An Interview With Maria Angelova
Study is not a purely intellectual exercise, but it is necessary to exercise the intellect in processing information into knowledge. And beyond the particular topic being studied, a strong intellect will nurture our ability to advance the science of our individual possibility.
It feels most comfortable to stick with what we are familiar with. But anyone who has achieved great success will tell you that true growth comes from pushing yourself out of your comfort zone. What are some ways that influential people have pushed themselves out of their comfort zone to grow both personally and professionally? As a part of this series, I had the pleasure of interviewing Kumar Murty.
Kumar is a professor of mathematics at the University of Toronto and for the last five years he served as Director of the Fields Institute for Research in Mathematical Sciences. Kumar received his PhD from Harvard and has held positions in Princeton, Mumbai and Montreal before moving to Toronto where he has been for the last 37 years. Besides his work in mathematics, Kumar is very interested in philosophy as well as in technology, economics and sustainable development.
Thank you so much for doing this with us! Before we start, our readers would love to “get to know you” a bit better. Can you tell us a bit about your childhood backstory?
I was born in India and grew up in Canada. I was fortunate to be brought up in a way that I developed an eclectic point of view being comfortable in both the culture of my birth as well as the culture I was growing up in.
I developed a liking for math at a young age and discovered I had some ability in it. I pursued that almost exclusively until my days as a graduate student.
During that period I discovered the writings of Vivekananda, a 19th century philosopher which resonated very much with me, and I would say that my worldview has largely been shaped by his thoughts. The foundation of his thought was very much about the growth of the individual.
Can you please give us your favorite “Life Lesson Quote”? Can you share how that was relevant to you in your life?
Vivekananda said that “You know but little of that which is within you” and he went on to explain that whatever stage we are at in our life journey, we have probably only scratched the surface of what we are capable of, and that we should continue to reach further. In so doing, we will be surprised at what we can do.
Is there a particular book, podcast, or film that made a significant impact on you? Can you share a story or explain why it resonated with you so much?
Well it depends on when you ask me this question. Since you are asking right now, I would say that its Kung Fu Panda. I am not sure who wrote the script, but it seems to me that they have really understood something important about human possibilities (even though there is not a single human in the movie!).
I think it is in Part 3 of this series, that the teacher Shifu asks one of the students (the Panda named Po) to become his successor and take over the duties of teaching the others. Po reluctantly agrees and makes a total mess of the first class. When he reports this to Shifu, he is surprised that Shifu says “I knew you couldn’t teach”. “Then why did you ask me to do this knowing I would fail?” The answer that Shifu gives is extremely important: if you only do what you know, you will never grow. Indeed, it is in attempting the unknown that we discover aspects of our ability that we didn’t know were there. By the end of the movie, Po figures out what teaching means.
I have actually been following this approach all my life, so I was happy to see this principle being stated explicitly in the Kung Fu Panda movie. Academically, I am now considered rather eclectic but its because I went through several stages of attempting things that were completely new to me. From my home turf of number theory and algebraic geometry, I ventured out into mathematical modelling, economics and even entrepreneurship.
Let’s now shift to the main part of our discussion. Let’s start with a basic definition so that all of us are on the same page. What does “getting outside of your comfort zone” mean?
There are some things that we can do and we know that we can do. That would be our comfort zone. When we are asked to do, or when we ask ourselves to do, something that we have never done before, something where we are not completely sure how to do, and something where we are not sure that we can succeed, that would be getting outside of our comfort zone.
Can you help articulate a few reasons why it is important to get out of your comfort zone?
Well, if we remember Vivekananda’s quote “You know but little of that which is within you”, and if you think it would be a wonderful adventure to know as much as possible about ourselves and our abilities, then we have to continually stretch ourselves and reach out beyond our comfort zone.
Knowing about ourselves gives us more self-confidence and will help us be more effective even in the things that are within our comfort zone.
Moreover, variety of interests and activities helps us to make better connections with people and circumstances and enriches our lives in a way that we could not have predicted. We will touch more lives, and be touched by more lives, than we can imagine. At the end of the day, it is human connections that give meaning to life and so one cannot overestimate the value of lives touching other lives.
Is it possible to grow without leaving your comfort zone? Can you explain what you mean?
Yes its possible, but it will be incremental growth and not disruptive growth. Small variations on what we are already comfortable with doing do stretch us a little bit, but will not give us the possible leaps of creative imagination that will catapult us into a new world of experience.
