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QUESTION(S) OF THE DAY: What was your favorite quote or lesson from this episode? Please let me know in the comments.

Scroll below for links and show notes…

SELECTED LINKS FROM THE EPISODE

• Connect with Safi Bahcall:

Website | Twitter

• Loonshots: How to Nurture the Crazy Ideas That Win Wars, Cure Diseases, and Transform Industries by Safi Bahcall
• Sundance Film Festival
• Total Immersion Swimming
• Rational Choice Theory, Investopedia
• Thinking, Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahneman
• What Is the Formula for Calculating Net Present Value (NPV)?, Investopedia
• A Crash Course on Derivatives by Rhett Allain, Wired
• McKinsey & Company
• Men’s Wearhouse
• Marlon Brando and Popcorn; Lessons on Leadership; And the Idea That Changed the Course of History by Safi Bahcall, LinkedIn
• Active vs. Passive Voice, Grammar Lessons
• The Stories of Vladimir Nabokov by Vladimir Nabokov
• Essays After Eighty by Donald Hall
• How Life Imitates Chess: Making the Right Moves, from the Board to the Boardroom by Garry Kasparov
• The Art of Learning: An Inner Journey to Optimal Performance by Josh Waitzkin
• Dana Farber Cancer Center
• Longwood Medical Galleria
• Why Director Robert Rodriguez Chose to Make Another $7,000 Movie by Cat Cardenas, Texas Monthly
• The No Asshole Rule: Building a Civilized Workplace and Surviving One That Isn’t by Robert I. Sutton
• Dutch Goose, Menlo Park
• Pan Am
• The Battle of the Atlantic: The U-boat Peril, BBC
• American Airlines
• Steve Jobs Discovers the Macintosh Project, Mac History
• Robert Hooke and the Wrath of Isaac Newton by Daryl Worthington, New Historian
• Meet The PayPal Mafia, The Richest Group Of Men In Silicon Valley by Charlie Parrish, The Telegraph
• Founders Fund
• The History of Social Networking by Saqib Shah, Digital Trends
• Statins: A Success Story Involving FDA, Academia, and Industry by Suzanne White Junod, PhD, FDA
• The Incredible Story Of Walmart’s Expansion From Five & Dime To Global Megacorp by Leah Goldman, Business Insider
• JFK Moon Speech
• The New York Times’ 1920 Editorial Mocking Space Travel Remains a Classic by Michael Byrne, Vice
• The Net and the Butterfly: The Art and Practice of Breakthrough Thinking by Olivia Fox Cabane and Judah Pollack
• Art or Eyesore? The Eiffel Tower History You Probably Didn’t Know by Lindsay Shapka, The Anthrotorian
• AgassiñSampras Rivalry, Wikipedia
• May 8th, 1963: Sean Connery Stars in His First Bond Movie, Dr. No, History
• Starkiller: The Jedi Bendu Script Site
• Star Wars
• E.T.
• History of Transistors, ROHM Semiconductor

SHOW NOTES

• How Safi and I first met. [07:17]
• How the atypical lessons we learned in our respective Total Immersion Swimming experiences can be applied to other aspects of life. [09:36]
• How psychologist Daniel Kahneman changed economics by approaching it from a human perspective. [13:15]
• My own experience as a lab rat for Kahneman at Princeton. [15:12]
• What circuitous path led Safi from particle physics toward his work with cancer? [16:04]
• A digression: Safi’s Men’s Wearhouse story. [19:30]
• Back on track to cancer. [22:22]
• Some of the why: Nobody writes 15,000 page essays (except for Safi). [26:15]
• A lesson in the difference between active and passive voice — and why a Pulitzer winner’s advice regarding their use might differ from a schoolmarm’s. [29:32]
• How Safi began training himself to become a better writer by slowly dissecting paragraphs instead of succumbing to the more popular inclination of speed reading. [30:52]
• Two books that resonated for Safi during this period. [33:28]
• Have you heard the music of Nabokov? Safi has. [36:34]
• How did chess champion Garry Kasparov’s post-game analysis shift Safi’s mindset about the decision-making process? [37:51]
• How Safi has implemented this system versus outcome mindset to other areas of his life. [43:14]
• What other questions might someone ask in a business setting to decipher how they came to a certain decision — whether or not the outcome was ideal? [45:56]
• How might this process be applied to decision-making in a personal setting? [49:20]
• An aside about single life in Manhattan, SWAE and no BLC gatherings. [51:34]
• How Safi fell into an unfulfilling junk dating pattern during this time. [54:34]
• Upon prompting, Safi shares a little more personal detail about this pattern. [57:08]
• Two criteria for finding the right life partner from one of Safi’s well-practiced friends, and the one that became his system versus outcome litmus test for breaking out of the junk dating funk. [59:50]
• When he came to the decision to do so, how did Safi go about paring down his peer group? [1:01:47]
• How Safi met his wife and gleefully exited the dating world entirely. [1:04:09]
• Safi often uses acronyms as memory tools. So what does “Write FBR” stand for, and how might it help liberate you if you’re a writer with perfectionistic tendencies? [1:10:26]
• With creativity as with riding a bike, task switching is really expensive — from the perspective of effort as well as physics. [1:15:21]
• The two hats Safi wears for reading: RICLS and REAS. [1:11:22]
• Why a physicist biotech entrepreneur and I are having a conversation about writing, and what Safi has tried to convey with his first book. [1:21:14]
• The three hats Safi wears for writing: hunting, drafting, and editing, and how it’s a bit like the way director Robert Rodriguez makes a movie. [1:24:30]
• Possibly the nicest thing anyone’s ever said to Safi about his book. [1:27:50]
• How did Safi come up with the wacky stories that wound up in Loonshots? [1:28:42]
• Safi’s three rules of creativity: speed, attention, and courage. [1:29:46]
• Why the sequence of these hats and heuristics matter for giving purpose clarity, with a Tony Robbins exercise for the sake of illustration. [1:34:12]
• False failure and the difference between a loonshot and a moonshot with a case study of Friendster vs. MySpace vs. Facebook. [1:35:36]
• Who was Sir James Black, and how does his story connect with Safi’s? [1:41:34]
• The three deaths of the loonshot: how great ideas get killed easily and often — in spite of what revisionist historians will tell you decades after the fact. [1:44:45]
• The problem with Silicon Valley’s “Fail fast and pivot!” slogan. [1:46:19]
• The two types of loonshots: P (product) and S (strategy). [1:47:22]
• Robert Goddard’s universally ridiculed notion that a rocket could make it to the moon in 1920, and the Eiffel Tower’s initial opposition. [1:51:08]
• Mental reminders for ushering an aspiring loonshooter through the three deaths and the so many nevers. [1:55:29]
• Why does Safi have a Post-it note on his wall that says “The Adventures of Luke Starkiller,” and how does it tie in with a spy-fighting limey truck driver? [1:58:59]
• Why entrepreneurs and small teams should nurture loonshots and eschew the idea of “disruptive” innovation. [2:05:00]
• The differences in nurturing loonshots between larger and smaller teams. [2:08:19]
• A summary and parting thoughts. [2:14:00]

PEOPLE MENTIONED