Heroic Interview: The Right Kind of Crazy with Adam Steltzner

You're listening to the Right Kind of Crazy. An Optimal Living interview with Adam Steltzner and Brian Johnson.

Hi, this is Brian. Welcome back to the Optimal Living Interview series. Today I'm thrilled to be chatting with and I'm actually looking at Adam Steltzner who has a fascinating story. We were chatting briefly before and I. I mentioned that I usually interview authors who have great ideas. Adam has great ideas, but he also has a fascinating story. If you've ever seen that crazy sky crane that landed the rover on Mars, you have Adam and his team to thank for that absolute act of genius. He wrote a great book where he captured that story and a ton of other goodness called the Right Kind of Crazy. We're hanging out a little bit before it comes out. We'll release it when it comes out. Subtitle A true story of teamwork, Leadership and High Stakes Innovation. A great book about all of those things and also just a great kind of personal memoir and by a guy who I'm personally very inspired by you, Adam, and I appreciate you taking the time to connect and I'm excited to hear more about your story and unpack some of my favorite ideas. So thanks again for taking the time and excited to jump in.

Well, thanks for having me, Brian.

All right, so as we talked about before, I don't usually ask for the bio, but can you give me your quick story from the F pluses to the JPL and all that good stuff?

Sure. Started out kind of reckless kid looking for the edges of the envelope, trying to find some source of reality. A lot of adrenaline, sports, a lot of risk, taking a lot of broken bones, not a really good student. I passed geometry the second time I took it in high school with an F plus and it would be, I would go into the arts, into music, into playing rock and roll. And when I was about 21 or so, I was coming home one night from playing a gig and I noticed the stars were in a different place in the night sky than they had been when I went out to load into the gig. And I had clearly not paid attention in high school. I'd missed that whole earth spinning on its axis thing. And so I remembered that something was moving with respect to something else. And I was curious and I was, I guess, ready in my life to challenge myself. I was ready to maybe face some of my fears. And I went to local community college to see if I could take an astronomy course to see. To tell me why the stars are moving. It had a prerequisite of a physics.

Course.

I took both. The astronomy course was actually cancelled because they didn't have enough students. And I ended up in this physics course. Physics without math, Physics for Poets. And I loved, blew my mind. The idea that there were a relatively simple set of laws that governed the way our universe worked connected with me. And I became incredibly curious and just consumed by this desire to understand my universe. And that ended up going through school and I discovered I wasn't, you know, really an F plus student. I actually could become an A student and did super well through college and through graduate school and eventually finding myself being an engineer building spacecraft to go land on Mars at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory.

There we have it. So I want to back up a little bit and just hear your perspective on that. You use the word curiosity a lot right then. And in the book, of course, it's essentially one of the primary themes, if not the primary theme, but for someone who might be at that stage, whether young or just even midlife, and just kind of just haven't quite hit that thing, when you look back and you think about how to help someone in that place, what comes to mind? Is it curiosity? Is it find something you love? How would you frame that?

Well, it's all of those. And more certainly, you got to listen to what you love and you got to find what you want. There's a great Joe Jackson song. You can't get what you want until you know what you want, right? So you got to look inside yourself and you got to see what do I really like and love? And then you got to follow it. I think our curiosity is absolutely in that process, right? It's when we connect with our curiosity and we allow it to move out. We can find the thing that really turns us on. And then, frankly, it's a scary process of going for it, of following your passion. But you've got to be brave to it. It's really all that there is in life, is committing to that. So for me, that's what I did in the very beginning. It was a big experiment. I didn't know how it would go, but I really wanted to see. I wanted to see what I could do when I really tried. I wanted to see what would happen if I really followed my passion and I gave it a go.

Gives me goosebumps. And you tell the story in the book about your dad and just his fears and how you kind of looked at that. I have a similar story. My dad struggled with alcohol and just that breaking the cycle of what are we really capable of if we leaned into it fully.

Yes.

Which brings us to one of my favorite ideas in the first one that I cover in the little note I've created whole hold on to the doubt. I love your story about when you would take tests. Can you tell us about that?

