427. The Mentorship Mindset: Nobel Insights with Dr. Bob Lefkowitz

Welcome to episode 427 of the Brainy Business Understanding the Psychology of why People Buy. In today's episode, I'm excited to introduce you to Nobel Prize winner, Dr. Bob Lefkowitz. Ready?

Let's get started.

You are listening to the Brainy Business podcast where we dig into the psychology of why people buy and help you incorporate behavioral economics into your business, making it more brain friendly. Now, here's your host, Melina Palmer.

Hello. Hello everyone.

My name is Melina Palmer and I want to welcome you to the Brainy Business Podcast. In today's conversation, I'm joined by Dr. Robert Lefkowitz, who asked for me to call him Bob, so I'll do that.

Through the rest of the episode.

Bob is a physician, scientist and investigator of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute, the Chancellor's Distinguished professor of Medicine, and professor of Biochemistry and Chemistry at the Duke University Medical Center. He is an elected member of the National Academy of Sciences, National Academy of Medicine, and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He has received numerous awards, including the National Medal of Science, the Shaw Prize in Life Science and Medicine, and the Canada Gardner International Award. In 2012, he and Brian Kobilka, who was a postdoctoral fellow in his Lab in the 1980s, were were awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry for their studies of G protein coupled receptors. Now, you might be wondering, why in the world is someone who won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry on a podcast about behavioral economics being applied into business? There are a few reasons. First is because Ruth Gotian, who was recently on the podcast talking about mentorship, recommended I talk to Bob about his work. And specifically we talk about what it means to be a great mentor in any field with any personality type. As I just said there a moment ago, Bob won the Nobel Prize with one of his previous postdoctoral fellows, essentially his mentee. How amazing is that? In our conversation today, we talk about how he and Brian have the most different of personalities, but they're both seen as being great mentors to those who work in their labs. So he shares some of his thoughts on why that is and what makes a great great leader and mentor, regardless of personality type. Another reason I brought him on is in reading his book A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to Stockholm, he shows how asking good questions, being thoughtful, and taking the time to reframe information and problems can help ensure you're working on the right stuff, which I definitely wanted to talk to him about. We also discuss the value of saying no so you can focus on the most important work without getting too distracted and he's just a delight of information and insights and diverse perspectives are valuable.

And I can't wait for you to hear all about it really quickly.

Before we get into the conversation, I want to be sure you know that there are links in the show, notes for my top related past episodes and books and more.

It's all within the app you're listening.

To and atthebrainybusiness.com 427 now let's jump right in. Dr. Bob Lefkowitz, welcome to the Brainy Business podcast.

Delighted to be with you.

Same. I'm so excited. And as we were saying in our kind of intro chat here, your background is very different than anyone we've had on the show before, which I always find very exciting. For anyone who has not yet heard of you and doesn't know about you, can you share a little bit about your background and the work that you do?

Yes. I'm a professor of medicine and biochemistry at the Duke University Medical school in Durham, North Carolina where I've been on the faculty for just 51 years. And as our host noted to me in our conversation before we started here, Today is the 51st anniversary of my coming to Duke. I'm a physician scientist. For the first 35 years that I was on the faculty, I taught clinical medicine. And throughout the entire 51 years and continuing to the present time, I do basic research. That research has to do with substances called receptors. These are molecules on cells with which drugs or hormones interact. And and along the way I discovered a large family of receptors called G protein coupled receptors, which include the receptors for many substances like adrenaline, dopamine, serotonin, opiates, on and on and on. In fact, the major clinical importance of this family of receptors is that currently about a third of all FDA approved drugs in the United States target these receptors. Things like antihistamines, adrenaline, these new GLP1 drugs that are taking the world by storm for the treatment of diabetes and obesity. All of these drugs were developed to target the receptors that I discovered for that body of work. In 2012, I received the Nobel Prize in Chemistry together with Professor Brian Kobilka from Stanford University who had been a fellow research fellow in my laboratory in the 1980s. So that's a brief capsule. Yeah.

And such an amazing for everyone who wants to read the real full, full story, of course we'll be linking to your book A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to Stockholm in the show notes for everyone so they can check it out. It's fascinating story and we'll talk about Some examples, of course, from it today. I am curious, are you a fan of the. The play the musical A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum or did it just sort of happen?

