Transcript of How World Class Scientists Solve The World's Biggest Problems With Creativity | Mel Robbins Clips

Dr. Karp, you run one of the most successful and accredited research labs in the entire world. I mean, your lab is looking at everything from cancer research to heart tissue repair. And you've taken everything that you've learned as a researcher and a scientist and all of this experience on the cutting edge of medical innovation, and you've applied it to your life, and you've come up with these things that you call life-ignition to tools that absolutely anyone can use to tap into their potential to improve their life, to be happier. I'm so excited to learn about these simple tools. But before we jump into the life Ignition tools, could you just tell the person listening a little bit more about the work that your lab does and what you're excited about?

Absolutely. So my lab is literally focused on the process of medical problem solving. It's It's an ever evolving process. It's highly iterative. The major focus is how can we make academic discoveries and move them as quickly as possible to patients. We do this like just how we approach problems, how we infuse fresh energy, how we disrupt linear thinking and single possibilities that we might find ourselves within. This has allowed us to create all sorts technologies that are in clinical trials and have actually made it to patients. For example, we developed a nasal spray in the lab that we demonstrated could neutralize 99. 99% COVID-19, H1N1, influenza A and B, and a form of pneumonia. That's one example. We developed a needle that can stop in between the layers of the eye to deliver gene therapy to the back of the eye. It's really difficult to get drugs to the back of the eye for macular degeneration, and that's on route to a clinical trial. We've developed therapies to annihilate cancer, therapies for osteoarthritis. It's really like a playground, if you will. People from all over the world, people with tons of different experiences and backgrounds and expertise.

But we really have a North star for every project, which is to help patients as quickly as we can.

Dr. Karp, you're one of the most innovative minds and award-winning researchers alive today. And I'm just curious if you can talk a little bit more about how you run your life and how you run your lab and the role of creativity and how you use creativity in sparking innovation in your lab. I mean, how do you get people to tap into the full potential of their own brainpower when they're doing research for you?

Yeah, I think creativity is one of these life forces. It's something that we can tap into. It's something that we are all born with. It's something that is flattened by our society, and perhaps through the education system, depending on where we were educated and the circumstances. But I think with this algorithmic lifestyle that we all lead, For example, I think if you look at... I have so many thoughts in my mind. I'm like, whoa. I'm like, yeah, because creativity, it's like, to me, it's just so exciting because we all have this ability to tap into creativity. And when we do, we surprise ourselves. It's literally this thing that just lights us up when we tap into it. And I think that it's magnetic. There's gravity to it. When somebody being creative, it just attracts other people. Everyone wants to like, oh, what are you doing? Oh, that's so interesting. How did you think of that? Something magical about creativity. And so for my laboratory, it's one thing to try to make academic discoveries It's another to then take those discoveries and turn them into products that can help patients. So the level of difficulty just escalates.

And so I spent a lot of time trying to figure out and actually experiment in in my laboratory with processes to maximize creativity. So one of the things that I've noticed is that the lab composition is critical for creativity. And so I've tried intentionally on purpose to limit the overlap in expertise. Most laboratories, you have the same expert. Everyone in the lab has the same expertise. What I've noticed is that if we minimize the overlap, that we can really leverage the power of thinking differently, and the sparks of creativity just start flying. In the lab, we've had chemists, we have material scientists, we have biologists, immunologists, but we've also had a gastrointestinal surgeon, a cardiac surgeon, We've had a dentist in the lab. It's constantly changing. I think when you start interacting with people who think differently, who have different skills, we've had people from 30 different countries in the lab. When you're from a different country, you have a different education system. You think differently, you have different wiring, you have different experiences. To me, that's how you start to generate the sparks of creativity. Something else that I experimented with in my lab, which actually was transformational, was I set up, and I hadn't seen this before, but I just was like, I need to somehow figure out how to get things more creative and people to connect.

I thought, okay, presentation competitions. I came up with this idea You're giving me anxiety about work.

I'm like, if I were to do presentation competitions, people would quit. Okay. But so you have presentation competitions at work in this world-round academic research lab?

Yes. And And there's some guideposts. So you can't present on your research. You have to present on something that is one of your passions or one of your interests or something you're curious about. I love that. And the goal is to take risks. This is a safe environment where no one's going to be shamed and everyone's in the same boat from a high school student to a PhD student to a postdoc to a young faculty. And everybody presents for three minutes. And then afterwards, the questions are focused on constructively, what could you do to improve your talk? What did you really like about the talk? And then at the end, I give prizes for people. Everyone votes. I don't vote. And who gave the best presentation, who took the most risk and who gave the best constructive feedback. And we've had people in the lab. It's been like, I couldn't have expected this. Somebody did a rap about the hamburger restaurants in Boston. Somebody showed up in a wetsuit and talked about surfing. Somebody played guitar and had slides going behind them. They didn't say anything during their talk. Somebody spoke about this permaculture effort they did in their backyard with hundreds of edible plants.

Somebody talked about a bakery that their family had started and then had to shut down during COVID, and they really want to set it up again. And what happened was this created this constellation of energy where people now were open. They were learning about other people's curiosity, what other people's interests were. And when you get people talking, when you get people connecting, it creates this creative energy. This energy just starts to flow, and it's just been unbelievable.

I love this. And you know what I love is I'm listening to you. I'm jealous. Now I want to be there. I want to feel that expansion and that connection and that creativity. And that brings us to the subject of your book, Lit, which is filled with all of these simple, proven, what you call life-ignition tools that we can use with ourselves ourselves to unlock in an instant that possibility and to spark ideas and tap into our brain and shift where we're at. And what exactly is a life-ignition tool?

A life-ignition tool is a strategy, a way to tap into something that you don't see in this very moment, something that could illuminate not just this moment, but your entire life.

It's like there's all this hidden potential, and these life-ignition tools unlock it.

They unlock it, and everybody has access to it. These tools allow you to access your evolutionary inheritance.

What is my evolutionary inheritance?

Your evolutionary inheritance is the biology that you have that's working for you. It's the ability to sense the the world, the ability to make decisions, the ability to evolve and to learn and to be inspired and to sense awe and to tap into creativity. It's what we all have access to And when we tap into it, not only does it light up our lives, it lights up the lives of everybody around us.

You know what's so exciting about this conversation is that it's so easy to get buried alive by your to-do list and to get drawn into social media and to feel like you're just on autopilot and you're barely surviving and overwhelmed with worry and the things that you need to do, that you forget that there is an evolutionary design inside of you. It's so easy your to-do list, and to feel like you're just on autopilot, and you're barely surviving, that you forget that there is an evolutionary design inside of you that you can tap into.