Interview: Bikul Koirala, MS, MBA
A wide-ranging conversation on a biotech career spanning two continents, lifelong learning, and the arduous process of writing novels
For this first interview on All Science Great & Small, I am joined by my friend and former Lacuna Diagnostics co-founder Bikul Koirala, MS, MBA, who is a chemist, business leader, and novelist. You can find out more about him at his website, and his Substack Writing in Public chronicles his process writing his sophomore novel. We had a great discussion about Bikul’s experience as an expat from Nepal studying and working in the US, his work as an app developer and with biotech start-ups, and his writing journey. The transcript below is condensed and lightly edited for clarity. You can also listen to the full conversation in audio format. I hope you enjoy the conversation as much as I did!
Eric Fish: Thank you guys for joining us. Really excited to talk to my first ever interview guest for All Science Great & Small. This is Bikul Koirala. He is a chemist, a business owner, a writer, a thought leader. He has done a lot both in veterinary medicine and outside it. And he has a lot of really fascinating stories to tell. So, excited for him to be here. How are you doing Bikul?
Bikul Koirala: I'm doing great, Eric. Happy to be here. Thanks for the generous introduction. Sounds like I've done a lot. I'm just a curious person is the way I see it.
EF: You have done a ton of things! I remember the first time we met in 2017, I was blown away by so many aspects of your biography and story. I see you've branded yourself on social media and your website as a "curious generalist." I love that! Why did you come up with that and what do you think are the advantages or disadvantages for being a generalist in this society that's become way more specialized?
BK: What I'm really interested in is ideas and learning, and that's the “generalist.” We get one life and it's up to you, we're all built in different ways. Some people just want to go very deep in one area and they do amazing things by doing that. We wouldn't get the kind of books and research and innovation we get without people going deep. And that's what fulfills them. For me, learning is a fulfillment and being excited, being able to just follow my path and interest wherever I want, that brings me the most joy. I'm not sure if that's the right path, expertise pays more usually than generalists. So, there are downsides. <laughs>
EF: I think you need both (kinds of) people. One of the things I see myself in that generalist path where you've got your hand in a couple different pots, a lot of times you can connect different bridges of ideas that might not occur to people who are hyper-specialized or hyper-technical. That's something I've seen a lot from you.
One thing the audience might not know: you're originally from Nepal and you came here for school. So tell me about that journey.
BK: Yeah, I'm originally from Nepal, born and raised. We're recording this in May of 2023. I came to the US in January, 2003, so it's been a little over 20 years now. When I think about it, I've spent more of my life in the US than in Nepal. Going back to the original question of that journey, the US is still the land of the opportunity, this is where ideas happen. It's okay to do things that do not fit the traditional path, right? Versus a lot of other countries. My major in undergrad was biochemistry, my masters was in chemistry. I did research in pharmacology in some of those areas.
The reason I was going after that path was it had more guarantees; if you do "A, B, C," you are likely to have a career. And growing up that was important. Because coming from a developing country, you want to see paths that provide some financial security and academic security down the road. But I had interests in business and other things. It's just...those paths have less guarantees. So the first step is going along the paths where we secure our basic needs, being able to afford healthcare and food. And then as those needs started getting met, I'm like, "maybe I can explore more of my other interests". And some of that is probably just age as well.
I came to the US in January 2003, so it's been a little over 20 years now. I've spent more of my life in the US than in Nepal. The US is still the land of the opportunity, this is where ideas happen. It's okay to do things that do not fit the traditional path
EF: Classic Maslow's hierarchy of needs—you go up to more and more abstract, philosophical needs once you can eat and you're not sick. I can definitely relate to some of that. One of the first careers I ever wanted when I was a kid was to be a writer. And I dabbled here and there trying to do a little bit of the fiction thing, trying to submit things, never really getting traction and it seemed like that was a pretty risky way to make a living. So you go into the sciences, and I had a lot of other interests there from engineering, to medicine, and animals, and ended up in the path I've done with veterinary medicine and pathology. And now I'm actually trying to circle back to that [writing]. The good news is I've had kind of a bizarre career with a lot of interesting things to write about! So at least now I have something to talk about instead of nothing. <laughs>
BK: Eric, I think that's so important though, right? All of us, or many of us, want to write something. In fact, I saw that a third of the country wants to write a book at some point.