Well, I, I did see that show, I think with Zero Mostel a million years ago and I can't say I remember much about it, but the titling things A Funny Thing Happened on the Way too. It's become kind of not overly original I guess. But I was trying to key on what you realized in reading my book, which is that I do have a humorous outlook on most everything, sort of part of my core personality. So I figured that was a good tagline for a title.

Absolutely. I. So in a random. In the fun of random stories, I used to. I almost went to school for musical theater and so I've been singing for a really long time and like the first song I did in private voice lessons that I remember when I was in, you know, elementary or high school or junior high school was Comedy Tonight, which is from A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum. And so that musical is just always top of mind for me in a way that it resonates so stuck out in that way.

That's another point of intersection of our lives. People often ask me, I have five children, six grandchildren. People often ask me, oh, did any of your kids become scientists or physicians, anything like that? And the answer is no, not one. But many of them. Many in my family are involved in theater and entertainment. In fact, I just got back from a trip to New York where I saw one of my son in laws in a Broadway musical called Water for Elephants which I highly recommend to your audience.

Wonderful. Well definitely everyone go get your tickets to that. And that sounds great. Well, I think it's such an interesting. There's not a great segue here, so we're just going to move along. We had our conversation there. But as far as having the conversation today and knowing that you are. You talk a lot about how you definitely were not interested in research at all and kind of fought it for a long time and then found that it has essentially become, you know, this passion space for you. And it was, you know, just in trying something that you were sure that you were not going to be interested in helped to open up this whole space for you. I think that like the confirmation bias and how we can be impacting our own lives if we don't allow ourselves to try is so interesting. Can you share a little bit about what you've kind of learned?

Well, yeah, when I talk to students about my career. I try to impress on them, even though many of them. And, you know, when I get my hands on students, they're either undergrads or medical students, and they often think they know what they're going to be when they grow up and what they're doing and what they're shooting for. And that's good. But I try to stress to them that you really have no idea how the story ends, and that's part of the fun. And we all have to stay open to possibilities that we never could have imagined. In my case, as you pointed out, I had wanted and was passionate about becoming a doctor from the time I was 6, 7, 8 years old, when I absolutely idolized my family physician, who made house calls in the Bronx in New York City, and he'd let me play with his stethoscope and his other instruments that he would produce from that black bag, which was, to me, like a cornucopia of just absolutely wonderful things. And from then on, I never varied in my passionate desire to be a physician. And I became one, and a pretty good one, too. I never had any interest in doing research. I loved science. I loved reading science. I was a chemistry major, but I never did any research. And were it not for a cataclysmic but serendipitous event in my life, I never would have done research. And I'm sure I would have gone happily on and enjoyed a career as a practicing physician and cardiologist. But the Vietnam War was raging during the 1960s when I graduated medical school, and there was a draft unlike there was a lottery draft for all men over 18. But for physicians, there was no lottery. Everybody was drafted. Every physician was drafted on graduation for medical school, typically given a year or two further deferment to get some postgraduate training, internship, residency. And then you were drafted into the army, the Navy, the Air Force, or the Public Health Service. For two years, the first three services, Army, Navy and Air Force, pretty much guaranteed one year in Vietnam. In the war theater, in the Public Health Service, you had at least a chance of not going to Vietnam and staying in the United States, perhaps better yet, in one of their research establishments like the CDC or the nih. But as a result, it was extraordinarily competitive to get those commissions in the Public Health Service. So they sort of were able to take the creme de la creme. They got, you know, people from the top of the medical school classes, et cetera. So nobody wanted to go to Vietnam. It was a very unpopular war. But I was successful in being drafted into the Public Health Service. I was sent to the NIH for two years where I spent about 20% of my time taking care of patients in the clinical center and 80% doing mentored research in a laboratory where I did not thrive. I mean, I was not very good at it. Nothing seemed to work. And so I made arrangements at the end of my two years to continue my clinical training and go into practice. But as luck would have it, during the final six months I did meet with some success. Published my first couple of papers, developed a little bit of a taste for it, but certainly not enough that I would have really pursued it. But then continuing my clinical training at that point in Boston, at the Massachusetts General Hospital Teaching Hospital of Harvard. After six months of intense full time clinical work, I realized I actually missed the laboratory and that I needed to reincorporate it into my career plans. And so I did that and I found another mentor and started doing research again. But I also, at the same time finished my clinical training and then came to Duke in 1973, as we mentioned, opened my laboratory and went to work, setting up a lab program, but also doing clinical teaching. And then over the next few years, the research just took over my being. I became involved in this problem I was passionate about, which was trying to prove that there was such a thing as receptors for hormones and drugs and see if we could exploit them as a way of developing drugs. And then as they say, I guess the rest is history.

