Your attitude determines your outcomes

I often reflect on my path through life — the opportunities I’ve taken, and the ones I’ve missed. I don’t carry many serious regrets, but my hit-rate has definitely improved over the years as I’ve learned from my failures. As an opener to a series on executive functioning (I'm only half invested into writing), I want to share some lessons that have helped me capture more opportunities. Hopefully they help you do the same.

Before I begin: I’m not claiming to be a beacon of success, and most of these ideas are things I’ve stolen from others. What I can say is that each one made a tangible difference at critical moments. The focus here is attitude.

Curiosity

I think curiosity or openness is the single most important attribute anyone can possess. In the context of executive functioning and self-actualisation, “openness” is really about tolerance and testing.

We all have egos, and in professional settings they often obstruct collaboration. If you believe in positive sum games, collaboration is opportunity. Yet we irrationally overvalue our own ideas. So we have to practice tolerating ideas that initially sound bad — and testing them instead of dismissing them.

In practice, this means listening fully to someone’s proposal and asking questions that expand, rather than shut down, their thinking. These questions should aim to help you understand their perspective, not to corner them.

For example: imagine you and a colleague are trying to figure out why an experiment you’ve been running for weeks keeps giving inconsistent results. You’ve thought about it a lot, you’ve read the papers, and you’re pretty confident you know what the underlying issue is. Then your colleague comes in with a completely different hypothesis — and to you, it sounds way off. Your knee-jerk reaction is to shut it down, steer the discussion back to your idea, or just quietly run the tests you think make sense.

Instead, try tolerating the discomfort and actually walking through their idea with them. Let them explain the whole thing, and then ask questions that are genuinely about understanding their reasoning rather than cornering them. Something like:

“Can you run me through the mechanism you’re picturing here? I want to understand your assumptions properly before we decide what to test.”

Or:

“What observations led you in this direction? I might be missing something.”

The goal here isn’t to pretend they’re right — it’s to slow down the ego-driven urge to dismiss and instead shift the problem into shared territory. This lowers defensiveness, keeps the cortisol levels down, and often uncovers details (on either side) that would have stayed hidden if you’d just overridden them. And even if their idea ends up being wrong, you’ve preserved the collaboration and created a cleaner path for testing than you would have managed alone.

The second part of curiosity is testing. After you’ve debated and clarified, you need to test the ideas. It may feel like a waste of time, but it saves time in the long run because:

1. You know what you know; your colleague knows what they know.
2. Both of you possess some amount of incorrect information in there.
3. If their idea is bad, evidence will show it and now you have a rational basis for your mistrust.
4. If your idea is bad, you’ve just identified someone with a complementary skill set.

Pretty much every time this process has led to an advancement in my own understanding, even if most of their idea is bad. To make this work, you must genuinely give others’ ideas a chance.

However, this mindset can be exploited by Machiavellian types. Protect yourself by insisting on impartial testing. If someone tries to avoid testing, rush it, or distort results, disengage – its not worth it. Even if you move slower, manipulation and deceit are always uncovered in the long run to their detriment.

This process is vulnerable to bias, but the key is imagining temporarily that you know nothing.

Try More, Fail, and Reflect

Success is ultimately a numbers game. Many people don’t move toward their goals because they fear failure. That fear is corrosive. The idea itself is generic, but actually implementing it is extraordinarily difficult because failure is uncomfortable and time consuming.

Some practical ways to build tolerance for failure and to pump your numbers:

1. Engage in social sports where failure is constant

Combat sports (my preference) like jiu-jitsu, wrestling, or judo are painful but invaluable. They massively increase your tolerance for failure while offering social connection, fitness, and biochemical rewards (serotonin, dopamine, endorphins). I’m guessing other sports like dancing, gymnastics, and rock climbing could offer the same, but having tried all of these I have had the best experience with martial arts.

2. Compartmentalise your emotions and reflect rationally

Recently I let my residence card lapse before renewal, and I was ordered to leave the country. My first reaction was, “The authorities are being harsh. Fuck these people!” But the real lesson was to better understand the rules, plan ahead, and take my obligations seriously. With this mindset, you don’t make the same mistakes twice.

3. Reflect in writing

Obviously rational reflection is not always so easy; emotional distress can overwhelm rational thought. Writing creates checkpoints that keep you grounded. Start with a factual recount of the events, then list what you could have done differently, and finally outline steps to make amends. Shame often drives the distress - repairing any harm (to yourself or others) helps resolve it.

4. Take smaller steps

Growing up on social media, we see end results without seeing the years of slog behind them. We want big achievements now, even when the path ahead is unclear.

The antidote is intentional small steps. Just as over-striding in running injures your knees, over-striding in life leads to burnout.

Practical ways to take smaller steps:

1. Use fewer resources (equipment, people, ingredients).
2. Ignore irrelevant protocols (sterility, excessive accuracy, unnecessary reporting).
3. Scale the task down (test a formulation at 10 mL instead of 1 L).
4. Limit complexity (fewer moving parts)

With repeated small steps and reflection, you can gradually build complexity, but starting with complexity guarantees failure and teaches you nothing.

Respect Others and Tell Them

It’s absurd that this even needs saying, but modern culture is so low on genuine respect. Social media has conditioned us to obsess over outcomes and ignore the process, feeding Machiavellian tendencies and eroding collaboration.

To counter this, practice respect deliberately, even toward people you don’t naturally like.

How to do this:

1. Compliment others on attributes, skills, or accomplishments that genuinely impress you. Don’t fake it.
2. If nothing impresses you, learn more about that person instead of dismissing them. Everyone has good qualities.
3. Avoid gossip and talking behind people’s backs.
4. Defend people who are being spoken about unfairly.
5. If you have an issue with someone, address it directly 1-on-1.

This is the foundation of functional society. Without mutual respect, people act purely in self-interest and collaboration collapses into competition. In game theory terms, opportunities shrink when a stag hunt devolves into a prisoner’s dilemma.

At the heart of everything I’ve written are three traits that matter far beyond professional life: curiosity, self-possession, and consideration. By curiosity, I mean the willingness to ask, explore, and test without ego. By self-possession, I mean the quiet, grounded confidence of someone who doesn’t need to elevate themselves to feel capable, and who can face being wrong or failing without defensiveness because their sense of worth isn’t tied to always being right. And by consideration, I mean acting with respect even when it’s inconvenient. If you can cultivate these three qualities — staying curious, staying grounded, and treating others well — you’ll find that opportunities don’t just arrive by chance. You actually make space for them.