EF: Wow, that's crazy! I'm glad to hear it, I feel like nobody reads anymore.
BK: Having done the [writing] process itself, it’s hard. And you're absolutely right: you need to live first. Let's say if I had wanted to write when I was 20, I didn't have much to share at that point. Now we've lived, we've seen, and going back to that generalist path about being in sciences, being in technology, being in startups, we've seen things that we can connect together, that we can bring together with writing now. Going back to this whole idea of guaranteed work and non-guaranteed work, we're also at a stage in life where we're a little more comfortable taking that longer path of less guarantees.
EF: I don't want to get too off the rails on this, but as we look at what artificial intelligence is doing and the potential it may have to disrupt or replace work, I don't think any form of work anymore is guaranteed, ironically, short of something like working in the mines or sweeping or doing hands-on stuff that's actually very hard to automate. A lot of the knowledge workers, we were told "Go to school, get a career, you won't be replaceable." Well that's now in question. So I think it's a question of what can people still do better than computers? And some of that is storytelling narrative, creating meaning, things that are more philosophical and abstract.
BK: Absolutely. I feel like the fundamentals of life are getting harder. They're becoming a luxury now, just because of how the technology has changed our world. So, in a way that's probably going to be an even a higher demand than before.
EF: Speaking of technology and then connecting this to your journey from Nepal, one of the first things you did was you built some apps geared towards people in your home country and then that started to grow. Can you tell me a little bit about what you did with KDuo, what your first app was, and where you you went?
BK: I believe it was 2009 or 2010. Anisa, my partner got me an iPod Touch and I was just playing around with it. The App Store had just come out. The first thing I did was I went to the app store and typed Nepal…nothing came out. What I was looking for was news from Nepal. I'm not a coder, but I'm good at connecting dots to build things. So I wanted a source of news from Nepal all of in one place. Pretty much an RSS aggregator. So I found a way to get that built online and got that in the app store. And what I realized as soon as I put it in the app store, there's a lot of people who were looking for that.
So that's how I got my early start in the app store, just kind of by scratching my own itch. And as soon as I did that, I started thinking, “Hmm, if I was looking for this for Nepal, then I wonder if there are other small countries where the diaspora is spread out throughout the world that are looking for a way to stay in touch with their country?” So that branched out to other news, radio, news apps for other countries. By this point I got my brother involved and that's where the “K duo” part comes in: me and my younger brother. Then I started thinking: “Is there a way I can use my knowledge for what I went to school for and build tools around that?” We started putting small apps, basic apps about quiz and testing around chemistry, biology, physics, and a few of those areas. So all of that got built into over a hundred plus apps in three different categories.
I started thinking, “Hmm, if I was looking for this for Nepal, then I wonder if there are other small countries where the diaspora is spread out throughout the world that are looking for a way to stay in touch with their country?”
EF: Crazy. Was that before, after, or during the Khan Academy rose up and really provided some of those educational tools?
BK: It's probably in parallel. This was 2010 through 2016, 2017. We built and maintained that for a while and slowly that fizzled out.
EF: That's incredible. Was that what spring-boarded you into being interested in an MBA and studying business in Colorado? Obviously that took you away from Idaho and you traveled a bit.
BK: Going through that journey, Idaho is where I went to school and got my undergrad and masters. I moved to Illinois in 2008 and was working in early state biotech startups, working on bio-based fuels and chemicals. My job had no business aspect to it, but I had always been interested in that side of things. Then we moved from Illinois to Colorado in 2011 and I was still working in the biotech field. A little bit of background: even though the app business was doing well, I had to continue working in my field of study because I was on a visa in the US. The way visas work, you need to be working in your field of study. So I had to continue that until I had some sort of path to permanent residence in the US.
While I had been building all that, I did not have the confidence that I had the business skills. I felt like something was lacking. So just to be brutally honest, I needed some sort of validation as a form of a degree, that's why I went for my MBA. I wanted someone else to tell me I know what I was doing, even though I had built a business that I was doing well, that wasn't enough. I needed a piece of paper.