Yes, definitely, and thank you for sharing that background.

One of the things that I really.

Loved in the book is where you talk about how, in many ways, having this, you know, a disparate background of different things that we're looking at and being able to ask really different questions and just intuiting the way that you would be speaking with the patient, actually sitting down next to them, paying attention to them while they're talking, kind of that slowing down and being focused on the most important thing in the room at that, at that moment. I know that some of that came from understanding, you know, that there's more than one story from the data. So I'm kind of combining a couple of things here. You can choose your own adventure and how to answer my winding question here. But really, as we think about, you know, that idea of paying attention to the things that matter, focusing on what is important and letting other things kind of go. I think this really applies to business problems and not just those, you know, in, in a medical space. But can you share a little bit about you know that story of data and things.

Yeah. So I think there are several points there. One is this issue of focus. Okay. I always tell research trainees that there are four keys to success in research and probably everything else in life. The first is focus, the second is focus, the third is focus. And the fourth you got to figure out for yourself. So being able to focus like a laser without distraction is a skill that many people just never develop. And I gather from what I read that in current generations of young people, because of all the electronics and the phones, this is a big problem. I see this in my own grandchildren. They're never really there. I was just with my family in New York to go to that show I mentioned. And so I had several of my grandkids there and they went to the show. And afterwards we all went out to dinner. 12 of us. The two grandkids who were like 13 and 10 who were there, they were on their phones the whole time. I mean, they just weren't there. So the ability to focus like a laser is so important. It's very important in clinical medicine, I can tell you that. And much appreciated by a patient. I mean, when I would. Role modeling is very important to me as part of a mentoring skill. When you're mentoring, you can't really. It's one thing to tell people how they should act, but that doesn't get you anywhere. You gotta show em. Okay. I mean, mentoring is all about an apprenticeship. When people come to my laboratory, they basically live with me in the lab for a few years and they watch me and that's the way I can teach them. Not by telling them, this is what you do and this is what you don't do. And the same is true in the clinical realm. And so when I would make rounds, I would always make it a point when we went into the patient's room to model behaviors that I thought were important to the patient. I mean, if you've ever been a patient, and I have, then you know that you live for those five minutes in the day when the attending physician is coming into your room. And if they're distracted, I mean, it loses everything. On the other hand, if they sit down on the side of your bed and they take your hand in theirs and they look you in the eye and they talk to you for five minutes and really find out how you're doing and maybe do a little physical exam, et cetera. So that kind of focus and presence, I think is very, very important. The other thing that you alluded to, which is very important, to me is, you know, making scientific discoveries, to use a trite description, is often a matter of seeing things in data that other people have not seen. Okay. And to me, this is a matter of putting together what are often disparate little pieces of information or data or something and making a synthesis of that so that you see something new where other people didn't. And one of the things I find most useful in cultivating that ability is humor. I often tell people, sometimes people will say to me, well, if you weren't a physician scientist, is there anything else you might have liked to do? And I say, well, probably be a stand up comic would have appealed to me because comedy is a very creative enterprise and generally involves looking for surprises and seeing things differently than other people do. And so in my lab meetings, I always get people laughing and looking at things from a different perspective. I mean, you know, in the moment that people see the joke or see the humor in what you're saying, in that moment, they're making a little discovery a moment before they didn't see it. And then you say something and oh, and they laugh. Okay, well, scientific discovery is basically like that. Those little eureka moments. It doesn't have to be a Nobel prize winning discovery, but every little time you see an association you didn't see before. Yeah. So I try to inculcate that in my trainees by using humor. So those are a few random thoughts in response to your question.

