It's very wonderful to see a mountain and to want to climb it and put your
flag on top of it. It is very wonderful to want to create your own mountain so
that you can then climb it and put your flag on top of it but it is also
wonderful to know why you are doing that or why you are compelled to climb
mountains in the first place
and you might discover that everyone values mountains but you actually love
the sea and perhaps swimming is what you really should be doing and if your
calling is the mountain then by all means go and climb the mountain but if
you have questions about the sea, you might as well run the experiment and see
what happens. Life means to evolve and if you're not
evolving through small incremental changes that build up over time to
create a large change then you're probably dead and that shouldn't really
be a goal of anyone like I think every day I get up and I say what are my
priorities and then I move towards that and sometimes honestly my priorities are
to see how many back-to-back episodes of whatever I'm watching on Netflix I can
watch, you know if it's that kind of introverts Sunday that I need, you know
for in order to be my best self out in the world Monday morning and sometimes
it's you know, how much of my to-do list can I crank through before lunch and so
I tell myself that this to-do list or the things that are on it are so
insignificant compared to the things that I have already done or I've already
survived or already accomplished that it's- it's almost laughable that they
think they can stay there on my to-do list, you know like they're- they're
actively mocking me and so if you can get to the point where you can say well
I've already pushed through something uncomfortable or I've already done
something that I didn't think that I was able to do, didn't have the skills to do
didn't have the confidence to even try but yet circumstances intervened and I
was forced to, I've already done these things and yeah they were in a different
context you know maybe they were in a personal context and not a career context or in my
case they were in the theater and not in the science world but I've already- it's
proof of concept is already there so what reason do I have to believe that
this isn't- it's not going to work again. So not thinking about it as this
entirely novel new thing because you do get the fear response to new things
because that's our brain trying to protect us from you know things that
might be dangerous that we- we don't know anything about and realizing that in
fact this is a familiar task that's cloaked in- in a new environment and so I
think that there's a lot to be said for looking back at our successes and not
just appreciating them but- but really recognizing that the new challenges in
fact are old dragons we've already slain.
A lot of the early accomplishments that I have made were because I didn't
realize that there was an option and there's actually a type of method for
teaching, I also used to play the violin and I was taught with the Suzuki method
and if you look up the Suzuki method, you have all of these little four or five
six year olds that are playing violin concertos that are, you know, far
beyond what you would think somebody of that age should be able to do and it's
because nobody told them that they shouldn't be able to do that and so that
was basically my reality. I was told well, you're 11, you're gonna start going to
college so I went and the expectation was you're supposed to get good grades, so I did.
Every time there was a goal put in front of me,I didn't realize you could not
accomplish it so I just did. We'll never really know who we would have been if we
had made like one different decision, you know way back there in our childhood but
because of the way the brain develops we are more emotionally susceptible to the
experiences that we have early on in life than we are later in life. We all
have to live in this society that's been created for us and there's you know
certain expectations that one is a contributing member of the community of
humanity and that can be accomplished in many different ways. I think if I had a
group of young people that I was responsible for I would try and listen
listen more than maybe my parents did to what each of them want. I certainly
wouldn't try and mentor all of them because you can't do that, right but put
them in situations where they can find people to emulate and to look up to and
to ask the right questions of because the worst thing in the world is to have an
inquisitive mind or to have questions and to not know the right people or have
the right resources to get them answered. So the youthful brain is still plastic
it's still developing and it's more susceptible to information in certain
ways than in others. I'd use stories I would use
imaginative language and humor but there's a certain amount of finishing
that happens in those last few years in the early- in the early 20s which is the
full development of the prefrontal cortex which is sort of responsible both
for those, our ability to think logically and to predict outcomes and- and also
maybe a little bit for us to project the negative outcomes as well, right so
optimism follows victim to reality. Brains are lazy because most of nature
is lazy. There has to be a justifiable reason for our energy output you know
because that's using resources that are important for our survival. So if our brains
are lazy and they follow the processes that are easiest for them to follow, if
you have constantly trained your brain and through like reframing and
reframing and reframing that the positive, the optimistic outcome is the
easiest one to think about and it has to work very hard to think about the
negative ones it- unless it's feeling threatened in some way it will go eh seems
good enough because it's a- it's a prediction machine. It's like I predict
that this is probably what's going to happen, it'll be a positive outcome, there
might be other factors but the energy that I would be expending thinking about
those other factors doesn't seem in line with what's necessary for the importance
of this decision so good enough. Our brains really don't like to be bored
they get very unhappy if they're under stimulated and then that can, that can go
to solving the problem in- in many different ways not just how can i- how
can i solve the problem short term but how can I ensure that this is not going
to be a problem in the long run. Emotion was not useful or you know, it is actively a
destructive thing in that I had to build my life entirely logically, now
that's obviously like we're human so it's impossible. We make emotional
decisions all of the time but a youthful developing brain thinks that this is
something that can be done and that they can, you know
always do the right thing and the right thing is the logical thing and then as I
started to learn about the brain and as I started to learn about myself, I
realized that I didn't have a lot of experience in seeing what would happen
if I just let them come and most people experiment with this in adolescence but
they don't know they're experiencing, you know just these these emotions. They- they
just kind of think this is how I am and this is who I am, right they don't think
about it in an abstract way. I went to New York and I trained at the Alvin
Ailey School which is a very well known school of modern dance there in
Manhattan and I was gonna be a dancer but then there were sort of cracks in
the facade a little bit. I wasn't quite fulfilled and when you're a dancer
especially when you're a young dancer you're treated as if you don't have a
mind of your own and you are simply a body and the artistic director and the
choreographer or the teacher is giving you the input and you have to give it back and
for someone that already had a bachelor's degree in biochemistry that
wasn't really satisfying, um especially when they would make comments about
biochemistry like don't eat too much turkey for Thanksgiving because then
you'll fall asleep because tryptophan. I'd be like do you know how many turkeys you'd
have to eat but I digress, all I hope for women in STEM is that they stop worrying
about whether or not they're fitting in and whether or not they are supposed to
be emulating the men or making a point of being female and- and they they start
just taking things. Taking their power, taking their place at
the table and not asking permission for it and we have all of these trailblazing
women that have had to do that. They have had to take and there are so many glass
ceilings in academia, you know the ancient ivory tower that it is and they
are still there to be broken but I think for the masses since we're always trying
to get women in STEM now and women in coding and so it's, I think of it as like
I hope this isn't offensive, like storming the beaches at Normandy like we
just put enough women into the pipeline and the fact that it's so leaky won't be
a problem, we'll eventually get enough of them through to tenure-track positions
that there will start to be a positive feedback loop and I think that for the
masses it can be very difficult to be at your best
when you're constantly looking over your shoulder and wondering if being you is
enough.