Sure, sure. That was one of the. Early on when I was trying to follow this passion, one of the things I did was I went back to school, local community college, I took these physics courses and I was passionate about it. I studied hard. And with all of that, when you get your test, the little tiny set of words at the top of the page and then this big huge pile of blank space and the terror of staring into the vacuum of that big blank space tended to have me jump to an answer. I didn't want to be with the open question and I wanted to get something down. And. And frequently I'd answer not even the question that was asked, an adjacent question. That was the first thing that sprung to my mind. So where I went to school, you could bring in for yourself an 8 1/2 by 11 sheet of paper with notes on it. And many of my friends would take out super fine point pens and they'd write down all of the example problems and everything. So they sort of condense the textbook and. And I found the thing I really needed to write was these words, hold on to the doubt. Big bright letters. I used colored highlighter just across the page. And it was relax, sit with the open question. Allow yourself to find the answer in that open question. That's what was that state of mind allowed me to do far better than I would otherwise do and actually to do really better than even my friends who are doing writing down all of the pieces of the puzzle.

Amazing. And again, that ties to someone trying to figure out what their bliss is, you know, what they, what their journey is, is hold on to that doubt. Don't rush into the first opportunity and then stick to that, step back, look at it, and actually be willing to explore and fail a few times or however many times it takes, but allow the ambiguity and tolerate that ambiguity. And then of course, you know, key from F plus to valedictorian to all the other things, and then bring us to Mars. So what's an example of holding onto the doubt? And you talk about many in the book, of course, but share an example of the process of landing on Mars and holding on to doubt in that context.

Sure. You know, one of the, you know, we used this kind of famously crazy, that's where the title of the book comes from, is the NASA administrator saying that this might be the right kind of crazy, this crazy landing system where we lowered the rover down below this jet backpack. The idea for that landing system really only came to us, a group of dozen or so of us, after we could hold on to the doubt. We actually had pondered a similar kind of approach a couple, three years before and just discarded it because we weren't able to sit with the open question. And it wasn't until a brainstorming session over a couple of days in the fall of 2003 where we really sat. And we sat there with the open question. It's a particular technical question, how long should the tethers be? And we always assumed the answer was a fixed amount. And that's not the answer. The answer is they're going to be different lengths at different times. We're going to be zero initially, and then we're going to lower it down. And it was only once we were soaking in the question long enough that quite literally, collectively, we all sprung to the answer at the same moment. So that's an example of sitting with that open question and finding the answer within the question, but only when you're calm enough to really be present with the question.

It's great. And it brings me to another one of my favorite ideas, the dark room. Yeah. And you talk about it in such a great context and just to be able to hold that right. But I'll let you describe it. I want to hear your.

Well, so frequently, if you're working in teams and you're inventing something, you will come up against challenges that you don't know how to surmount. We have the additional added anxiety that we kind of have a set schedule due to interplay Planetary Orbital Mechanics. And so that time is time crunch. You can't really push that back. Or if you push it back, you push it back two years and change. And so it's a painful push. So when you're in that place where you found a problem and you don't know what the answer is, what the solution is, I call it being in the dark room. You're in the dark, you don't know the path out. You don't know where the light is. And it's good to be able to call that out, call that out to yourselves, call that out to others, and ultimately what you've got to do, it's kind of like holding onto the doubt. You got to surrender to that dark room. And I personally have gone through periods of time where I couldn't. And I would hold on to the solution that wasn't working and just try and bash and bash and bash and bash. And it's only really when you surrender. The river guides say sometimes you gotta surrender to the river, because when the thing's too big to fight, stop fighting it, go with it, and find your way out along the current in the dark room. You got to surrender. The fact you don't know where it is, what the solution is. You got to keep looking. And there isn't a guarantee that there's a way out. My experience in life thus far is there always has been. Don't worry about whether there is or not. If there really isn't a way out, let the future tell you that. Just relax and look.

Yeah, it's awesome. I want to share a little quote that you shared. I think you described it as, let it surprise us. Right. You said, this is the point at which Tom Rivellini reminded me of the old saying, the coward dies a thousand deaths. There's plenty of time to confront the worst if it comes to that. So there's no point rushing ahead to assume that you've reached it. Today, I tell my teams, just keep working. And if death comes to visit us, let us be surprised. Where there is will and ingenuity, there's always been a way. I just love that. Yeah, might as well die one death, right?