I love it. And very much tied in with where we were looking to go and knowing that I asked them most diverse. I tend to ask like four questions at once and just let someone go wherever they feel compelled. I think it makes for a good conversation on these. Well, and so last week's episode of the show, I had on Christopher Frank talking about his book that he co wrote called Decisions over Decimals. And it's talking about this piece on knowing the difference between summarizing and synthesizing information that you're going to be presenting when it comes from just like you're talking about here in the data, and that there are multiple ways to, to look at the data and the, the numbers and how we share that. And so I know that there's a great example from when you were kind of put on the spot early when you were in your residency. I believe that helped to teach you this. That I think is powerful for, for people to hear. And then if you're able to kind of, I would look to transition this into, as you think about like funding for the lab and helping to teach People about the way they tell a story to others to get their buy in.

Well, yes. So storytelling has always been very important to me. And that was the genesis of my writing the book with a co author was because for as long as I can remember, people have been saying, bob, you have all these great stories, you need to write them up. And eventually I was talked into doing it by one of my fellows. But. But storytelling is extraordinarily important in both realms, both professional realms in which I have made my way over the years, the clinical world and the basic science world. But the story I tell in the book actually was one that had a huge impact on me, although I didn't realize it at the time. And it occurred not when I was a medical resident, but much earlier. It was during my beginning of my third year of medical school, on my very, very first clinical rotation. So the first two years of medical school are basic sciences, and then you start the third year and now you're in the clinic for the first time. And it was not only my first clinical rotation, it was the first day, and I was a student at Columbia, and I had been assigned to the Mount Sinai Hospital in New York City, the medical service, for my first rotation. And on day one, I was given a patient who had just come in with some sort of lung trouble, worked him up, and the next day presented that to a remarkable attending physician who was himself a pulmonologist, a lung doctor. Terrific guy. He was an identical twin, and his brother shared the practice with him. Anyway, he listened to my case, we had a little discussion, and then he said, okay, Mr. Lefkowitz, now I want you to represent the case, but let's stipulate that you can change none of the data, none of the historical data, none of the physical exam data, none of the laboratory data. But I want you to tell me a different story. Well, I was flummoxed. I just don't know how you could do that. I mean, the story is the story. He went around the room. None of the other trainees or physicians could do it. So he said, let me illustrate. And so he went ahead. And just as he said, changing none of the data, he told a rather different story. He put the emphasis in different places. He left some things out. He brought in some things that he had read in the chart, which I didn't think were important enough to mention, and in the end told a rather different story, which led to a somewhat different differential diagnosis and in the fullness of time, to the correct diagnosis, unlike the story I had Told. So I was impressed by that at the time, but as the years went by, I was even more impressed because what he was basically showing us was that data are not a story. Data, just data. A story is something you impose on the data with your own creativity and synthetic ability. And, boy, that is even more true. Perhaps in the world of basic research, you get all these data, but when it comes time to write the paper, there are many different ways you could put them together. So often I'll have the folks in the lab, you know, we'll have, say, six or eight different data figures. So now the next job is to put them in an order which tells the story. And there are many different ways you could lay it out. Sometimes what looks initially like it's the last figure really should be the first or vice versa. So learning to tell a good story is just a very, very important enterprise in both clinical medicine and research, and I suspect in many, many other fields.

Definitely. There's so much, like you said, where it's potentially it's a cyclical relationship that we're not thinking of. Right. The catalyst may be. Be something that we considered as an outlier, right. And said, oh, that's not a big deal, but it's actually incredibly important in something that's triggering behavior for somebody. And that's in that space of behavioral science, of knowing that thing that we don't think is that important is often so key to the choice that someone's making. And so taking that time to look at the problem more holistically, to look more big, go way, way down, you know, it can help to find something that we might have missed and that the competition can tend to miss. For sure.