Can you share some anecdotes from your personal experience? Can you share a story about a time when you stepped out of your comfort zone and how it helped you grow? How does it feel to take those first difficult steps?
I started a company almost on a dare. I had some ideas for a disruptive new technology and tried to partner with existing companies to develop it. Everyone thought it was too risky and too blue-sky to be practical. At the same time, I was hearing some people opine that academics didn’t know how to make money. Well I decided to prove them wrong and started my own company.
I had some friends who believed in me and they invested some seed capital and we got started. Someone told me that Silicon Valley is the place where people understand new ideas, so we flew to San Jose and got an appointment with the CTO of a major company. We met over breakfast and as I blabbered about the new ideas and the disruptive technology, he listened patiently while eating his oatmeal. At the end of my speech, he said he would invest in our company, but he wanted to tell me about a “real problem” which if we could solve, there would be customers right away. The problem he explained involved a lot of things that I didn’t know anything about at the time. We came back to Toronto, focused our mind on what we heard, and solved the problem one day over lunch. With that, we pivoted the entire company to this new problem and we were successful.
Everything about this experience was new. I had never worked for a company before, let alone started one. I had no exposure to investors or company executives. I didn’t understand what was involved in selling or marketing anything. Everything about this experience was an eye opener. But I embraced it as an adventure and I believe I experienced significant growth in a very short time. I became familiar with and understood how to interact with a world that had been invisible to me.
But most importantly, I had an idea and acted on it without necessarily waiting to figure out all the details. And I kept an open mind to learn along the way when people offered advice and guidance. As a result, the company was successful but at doing something that we would not have even imagined when we started it.
These are lessons that have helped me tremendously as I advanced in my career. I have held senior administrative positions in the university and at the Fields Institute. Charting a bold new course with a vision, and being open to course corrections as we learnt more, are techniques I have employed on many occasions and they have stood me well.
What are your “five ways to push past your comfort zone, to grow both personally and professionally”?
All of these ways are about preparing the mind. As the Katha Upanishad says, what is to be achieved can only be done through the mind. The first is knowledge, the second is attitude, the third is reflection and study, the fourth is dealing with uncertainty and the fifth is identity.
The first way is knowledge about evolution at the human level. If evolution at the plant and animal levels had to do with survival, evolution at the human level is largely psychosocial, and about manifesting the possibilities within us, discovering our potential. For this purpose, we can benefit from the insights of philosophical and spiritual traditions, but also from modern science. Neuroplasticity is now an acknowledged aspect of neuroscience that supports the brain rewiring itself to accomplish whatever task we demand of ourselves. The first way is to understand and be fully convinced that we have the psychophysical tools necessary to push beyond our comfort zone. I spend time every day reflecting on philosophical, spiritual and scientific writings that point to greater capabilities.
The second way is attitude: a general attitude of appreciation of people and things around us will make it easier for us to become aware of our capabilities. Saying ‘thank you’ and wishing people well will create a mindset primed for discovery and unfoldment. It will also help the people we interact with make progress in their own journeys. And it will make our interactions with people and circumstances a lot more pleasant.
There is a philosophical perspective that asserts that we tend to see outside what we have within. And if we see positivity outside, we become aware of the positive within us. With a positive mindset, we are better able to reflect on what matters most for us, and what we really want and what we are capable of. In the words of essayist, philosopher and poet, Ralph Waldo Emerson, we will be better able to “detect and watch that gleam of light which flashes across [our] mind from within”.
The second way is to deliberately cultivate an attitude by which we are receptive and open to greater things that await us if we take the plunge.
The third way is about the need to apply our positive mind in reflection and study. We go through life not realizing the talent that is within us and we wonder why success eludes us. Discovering our own talent requires reflection and study, and that is an art that has to be learnt through practice.
Study is not a purely intellectual exercise, but it is necessary to exercise the intellect in processing information into knowledge. And beyond the particular topic being studied, a strong intellect will nurture our ability to advance the science of our individual possibility.
Despite all our analyses, learning is still mysterious. Given the mystery behind learning, we are sure to face uncertainty and doubt, and the fourth way is to learn to deal with this in a positive way, There are four principles about uncertainty.