Yeah, only one. That's all that we need.

Well, let's pivot from there to another. One of my favorite ideas was obviously, when you're under this stress and you've got celestial mechanics at work and all these other things that are. You have a very fixed deadline timeline, and a very nice budget of a billion dollars or so can lead to some stress. And you talked about how some people were able to deal with that and thrive, and others folded, and you wanted to be in the group that was able to sustain it. And you talked about the fact that you worked. You actually had a couple things. You had a visualization exercise that you did that I want to hear you describe. Okay, let's start there, and then I'll go to the second half.

So these missions are like. It's the big show, right? In my field, it's the thing. And it's intense. There's a lot of power going along, a lot of anxiety. Money moving around, time swinging by, thousands of people working. And so it's like a storm. It's a bit like a storm. And I wanted to be able to be in that storm, but without being swept away by the storm. And so the Thing I would visualize is being in a warm jacket with a nice hood and feeling the storm swirling around me, but inside feeling calm and centered because I wanted to be part of that energy, but I didn't want to be swept away with it.

Is that something you do? Like you did it once or twice or ten times or once a day or what?

When I first got into this, when I first was like, wow, this is intense, I recognized I could see people, lots of people, choosing not to go into that area, not to go into the storm. And I went, I want to go in there. But I get why they are choosing not to, because they don't want to be swept up. I actually kind of want to try and do both. I want to go into that intensity, but without allowing it to unseat me or unground me. So I want to just think of myself as grounded in it.

Yeah, that's awesome. The other part of that, in the same section you said, and I worked out a lot.

Yeah.

I love that. I'm all about the fundamentals. I always talk about eating, moving, sleeping, and we take those for granted. But the more stress we have, the more important it is to honor that. So I kind of pulled that thread. I'd love to hear you describe that in your own experience and words and wisdom for your teams.

Oh, yeah. So I would. When this first broke, when I was. Especially now I'm 10 years into learning how to deal with this, and I. I'm a little bit more seasoned, but still the fundamentals apply. I try and stay grounded in the storm. I try and move and exercise to keep my body happy and de stressed. But when I, you know, 10 years ago, I would exercise. I'd work out twice a day. I'd get up, I'd go for a run, I'd come back. Sometimes I'd come back from work so pumped up, I'd need to go do another run just to get that juice out of me. You know, just work through it. And if I didn't do that, I turned to the alternatives, which were eating and drinking. And eventually I just become, you know, tired and toxified. And it was, you know, that's not the preferred way of coping.

Performing rocket science. No, no, that's awesome. I mean, it's one of those things that's just taken. Taken for granted, though, I think are just ignored that we can perform at a high level without having those basic fundamentals in place. Love it. Okay, so let's go to self authorizing. Another really cool idea. What is that?

Okay. It's kind of like the seminal gesture of leadership. You know, it's the first thing it is being willing to put your ideas out there and potentially interrupt or disturb the status quo. It's essential thing for a leader to do, but it's something that really needs to happen at all levels of an organization within everybody in a team. And so when you're building a team or you're trying to set the culture of a team, it's important to create a culture that makes a safe place for people to self authorize and push themselves into the team's activities. What does that look like? It looks like people saying, I don't think I agree with that. Especially the most beautiful of them is when there's a minority voice that says, wait, hey, the whole team's aligned and they're going this way. And I don't think that's right. And here are my arguments and I feel safe to bring it out. I'm going to authorize myself to bring it out. And in the best case scenario, we were all going in the wrong situation and this person brought us out and we figure out what the, what's right. So it's that gesture of bringing yourself into, in my case, as I describe it, the team's work. But you can also say it really in life. Right. It's about bringing all that you have to bear to the thing to your endeavor.

I'm trying to remember the story you used, I think early in your career is obviously you did it a number of times. Can you share a story when you did that?

Oh, yeah. My first act of it was, I came in, I was working with a group of guys, great guys. I came into this problem. We were trying to land on a comet. We were trying to spear ourselves essentially onto the surface of comet.

Most of us deal with these types of challenges in our daily work. Yeah, I'm totally familiar with that.