Yeah. And this is what mentoring is all about. Because if you think about what you were just saying, could you, with words, teach somebody how to do that? I mean, how could you do that? You can't. All you can do is somebody is like, living with me in the lab for three, four, five years and sees me day in and day out. The decisions I make, when do I let go of a project, when do I keep pushing on in the face of failure, when an interesting, seemingly interesting, unexpected finding pops up. But it's kind of off to the side, and it's a matter of what do we take our focus off that goal and just maybe take a look where that might take us? Well, sometimes I do, but most of the time I don't. So how do I make that decision? I can't put that into words, but if you watch me do it, Five dozen times, you may get a sense of it. You develop a sense of taste. I mean, there's nothing more fundamental to the scientific enterprise than what you choose to work on. I mean, in the moment you decide what is your research problem, you are setting the upper limit of what you could ever achieve. Because if you choose something that's not very important, it doesn't matter how successful you are in solving it. Nobody will care because it wasn't important. And if you choose something that's too important and too difficult and too risky, you'll never solve it. And again, you'll fail. So you can fail in diametrically opposite ways. It's too easy. It's too hard. How do you choose just the sweet spot? The sweet spot is the most important, and typically, risk follows importance. The most important and riskiest thing you could work on without choosing something that's too risky for you? Well, I can't put that into words. On the other hand, you work with me, you see how I do it, and hopefully you begin to pick up that sense of taste for a problem that is in that sweet spot.

Yeah. In the book, as we start to look for ways to be putting this into words a little bit. Right. So you. You share about the, you know, the power of saying no. Right. And so how there were a lot of things you said no to. And of course, you know, along the way, it's making sure you're saying there's this balance, like you said, of stubborn pursuit of a thing that you got fixated on that will never turn into anything, versus, I know that this is the right thing, and I'm willing to gamble it all. Like you said, that investment and investment in the right process. Do you have tips for people as they're kind of determining what to say no to, how to say no to things? And I know you got very good at saying no to people and had your form letters and whatnot along the way.

Right. So I think focus helps in that regard. So to me, the issue is, do you know what's really important to you now? What you would like to achieve? What is your goal? And for many years, my goal was to figure out a certain set of research problems which I felt were important and I felt I had real traction on. And then, as I think I mentioned in the book, beginning actually at age 33, three years after I arrived at Duke, I started getting offers to chair departments. Now, that's a very prestigious thing. I mean, when I was in training, I would have thought that if you asked me what would be the pinnacle of your career as an academic physician, scientist? The answer was obvious. To be a chairman of a prestigious department of medicine. But at 33, not having made my mark or built an edifice of research that I felt would be a worthy lifetime contribution for me to have taken any kind of a chair would have been a complete distraction. Now, was I ruling that out for the. No. I just thought, I'll get to that in good time. Now, the interesting irony of my whole career is every job that I thought I might want someday when it probably would have been right, I didn't want it anymore. Okay. So, for example, when I was a resident physician, if you asked what would be the pinnacle of your career, I would say it would be to be selected as chief medical resident. What an honor that would be. Well, that happened to me twice, Both at Columbia when I was in my early training, and then at the Mass General. So Columbia and Harvard tried to make me chief medical resident, but for different reasons, especially when I was at Harvard, I didn't accept those positions. And then in the 1980s, having been offered innumerable jobs, they offered me the chair of medicine at Duke. Okay. Well, you know, I was in my early 40s, and I still felt I hadn't gotten where I wanted to with my research. So I turned that down. And I just kept turning them down. Then deanships and heads of research institutes, and now I find myself at age 81. I never took any of them. I think I could have been a good leader of many institutions, but I probably wouldn't have been because I never passed a point where I would have been willing to take my focus off my research and my teaching and devote it to administrative work. So you sort of have to know one, what are you good at? But probably, what do you want to do? I mean, it's a matter of knowing yourself and knowing, you know, what. What makes you tick.

Right.

Yeah.

And I love that there was always that perspective of being able to. From what I read in the book, of course. Right. Of just this space of saying, you know, like, if I was to go to this other school, I'd have to start all over and build a new program. And you're going to be behind and where you thought you were and clearly were correct that you were, like, right at the edge of really amazing research that ended up, you know, culminating in that Nobel Prize. If you would have been then three years behind, you know, would have been a totally different story.

