Breaking Through

Housekeeping note:

Wanna buy me coffee for some hard-hitting thoughts?

Go for it here. Much appreciated!. 

Oh, and tell all your friends, too 🙂 

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How Much Failure / Redirection Can YOU Take Before YOU Break Through?

This question isn’t some idle chatter.

It’s a question SO many top performers have had to ask themselves repeatedly.

Athletes, including many gold medalists.

Novel Prize winners.

Entrepreneurs who built billion-dollar companies.

Political leaders, military and business leaders.

Success ain’t all about prizes and champagne and caviar.

Yes, indeed, it’s often outlasting everyone else.

Outworking, yes, sometimes outthinking, certainly.

But for the most part, success is quite often a LONG succession of eating shit and failure and being denied and denigrated by “experts” and “gatekeepers” with fancy degrees who are all about either “business as usual” or simply protecting their sinecures.

This isn’t a novel idea.

There are endless biographies, success forensic examinations and other screeds showing how many of the names we idolize in business, Hollywood, academia and elsewhere (idolize foolishly, since they’re inherently flawed as humans who survived such extreme conditions for so long) had to do all sorts of crazy pivots, face derision and ignorance and worse, just to stick around and EVENTUALLY break through to massive success.

These stories are too often window-dressed with something less than full candor.

Too many others highlighted by the media are all about 20-something and 30-something Forbes 30 Under 30 types that made their billions early.

The numbers on business success (starting a successful startup) are overwhelmingly clear about people in their mid-40s being the most successful group to do it, by far.

Again, these are stories that usually happen to people that are seemingly superhuman, blessed with insane stubbornness, vision, and often — let’s cut the crap - startup capital from their parents or others in their family’s high income bracket.

The bootstrapping myth is just that, if you’ve read Benjamin Franklin’s biography.

He was the genesis of “bootstrapping,” yet was himself the beneficiary of startup funds from his father and brother.

But I digress.

Speaking of Benjamin Franklin, I’ve written previously in these pages about someone I know well from my time at UPenn who was just such a person.

Someone who fought tooth and nail for her work and research, and had an insanely hard time dealing with idiot bureaucrats obsessed with funding dollars per square foot and other such useless metrics.

Someone who spent DECADES trying to convince others of the value of her research on mRNA.

Someone who managed, despite coming from a modest butcher’s family in rural Hungary…

To prove to the world that an mRNA vaccine can be created… and in the process, save literal millions of lives.

That someone is Dr. Katalin Kariko, whom I hope to see in Haifa in June, when she is slated to finally get her Harvey Prize from Technion.

It was my great pleasure to email her the announcement a few years ago.

I am happy to say that she remembers me well from when we worked at the same lab bench and shared our immigrant stories in 2002-03.

Yep, this is 20+ years later, under much different circumstances.

So I finally managed to read her biography, Breaking Through: My Life in Science.

I’ve read lots of biographies like this. Ataturk and Lenin both come to mind.

There’s always an element of being a total outsider to the ruling structure, coming from a different place and perspective and background, having the improbable staying power despite the entire system being stacked against you, and still managing to find a way to the top.

Too many, of course, never reach anything like the top.

Imagine how many women scientists, immigrant scientists, businesspeople and so on an so forth.

The nameless laborers who are tethered and controlled by white male bosses who yell at them.

Bosses who deride (the often better) ideas of others who are generally afraid to speak up, who come from places where they’ve been repressed and worse.

Bosses with degrees from fancy institutions who already come with massive “legs up” into any room they walk into.

I grew up in the shadow of exactly this.

My Mom, being an immigrant scientist, sadly faced this shit from white male bosses, Indian male bosses, from hostile peer review committees full of white and other men with inferior ideas, grant review committees similarly constituted.

I saw all of this from an early age, saw the damage this did to my Mom (and myself, indeed), the powerlessness and inability to speak up and fight back against an entire system with crazy levels of bias and discrimination.

It’s not a small reason why I went into law, by the way.

I grew up hating this entire white male-dominated science-industrial complex.

The same complex was later apparent in every other industry I worked in.

Law, finance, consulting. Maybe less so in coaching and HR.

But the dynamics are not much different, to a large degree.

I learned to move past snide remarks and little action to using my legal skills (too expensive, but valuable) to help my family and friends win in their battles with employers, whether friendly (negotiating a higher salary) or not quite friendly (leading to huge settlements).

And perhaps most importantly, I learned how not to let anyone take advantage of me.

Plenty still underestimate me, which I’m totally fine with.

But let me assure you, the sting of past failures sits somewhere in the back of the mind and fuels the full-court press in my mind.

Barely a moment to let the foot off the brake (aside from Shabbat).

So, about the book…

Aside from Dr. Kariko telling about her childhood in Communist Hungary, the Russian teacher who tried to screw up her career (and failed, thankfully), then the bastards who tried to threaten her and derail her career as an immigrant woman scientist, the ones with the fancy degrees, the ones who refused her grants and the ones who refused her better positions.

Throughout all of those, she still believed stronger than anything that her work was onto something.

She had to be incredibly resourceful just to keep going, taking a job 2 hours drive away from her family for a year.

She did that again later, when she got kicked out of Penn (idiots!), moving to Germany.

She talks a lot about how screwed up the system is and how stacked it is against someone like herself.

Sadly, I know all this, all too well.

She also talks a lot about her daughter Susan, who was my classmate at Penn, and how she was a walk-on to the rowing team, eventually making it to the Olympics twice - and winning a GOLD MEDAL twice!

Super inspiring, both of them.

There is a lot about the serendipity of meeting her future collaborator, Drew Weissman (her Nobel co-recipient) at the copy machine, how their skills were super complementary and how they managed to simply keep going until they had that incredible EUREKA moment.

Which was, of course, not enough, but did encourage them to keep going.

That whole thing about having a true partner to push you, someone who you can build with, is indeed a rarity and far from a given.

Personally, I haven’t been lucky, to date, in finding great collaborators, save for one or two here and there, who were too short-term.

Maybe this is my call to the universe 😀 

I’m building something special in the HR Tech space and could really use a great co-founder, or at least a co-builder. Haven’t found him or her yet.

Whom can you recommend, amigos? Surely, someone’s out there… maybe?

So the book was excellent, incredibly inspiring.

One main thing I learned about her internal mentality.

Sure, having a supportive life partner and self-sufficient kid really helps :)

Really can’t under-estimate those things or take them for granted, trust me.

BUT… there’s a real critical point here…

She’s always had this thing to do ONE MORE THING. AND ONE MORE THING. AND THEN ONE MORE THING.

There is no magic rest with a micro-success.

There’s no getting down on yourself with every failure.

There’s only learning.

There’s only pushing through to discover some new truth, some new way to help other people.

Perhaps it’s a bit mono-maniacal, but it’s ultimately effective.

A real human that I actually know, who went through this craziness, and made it to the other side, having just received her Nobel Prize and a slew of others, most importantly having saved actual, real millions of lives.

Basically after 3(!!) decades of this, well into her mid-50s and beyond.

All the hats I have, off to Dr. Kariko.

I’m still trudging through those years (2 decades, for me, as well) before any big breakthroughs, but I will happily keep going until I outlast and outbuild everyone else, including my own previous self.

What’s YOUR big struggle that you’re pushing through that you TRULY BELIEVE IN?

How long are you willing to face failure and derision based on your belief in yourself and your life’s work?

The answer will likely predict your success in that area.

Wishing you every blessing, and indeed, success!