And so I came in and it just felt like the work was. We were all going in slowly different directions and we hadn't. I felt like our collective effort, no one had stood back from our collective effort and sort of analyzed what was the essential and what were the non essential and sort of ordered the essential into the actions that we should take. And so I said, hey guys, I'm not the leader, okay? But I think from my eyeballs, I think we should break it up like this. I think these are the important things and these are the less important things. Should do these tests, not do these tests, do these analysis. And my compatriot said, we agree you're not the leader, but hey, we agree essentially with that leadership. We agree that that sounds like a good idea. And as it would come to pass, when the project manager got back from vacation, because this is happening over the summer, he found out what I did, and he said, yeah, I love that. And guess what? Now you're the leader because of that demonstration of leadership.

Yeah, that's awesome. And that dovetails perfectly into another one of the ideas of you were reflecting on. If you could share something with your younger self, that would essentially be it. Right. Of hustle. Do good work, Be worthy of being listened to.

Yes.

And quit paying attention to the outliers who have just done whatever they've done at 10 years old, you know?

Right, right, right, right, right, right. Do what you can do. And do you put all that you have into it and relax. Something's going to happen. Something's good. Something good is going to come out of that. Yeah, absolutely.

That's awesome. So then, another one of my favorites. I jokingly call it Radio Shack on Mars. So you talk about the naughty bits that are exciting. Right. Then there's the mundane stuff. Talk to us about that.

Yes. So we didn't make our launch date with the big Curiosity rover and we slipped 26 months. And my good friend and project manager Richard Cook, when we started to spool back up, said to me, hey, Adam, are you ready to respect and love the mundane? And what he meant was, there's lots of high drama pieces of the spacecraft, the rockets, the parachutes, the stuff that looks incredible as you watch an animation of the vehicle going through the Martian atmosphere and landing on the surface, all that stuff you see, that's the naughty bits. That's the easy stuff to love, that's easy to pay attention to. But the mundane utilities, the software utility functions that are driving the moving of information around in the computer or the shuttling of telemetry out the radios or. So those are just as important. If some of those go wrong, you're just as dead as if the rocket's on fire. And even though they're kind of mundane and they share the same kinds of functions with every spacecraft we've ever put on into space, and actually a large number of the automobiles that currently drive around on the road, even though they're that kind of mundane, they're the more generic, they're just as important to getting the whole thing right as the bits that are unique and sexy.

Yeah, I love that. And again, application to our personal lives and to our creative Work. It's like, look, you get obsessed about all the super obviously sexy stuff, but it's the mundane, unsexy stuff that ultimately leads us to that sublime.

Right, that's right. That's right.

That's cool. What have we not talked about? That's your favorite idea?

You know, there's one that I think is really important, certainly for organizations. It's this idea of separating the people from the ideas that the people hold. When you do that, if you're working in teams or frankly, even within a family, if you can understand the ideas that people hold and help them understand that your arguments against those ideas or for those ideas are not personalized. When you're able to separate the humans from the ideas that the humans have, then you basically create a pair of cultures, a culture of collaboration, because you love and respect the people independent of the ideas that they hold. And then you let the ideas do brutal mortal combat with one another. So you get a culture of innovation where the ideas go at each other, and a culture of collaboration where the humans respect and love each other. And so that separation is sort of a watershed event that creates a very, I think, a very powerful team and a very powerful organization.

Yeah, that's awesome. So collaboration, innovation, what's your number one tip on how to go about doing that?

Practically speaking, I do it by modeling it myself, by attacking my own ideas, by stepping. It's almost some sort of Eastern, maybe Buddhist, objective distance between myself and the thing that I'm thinking about. So my ideas I step back from and I look at with a critical eye out loud in front of those who. Which I work and I encourage everybody I'm working with to do the same. You know, there was a time with the Landing team that we used to say, if you've got a good idea, bring it to us. But I would like you to show up with the top three reasons you think it's a good idea and the top three reasons you think it's a bad idea to sort of get that objective separation between the idea and the person who's bringing it into play.

Yeah, I love that. Make it the object of your awareness rather than being attached to it.

Right.

Than have.

Yes, that's absolutely true. It's very important. It's actually, by the way, a profound way of living too.