Yeah. And when I look at college, my career, while far, far from Unique is unusual in that most of my colleagues that I sort of grew up with professionally, my cohort at some point in time transitioned from being a physician scientist, leading a lab program, et cetera, to being chair of the division, the department deanship. Most of my colleagues went that route. I never did. And so that was sort of somewhat unusual and I think just reflected my desire to just keep my focus on what I was doing.

Well, we've talked a little bit, mentioned mentorship multiple times throughout the conversation, and of course, thanks to Ruth Gautian, who made the connection to us, who was on the show talking about mentoring our recently as well. And you went on. One of your mentees, as we would say, is who you ended up winning the Nobel with. And many of your mentees have gone on to do amazing things. Can you share some of your, your thoughts on, on mentorship? You know, why it matters and what it means to, to win such an honor with, with one of your mentees?

Well, when I got the call from Stockholm, the very first question I asked them is, am I sharing this award with anybody? And they immediately said, yes, Dr. Kobilka, et cetera. And I kind of teared up at that because you never know who or what they're going to do with these prizes. But mentoring is so important to me. I mean, in the end, perhaps in a certain way, even more than the science, your biggest legacy in this business are the people that you've trained. And there are real, how can I put it? Real lineages in science. I mean, if you select at random an outstanding scientist, either a Nobel laureate or somebody who wins big awards, et cetera, you'll invari. And you then ask, well, in whose laboratory did they train? Invariably it's somebody very prominent, et cetera. And if you ask, okay, who did they train? Same story. And just to give you an illustrative example, I told you about this program that sent me to the NIH as part of my public health service. That program had the formal name of the Associate Training Program, or ATP at the nih. Informally and derisively, it was referred to by a pejorative moniker, the Yellow Berets, okay, A takeoff on Green Berets elite commando forces, Yellow implying cowardice because we didn't go to Vietnam. Anyway, it was a small program. Maybe 50 people a year got sent to the NIH through the Public Health Service. But between 1964 and 1972, eight year period, which were the peak years of the Vietnam war during those eight years, so maybe there were 400 people in the program, 10 of us would go on to win the Nobel Prize, which is staggering. All young physicians, most of us with no prior research training at all. So how'd that happen? Well, at the NIH were a lot of mentors. So of the 10 of us, not including me, but of the 10 of us, four actually trained in the lab of a Nobel Laureate. The other six of us trained in the lab of somebody who, while not a Nobel laureate, had trained in the lab of a Nobel Laureate. Okay, so what I'm saying is you never had to go back more than to a scientific grandparent in any case, to find a Nobel Laureate. And if you look back further it studied. Now this plays out not just at the level of Nobel laureates. That's just the tip of the iceberg. But it does really support the idea that there are transferable elements in how to do high level science that come from the apprenticeship experience that we call mentoring. Now, in terms of my own mentorship, style, boy would take a long time to describe it. And I have a whole chapter on this in my book. But, you know, amongst the things I teach people is focus, is sort of saying no, working diligently, all these things, but really developing a certain sense of taste for problems and trying to always see things from a, maybe a different point of view. I was just as an example last week, what drew me to New York City is there's a very, very prestigious award for biomedical research. Some people think in prestige, it's maybe second only to the Nobel Prize. It's called the Lasker Award. Okay. And many people who win the Lasker Award will go on to win the Nobel within a few years. Well, I'm on the award jury for the Lasker Prize, and I'm part of a committee of two dozen folks who review nominations and decide who's going to get that prize. And, you know, we have discussions and this and that. Anyway, after I got home, and it's a very notable committee, I think about a third of the committee Nobel laureates themselves. Anyway, after I got home, I got a sweet note from one of the other Nobel laureates on the committee saying how much he enjoyed my comments and the discussion. He says, you always seem to see things from a different perspective. He said, perhaps that's why you've been so successful. Well, I don't know about that, but yeah, trying to see things from a different perspective, that's always sort of come easily to me. That's just my personality. But it brings up another issue in my mind about Brian Kobilka, who you mentioned. So Brian is generally regarded, revered, I would say, as an outstanding mentor. And Lord knows he's an amazing scientist. You could not have two people whose personalities are more different than me and Brian in every regard. Okay. And yet we both do a pretty good job of mentoring and of doing science. So what does that mean? Well, first of all, it means that there's not one right way to do it. But the key is you've got to do it your way. You've got to play to your personality. You've got to inspire people in the way that you can do it. And believe me, Brian and I can't inspire people in the same way. He is an introvert of introverts. I'm an extrovert. I'm a man of many words. He's a man of very few words, et cetera, et cetera. So you have to know yourself and do things in a way which is consistent with your own personality.