EF: Well, you see all these Fortune 500 companies, they send their executives who have been in the track for years to go get a six-figure MBA. They pay for it just to check a box.
BK: Yep, the only difference here was I had to pay for the MBA out of my pocket, but the bright side of that we can talk about later is we ended up building a business where we met. So, you know, at the end of the day it was still all worth it.
EF: Absolutely! What Bikul's talking about is we met in 2017 as co-founders of Lacuna Diagnostics. That was an interesting business that grew out of a number of MBA students out of Colorado State University. It was, I believe, the first full-service business that digitized cytology at the point of care in hospitals and beamed it to a remote cloud network of pathologists. I first started talking to them about doing some validation work and loved the idea. I saw the future was there, and came on as a co-founder.
Two of the guys were DVMs. How did you connect with them in your whole class? I know it grew out of a capstone project. So how did you find Conor and Aaron and the other people and start gelling with each other?
BK: I think between happy hours after class we started talking to each other and there was a group of us who had interest in entrepreneurship and building something. Since I had done some app work on the side, a few other friends were kind of interested. So what we started was a—I want to say either weekly or biweekly—coffee meeting where we invited people who were interested in starting something and we'll just get together for couple hours and just talk about ideas. Just random ideas everywhere. The idea was let's talk about everything. Everything's up for grabs, there are no secrets here. So just kind of a very laid back group, that's where all of us got to know each other a little better.
The idea was let's talk about everything. Everything's up for grabs, there are no secrets here.
So when it came time for our capstone project in the final semester, a subset of people in that group, which had people in the MBA [program] and outside the community, came together. I felt like, we don't know what we're going to work on yet, but these are the people we feel comfortable building something with, let's do something together. And after that we started talking about what we could work on for the capstone project. Let's see if we can do something that's going to be a real business.
EF: That's an amazing example of people first and then idea second. I think sometimes that's how the most successful ventures go. Because you need to day-to-day enjoy who you work with, and you've got to see that purpose other than just dollar signs. And for the listeners who may not know, Fort Collins is one of the epicenters of the microbrewing expansion of the last 20 years. So I'm sure there were many productive, happy hours over very delicious microbrews. <laughs>
BK: Yep, there were! You know, just one thing on the people first, this was an interesting group of people, but it wasn't necessarily all like-minded thinking. We had very different ways of talking, some of you that you experienced as well, our working process was different. Our questioning was all different. It worked to our advantage that way.
EF: Absolutely. I've said that my experience with Lacuna over those years was sort of like a crash course MBA. Obviously, I'm sure there would be plenty for me to learn if I were to do a formal program, but yeah, a lot in terms of the personalities, in terms of learning how to read financials, and how to build a business model.
So a couple years in when you were at Lacuna, you actually stepped up and acted as a formal CEO because initially it was amorphous, you're just the founders putting an idea together. How did you feel about becoming a CEO so early after your degree? And what were some of the early challenges you dealt with?
BK: I had a hard time thinking of myself as a CEO. I came up as a CEO early on because that was the only choice. We were thinking about who was gonna be the first person to come full-time. We flirted with a couple different ideas that did not work out and we were gonna start raising money. And one of the things I talked to the guys in the group was like, “Hey, if we're gonna go raise money and ask people to come invest in us, but none of us are going to come full-time, it's going to be like we don't believe in this, but we want you to put your money in.”
EF: “Give us money, please, it'll be fine. Don't worry about it.”
BK: Right? So for me, it just worked out in a way since I had this business on the side, it's like I was more comfortable taking those risks or I had more bandwidth that way. The team felt if we're going to do this, let's give it a real shot. And if it doesn't work out, I'm more comfortable saying, “Hey, we tried, it didn't work.”
So that's how I came in as CEO. We were still a very flat organization in terms of how we worked. Since I was going to be the one dealing with everything day-to-day, the second part of the question, how comfortable I felt…not very comfortable! I lacked the confidence to properly present myself. That still comes up. I think there are a few things in terms of sales and a couple other skills I'm not very comfortable with. I'm comfortable saying that I'm uncomfortable with that.