Yeah, right. Anytime. Yeah. That's powerful. Anything else?

Well, I found that if you're in touch as a leader, if you're in touch with your own curiosity and you can help your team members get in touch with their curiosity, it's an incredible tool to motivate productive engagement. Sometimes people wonder how was it that we were able to keep a team together for almost a decade working on this lander? Two things. One, it's actually not that hard because we are aerospace engineers building a spacecraft to go to Mars. It doesn't get much better than that. But keeping your curiosity engaged. All of us are curious beasts. We are born half baked, we are born unprogrammed. There are very few instructions in our code when we come out of the womb. But one of those, perhaps the most important, is be curious. That Curiosity helps my 3 year old daughter know the difference between a liquid and a solid. Before she knows what an L looks like or that gravity exists, before she even understands what a G is, just by the experience, by building this model. So if we can help our team members connect with that curiosity, they are absolutely engaged in the process and they are more collaborative and we end up with a more highly functioning organization.

Smiling as I imagine my 3 year old son with the same attitude. How again, what's a practical idea orientation to cultivate that within ourselves and then.

Within those playing, you know, your three year old son, my three year old daughter, they learn through play. You know, as adults, we actually still learn through play. If we can keep that levity, be very serious in some ways about the work, but not serious about ourselves, keep that joy alive, that wonderment, that discovery that keeps us playing at some level and always building a better model of the universe and discovering new things.

So let me just drill that down one step deeper into your. So give us, give us a recent example of you doing that.

Oh, we would do in my team, in our team we have a big, huge computer simulation. And that huge computer simulation tells us how our untestable descent into the Martian atmosphere and landing would go. We would play, we would, when we would go to do one of these big computer simulations, light up a supercomputer array and brown out Pasadena and take a day of huge computer power. As a team, we would take bets on what the answers that would come out of the computer would be. We'd be betting beers, we'd be betting, you know, it's a fun thing. And what that was doing first, it was great camaraderie, it was great connecting with one another. But we were also really sharpening our understanding of the system. Way ahead of the fancy computer getting done. We would be able to know exactly what the results of our huge supercomputer run were going to be be because we will be constantly Exercising through play, our understanding what the task at hand was.

That's awesome. Well, that's a lot of ideas in a short period of time. I'd like to step back and I'd like to conclude these chats by asking if you were willing to give, if you could only give one piece of advice, kind of one piece of wisdom to someone looking to optimize their lives, which might be something we touched on or might be something separate, but just one piece of wisdom. What would that be?

I think it would be that objective distance. I think we are able to be most happy and most effective when we have the greatest level of self awareness possible. But to get that self awareness you kind of have to be able to, to license yourself to say, it's okay, I'm going to be okay, I'm not going to judge myself, I'm going to look at myself but I'm not going to judge. And I'm going to start to understand how I function. And when I do that I actually can make some choices about changing how I do that that are not, they're not should statements, they're not heavy judgment driven things. They're more like I'm just, I'm going to choose differently and I'm going to choose in a way that might be more effective. And you can even start to experiment with that. Like oh well, I thought that that would be a more effective way of acting and it isn't. But it's that self knowledge. For me, if I look at the best leaders, if I look at the best managers, if I even look at the happiest people, they are the most self aware. And so finding that self awareness through being able to sort of sit apart from yourself and look at yourself not judging. Because when you start to judge, you'll start to close your eyes, you'll start to hate to see what you see or something. So you got to let go of the judgment, stand away from yourself and look at who you are. And that self awareness I think is the greatest tool towards happiness and living an optimal life.

That's awesome. One of the metaphors we use is the experimenter in a lab coat with the goggles on, with the clipboard and just looking at life. It's just data. There doesn't need to be a personal, something's wrong with me if it didn't go the way I want it to go. But look, I'm committed to getting a little bit better today. So let me just take that data in objectively and run the next experiment. Run the Next test. Oh, it didn't work. No.

Oops.

100 times later it didn't work. But just keep on hitting it. Getting a little bit better. Absolutely fantastic. Adam, I appreciate you, appreciate you taking the time today.

Well, Brian, thank you very much for having me. I enjoyed a lot.

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