I love that. And helps to show for people if they feel like, you know, just thinking about as a manager. Right. So it's very much. Even if people aren't in a lab that are listening to the show, which many people aren't, I'm hoping that there's a lot of crossover people are going to be able to see as they think about inspiring others and also looking for people to work with who you find inspiring. Right. So in the case of what you're talking about here, you know, on the scientific side and knowing that's what you have as a background, it sounds kind of like, you know, there's the balance of, you know, great program that has good funding, but potentially, you want to be looking for the lab and the person you want to be under the tutelage of more than per se, maybe the school or a specific program, maybe, or kind of a balance of all that.

Boy, did you hit the nail on the head, Molina. Absolutely. People often ask me, well, how do I know which school to go to or which program? You know, where to go to college? Well, college is a different story. But where to go to medical school or graduate school or residency or postdoctoral, I say, doesn't matter. None of that matters. All the things you think matter because it's more prestigious to go here. None of that matters. 30 years from now. I tell them, nobody will know or care where you went to school. Does anybody know where I trained? Why would they care? Okay. What matters is mentorship. So what matters is, if you're a scientist, what laboratory do you go to? Who is Your mentor, that matters. So pay a lot of attention to that.

I love that. And I think that's great for people, too, to know. People in business work for great managers, and they leave because of bad managers. So as far as cultivating strong talent and knowing that anyone can be a great manager and therefore mentor in a way that can be impacting other people within the work that they're doing to go on and do their version of amazing things, perhaps, you know, likely not winning Nobel Prizes, but.

Well, but I'm sure it's true in the world of business and everything else, just as it is in my occupation, that in order to be successful, you have to attract good people. Okay. And, you know, state the obvious. The better the people that you have, the more chances you have to be. So how do you. How do you attract good people? Well, first of all, you have to be able to recognize talent. That's one aspect. But the other is even after you recognize it, if you've recognized it, competitors are obviously going to recognize it. So how do you get them to make the decision? They want to come work with you. And a lot of that has to do with inspiring them when they meet you and they want to be inspired, they want to feel your enthusiasm. They want to think, hey, in addition to doing some great science, it might be fun to work with this guy. In fact, it's fun talking to him.

So.

And then they go in the lab, and I always tell people when they ask me, well, how do you. How do I choose a mentor? I said, one of the most important things is to visit the laboratory and talk to the people. They'll be honest with you is what I found. Find out when the boss isn't around. What do they say about him? Do they like working with him? Is he fun? You know, and I think that's one of the things that's helped me over the years to attract good people, because the folks who work with me basically enjoy what they're doing. And the main reason is I enjoy what I'm doing. And that's infectious. I mean, if I'm having fun and they are having fun, it's probably working.

Yeah, I love that. And I think, too, there's a lot to be said about. There are a lot of managers, mentors, that want to glom all the credit for all the things and would not have felt good about rising up their mentees, let alone winning a big notable prize with them. And I love that. And I'm sure, you know, as far as people who've been in your lab and been around it being able to see that, you know, this is a place that just fosters amazing growth and everyone to get to their fullest potential, whatever that means, and that you're going to celebrate, you know, with everyone along the way, whether you were named on a prize or not. Right. It's about their. Their best success in a way that I could tell through the way you talked about it in the book. And I think that's something that any manager and company would be. It would be worth looking at emulating in their companies.