EF: But that's good! So many people won't admit any flaws or confidence. And one of the things I always admired in you as a leader is there was no sense of ego. You were willing to collaborate and listen. You really created a cohesive team. And I think you created a sense where everyone got along and everyone's ideas were valued. And so many organizations, it is led by the force of nature of one CEO. And, you know, maybe they get products done, but they're atrocious to work for and they're usually chaotic organizations.
BK: Well, thank you, that was the goal. I'm sure it was not that way all the time, but I'm happy to hear that it was most of the time. For me that was most important. Like, you know, we want to build a successful business, but we want it to be about the people, and they should be happy, or at least we should do our best effort to make sure they are happy.
It was a great learning experience, Eric, working with all of you, with our customers. Just a little background at this point: I had very basic to no knowledge of veterinary medicine. I had a science background, I'd worked in biotech. I knew how to look at slides under the microscope, so that helped a little bit. I'd worked as an analytical chemist, so I knew what measuring or reporting things makes sense. And I had done an MBA, I had built a business, I knew a little bit of marketing. There's little bits and pieces that I could connect together. That's what was so exciting about, it gave me an opportunity to connect a lot of what I had learned towards building a product that would actually be useful.
EF: Well, I think that's a reason we got so much traction early on. One thing that attracted me to you guys is you listened to the vets on your team. Now, certainly myself and the other people who are vets there, we didn't have all the skills to build a full company. No one did. We all complimented each other. But I've seen so many companies in this space before, during and after Lacuna, they have people come in from either human healthcare or no healthcare background. They just see veterinary medicine as this big, unregulated, Wild West and they get dollar signs in their eyes. They they kind of tell vets what they want and sometimes they're right, but usually not. So I think having first the curiosity and then the empathy to be like, “Hey vets, what do you struggle with? Tell us what you need to solve” is a big reason why we took off at a time where the technology was early. The market may have been a little early for it.
BK: That's such an important point, Eric. Just going back to the very basic principle and business of the value proposition, right? Rather than “selling” our features, we went with the process of like, “What is the problem? Hey, we built a solution. I think that's going to solve your problem. Would you like to try it?” We listened to people, and having vets on the team like yourself and Conor and Aaron (who were veterinary students at that point). And then just the initial team that you helped bring in with other pathologists who wanted to make this a reality. I think that was what helped us become successful and grab early traction. Because you and I know it wasn't from a lack of funding from our competition. There were people who had raised 10x, maybe 100x, what we had raised at that point who were struggling to get some traction. Right?
We listened to people, and the vets on the team, and the pathologists who wanted to make this a reality. I think that was what helped us become successful and grab early traction.
EF: Totally agree. Not your story, but, Dr. Conor Blanchet (one of the co-founders), he famously worked in the clinical pathology lab and saw first-hand packages of slides that arrived in the mail broken from vets. He would get things that would be non-diagnostic and they could have fixed that within an hour if someone had told them at the point of care, but it got mailed in and a week later they're told, “Sorry, the sample's just not viable.” So that was a key critical insight and I don't know the business model would've been built without someone seeing that.
Another piece of empathy for the problem—during those first few years at Lacuna, I know your own dog, Bobo was diagnosed with cancer by cytology. How did that hit home with you and how did that kind of impact how you viewed your work at Lacuna?
BK: So slightly different, I'm going to correct the story there a little bit: Bobo was impacted by cytology, but it wasn't cancer, luckily for us. What happened was we took Bob to a vet for his regular checkup. There's a lump on his leg. They aspirate it and look under under the scope for an early look. They thought it was a mast cell tumor (MCT). Bobo was also going to be under for dental work, so the recommendation from the vet, since he's going to be under anyways, we should remove this mass and take really good margins. After completing the biopsy, they sent the tissue to CSU (Colorado State University’s diagnostic lab).
You know, what was it? Three, four days waiting and thinking, “Oh my God, did they get everything? How bad is it? Is it other places?” Anxious, worrying thinking about all of that. This is sometime in 2018, so we've been working on Lacuna for a little over a year. I know what we're trying to build, but this is where it started to hit home really close for me. This is tough, the waiting. Then result comes back, and what it looks like is just a reaction to a bite. It was most likely a spider bite.