The first is that uncertainty is intrinsic to all knowledge and in the phenomenal world; we can never eliminate it, not even in as precise a subject as mathematics. The second principle is that there are varieties of uncertainty: some don’t trouble us. Reflection is necessary to sort out what kind of uncertainty we are dealing with and not to conflate everything into an amorphous unknown. The third principle is is that uncertainty is a subjective state and not an objective one, for if it were objective, then given the same set of circumstances, everyone should have the same sense of certainty and uncertainty. The fourth principle is uncertainty in the small becomes averaged into a degree of certainty in the large. If we toss a fair coin, there is uncertainty about whether it will land on heads or tails as both possibilities have an equal chance of occurring. But if we toss the coin a hundred times, we can say with a high degree of certainty, that close to half the time, we will get heads.
Once we understand these principles, we can deal with uncertainty by dealing with our own mind, and by taking a larger perspective on things.
The fifth way is about the importance of identity. Who do we think we are? The answer will demarcate the extent to which we can grow, and the extent to which we can identify, develop and manifest our possibilities.
If part of my identity is that ‘I was never good at math’, that is going to erect a wall that I cannot scale and like a self-fulfilling prophecy, I will never be good at math. We have to become aware of aspects of our identity that are actually obstructing our growth. And we have to change those aspects through tools such as imagination and auto-suggestion.
Going beyond our individual achievements, we find that as we better understand ourselves and our potential, we are also able to better understand others and thus are able to more harmoniously interact with others.
Thus, we come full circle back to the idea of modern evolutionary biologists who say that human evolution is at the psychosocial level in which we develop a more harmonious relationship with ourselves and with others and with our world.
From your experience or perspective, what are some of the common barriers that keep someone from pushing out of their comfort zone?
Almost always, it is fear of failure and of the consequences of failure. That’s why it is good to remember that many great people — people who we consider great innovators — failed many many times before they succeeded. Mahatma Gandhi is famously known for saying that two things he gave up a long time ago were fear and failure.
There is a well-known quote attributed to Eleanor Roosevelt that says, “Do something that scares you every day”. What exactly does this mean to you? Is there inherent value in doing something that pushes you out of your comfort zone, even if it does not relate to personal or professional growth? For example, if one is uncomfortable about walking alone at night should they purposely push themselves to do it often for the sake of going beyond their comfort zone? Can you please explain what you mean?
I think I understand what she means, but I don’t particularly like that approach. We don’t need to scare ourselves. We can challenge ourselves without being scared. If fear is involved, it probably means that we are going too fast for ourselves or perhaps we haven’t even thought it through. On the other hand, if I have a sense of adventure then it is a positive attitude and is likely to help us grow in a constructive manner.
Consider the example of walking alone at night. I would say the first step is to figure out why one feels scared about it. Perhaps we have vague ideas of things that might happen to us. We need to spend some time reflecting on these things and come to a better understanding of whether these are reasonable or not. Reflection will reveal to us that some of these apprehensions are not reasonable. Maybe there is a big hole in the road and I will fall into it. Have I ever seen a big hole on this road? If not, then it is not reasonable to think there might be one when I am walking there in the dark. Maybe I will get mugged. Is this an area which is known for people getting mugged? If yes, then this is a reasonable fear and I would consider it foolishness to go out wandering the street in that context without taking some protection with me.
Going beyond our comfort zone doesn’t mean to be foolish or reckless. At the same time, we don’t want to over think it. There is a method to it.
You are a person of great influence. If you could inspire a movement that would bring the most amount of good to the most amount of people, what would that be?
Right now, I am very interested in developing the idea of a “smart village” as a vehicle towards global prosperity. Two years ago, I introduced a triangle of learning, innovation and inequality. It captures the idea that a higher quality of learning will bring about an innovative culture that is accessible to all, and which generates prosperity on a scale that we haven’t seen.
The talent and abilities that are locked up in people, undiscovered all their lives, would, if brought into the open and developed, be sufficient to generate wealth for themselves as well as their communities. And it is not only wealth, but answers to fundamental questions and challenges that we are all facing.
This is why Mahatma Gandhi said that “The difference between what we do and what we are capable of doing would suffice to solve most of the world’s problems”.
Is there a person in the world whom you would love to have lunch with, and why? Maybe we can tag them and see what happens!
Barack Obama! I really resonated with his mantra “Yes you can!” I think he will be able to give me guidance on my ideas about global prosperity and how to turn them into reality, given his understanding of the world and both the geopolitical realities as well as the opportunities.
How can our readers follow you online?
I’m afraid I don’t have an online presence.
Thank you so much for sharing these important insights. We wish you continued success and good health!
V. Kumar Murty On How to Go Beyond Your Comfort Zone To Grow Both Personally and Professionally was originally published in Authority Magazine on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.