Two quick stories about that. One, one of the things you have to do when you win the Nobel Prize is give a Nobel lecture. Okay? That's an old requirement. So during my lecture, I reprised my career and the major discoveries we had made. And for each discovery, I, without even, you know, thinking twice about it, I tried to name the people in the lab who had made those discoveries. Anyway, when I was all done, the sitting in the audience, somebody came over to me and said, that was amazing. He says, do you have. He was interviewing me. He said, do you have any idea how many names you mentioned from your lab program? I said, no. He says, I'll tell you because I was keeping track. He said, 50. You credited 50 people specifically by name. That's one story. The other is there was a young man who was with me in the lab relatively early in my career, in the late 70s and early 80s, did a very important piece of work. I had largely lost track of the guy. I mean, I knew where he was. We had had a couple of contacts over the decades, but not much. I knew that he had two children, two daughters, and that he had lost his wife very early in the marriage to breast cancer. I had talked with him a couple of times after that happened. Anyway, unbeknownst to me, he was in the audience. Many of my alumni, something like 60 of my lab alumni, came to the Nobel just to sort of be there and be together and watch the boss get the prize and all that stuff. Anyway, he was there with his two daughters, whom he had raised as a single father, who were now in their mid, late teens. He introduced me to them, et cetera. And then he took me aside, he said, bob, I can't tell you how much it meant to me that you mentioned my name when you showed the slide, the one slide from my work. He says, for my two daughters to see what I did. He said, it brought tears to my eyes and to theirs. And of course, I hadn't thought anything about it. Of course I would give him credit. But there he was with his two daughters who had some vague conception that he had worked with the guy who was winning a Nobel Prize. And now they're hearing their father called out for this specific thing. So, yeah, I mean, you gotta raise your people up. I mean, they do the work and they deserve the credit.

I love that. Such an amazing lesson. I was definitely tearing up a little bit as you were telling that, that story there as well. So thank you for sharing that. And again, I think every, every manager, every human person can be lifting others a little bit more than we do, you know, all the time.

Yeah, that's absolutely true. And believe me, I have colleagues who do the opposite. I mean, you know, everything is, I, I, I, I. It's always we, I mean, you know. But yeah, it's too bad.

Well, a wonderful lesson and I'm sure everyone could talk to you all day long with all the great stories and insights and just a fascinating conversation. And so I will close us out here and say thank you so much, Bob, for joining me on the show. We're going to have, of course, a link to your, your work and your book and other things in the show. Notes for everyone to go read and learn more. It's a really great story and, and just fantastic. So, yeah, thank you for joining me.

On the show today.

My pleasure. Indeed.

Thank you again to Dr. Bob Lefkowitz for joining me on the show today. What got your brain buzzing in today's conversation? For me, I really love how generous of spirit Bob is.

First, of course, because he took the.

Time to talk with me, even though our work is on the surface. Also in the way he shares his stories and experience, both in his fantastic book A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to Stockholm and in our conversation here today. When it comes to human behavior and finding insights into our lives and work, I really can make a case for anything to be in the space of behavioral economics and behavioral insights. And I love making connections in areas that others might say don't go well together. I think it's a great practice to get into because it can help you find overlaps and opportunities that others might miss. As an example, Bob talks about multiple times in his book where he solved a difficult case by sitting down with a patient, holding their hand, looking into their eyes, and really focusing on them while asking thoughtful questions and really listening to the answers, slowing down and taking the time to be thoughtful so you can find a seemingly simple answer to a complex question. That's exactly what we do here. So what's a book or show or conversation that helped you have an aha moment in a seemingly unrelated area, please do come share it with me on social media. You can find me as the Brainy Biz pretty much everywhere and as Melina.

Palmer on LinkedIn and I'd love to hear all about it.

And as we close out the show, don't forget about those show notes, which include links to my top related past episodes and books, including A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to Stockholm and more.

It's all waiting for you in the.

App you're listening to and@the brainybusiness.com 427. And thank you again to Dr. Bob Lefkowitz for joining me on the show today. It was a delight to chat with and learn from you. Join me Tuesday for another Brainy episode of the Brainy Business Podcast.

It's going to be a lot of fun.

You don't want to miss it. Until then, thanks again for listening and learning with me. And remember to be thoughtful.

Thank you for listening to the Brainy Business Podcast. Molina offers virtual strategy sessions, workshops and other services to help businesses be more brain friendly. For more free resources, visit thebrainybusiness.com.