and concerns from your relatives or classmates. Almost all societies seem to have such voices, and the United States is no exception. However, in cultures like Istanbul or East Asia, external voices appear to be much stronger. So, when facing such situations, how do you personally cope? How would you respond?

Ozan: I think acknowledging these limitations is one thing, but succumbing to them is quite another. I grew up in a very financially constrained environment. When I was admitted to Cornell University, I was still a high school student who spoke English haltingly. I decided to look into what the astronomy department at Cornell was doing and discovered that a professor there was in charge of a Mars mission. Not only was he the principal investigator, but he had also been a graduate student of Carl Sagan—one of my idols growing up. So I sat down at my computer and hesitantly expressed my strong desire to work for him, attaching my resume.

Just as I was about to click to send the email, some voices emerged in my mind, sounding very similar to what you just described: "There's no job posting at all, why are you applying for a job that doesn't even exist?" "You were born in a developing country with poor economic conditions. You can't do this—this is someone else's space mission, not yours!" "You're just a skinny, oddly-named 17-year-old kid from the other side of the world. What could you possibly contribute to this Mars mission?" I almost didn't click send, but I remember gathering myself, taking a moment to ask: Where are these voices coming from? Are these voices actually my own beliefs? Then I asked myself: What do I think? Setting aside all these limitations, what should I do? The answer was clear—send the email. So I clicked send.

That email ultimately catalyzed a series of events. If I hadn't sent that email, I wouldn't have gotten the interview for the Mars mission, I wouldn't have joined the Mars rover mission operations team, I wouldn't have written my first bestseller *Think Like a Rocket Scientist*, and so you and I wouldn't be chatting now... I think no matter what stage of life you're in, you probably have a story like this—where you've doubted yourself or heard others say you couldn't do it. So, I encourage you to take a moment for an inward journey, to reflect. When you find yourself filled with doubt about your abilities or what you can achieve, come back to this story of mine and click "send" on that email.

Backtracking Method: Starting from the Future

Ozcan: When we think about the future, we usually make predictions. Most businesses do this—they look at what they did last year, copy and paste that process, and make slight adjustments. For example, they examine last year's revenue, last year's customer base, last year's market, and then take those numbers to try to calculate what this year or next year will look like. I think forecasting is a valuable exercise, but it also has a major flaw: it starts from the present, embedding all our problematic biases and assumptions into the current situation and projecting them into the future. So, everything we did yesterday ultimately limits our vision of what we can do tomorrow. The method I use is called backcasting, and its defining feature is that I don’t care about the current reality or what we did last year—I start from an ideal future.

When I was still in middle school, I did it exactly this way (though of course, I didn’t call it the "backtracking method" back then).

I started with an ambitious "moonshot" goal, aspiring to become an astronaut one day. Then, I worked backward from there to determine what I needed to do to achieve that goal. That’s why I studied the backgrounds of all NASA astronauts and created a roadmap for myself—learning English, getting into a university here, excelling academically, studying astrophysics, and so on. But if I had just been a middle school student in Turkey, simply asking myself, "What can I do?" I might never have left Turkey. So, it’s important to aim high, but also to combine idealism with pragmatism. One of the key points I mention in my book is creating a very specific roadmap to achieve your dreams. By the way, I haven’t made it to the moon, and I’ve never been an astronaut—at least not yet (we’ll see what private space travel has in store). But I was part of one of the most successful interplanetary launches in history. If I hadn’t set a lofty goal, if I hadn’t combined the "moonshot" with the "backward planning" approach to create a truly specific roadmap for achieving it, I wouldn’t have been able to do the things that earned me a place on the operations team for the Mars mission.

First, start with your vision, not with where you currently are, because when we begin from where we are now, all you see are limitations—and this applies to everyone.

Second, starting from this goal, how to develop a roadmap—how do I get from A to B. Sometimes you may not reach B, but you achieve B1, and B1 can open the door to C2.

Ozan: Exactly, the final outcome far surpasses your original goal. Therefore, even if you fail—if not achieving the moon landing is considered a failure—your failure still exceeds what you initially aimed for. To me, that is an extraordinary success.