EF: Oh my God, that's classic!
BK: Meanwhile, Bobo's got this huge chunk taken out from his leg. He's got a collar around his neck. And it's not fun for anyone. One way to look at it is: great, it's not cancer. But that's where it really hit home for me is like if we had a quick cytology technique that she (the vet) could have aspirated the mass there, looked at on the scope, sent it to a pathologist like you, who would've got back a response with 30 minutes to an hour, and say “No, it's not a mast cell tumor.”
EF: Well, there's nothing like a personal experience like that to really make you a true believer. It's like that old thing: "I'm not just the president, I'm also a client!" Like you believe in the product wholeheartedly. That's incredible.
BK: Exactly. And you know, Eric, the sad thing is that this was 2018. Now in 2023, a lot of companies have digital cytology more accessible, but I still go to the vet and they don't have this quick cytology technique. Bobo is 11 now, so he’s got a lot of lumps and bumps all around. And every time we see one change or a new one, we poke. Cause I know how important it is, right? And they still send it out for a biopsy. It's still three days.
EF: I totally agree, there's still so much room for it to grow. At this point, I just want to let the audience know this isn't an ad for Lacuna—it actually doesn't exist anymore. It was acquired a few years ago by Heska. Now the service is offered by, to my knowledge, every major commercial lab. We don't need to name drop each, they all have pros and cons. But it's still on vets to sign up for the service and get used to the change in workflow. It still hasn't fully penetrated the veterinary market, even though the technology is pretty ubiquitous at this point.
So what lessons did you learn as CEO? I know you talked earlier about some of the uncertainty and grappling with the role, but now with it in the rearview mirror, how has that shaped what you've done following Lacuna going forward?
BK: Yeah, there are some lessons I've learned, but I'm not quite sure if I'm applying them yet. I feel like there's a huge gap between knowledge and doing what we know to do.
EF: It's like that Yogi Berra quote: “In theory, there's no difference between theory and practice; in practice, there is.” It's different in the real world.
BK: Right, that's the caveat I want to put out there. I know what I think I need to be doing, but I'm still learning on how to do it. One of the biggest things Eric, was despite it being very uncomfortable for me and being unnatural for me, it is very important to talk about yourself and the team, especially when you're building a company. Because I used to think of it as egotistical to talk about myself. Right. But what I did not think about is I wasn't being empathetic to my audience. For example, if we're talking to an investor, they do not know all the background about us, about the company. What the investor is investing in early on is the team, so it is our job to show the investor why we are the right people. Same thing if we're talking to veterinarians, they want to make sure we are the right team. I'm still learning this concept of confidence without arrogance, finding that balance.
I've noticed it's important to learn how to present your ideas, the storytelling, we are all storytelling machines. Coming from a technical background, it's even more important since I get hung up in the nitty gritty of the numbers and logic versus the human mind is thinking more about the ethos, pathos, logos of communication and reasoning. So, if we start with ethos, why should someone listen to you? But the story is where everything is right? So being able to build a good story around everything we're sharing, those are things I'm still learning.
EF: I totally am on the same page. I feel like one of the things I struggled with when I was at Lacuna and after is the story; how do you go from facts and figures to what a normal person on the street needs to know? What an investor needs to know is what is the beginning, middle, end? What are you trying to do here? Tell it almost like a movie. And that was very challenging for me and I'm still learning to do it. I think taking the messiness of how science is done and distilling it into something someone who is not a PhD chemist can follow is challenging. And I think a lot of scientists are not good at it. I think that's one reason there's decreasing trust in the sciences and society's become more polarized. It's hard for people who know what they're talking about to communicate it to everyone else who needs that information.
BK: You know, to bring it back to the work you're doing here building All Science, it’s important, right? Being able to bring stories around that. A few of the stories that I've looked at from what you've written, it shares what got you interested in this career at first. You shared the story of how you made your transition [out of practice, “Quitting Time”].
[On building a readership base] These things take time, it's the power of long-term thinking. I could get discouraged quickly, but what I started realizing is unless I start working towards it, it's not gonna happen.
EF: Yeah, I feel like I'm just talking in aphorisms today, but “The journey of a thousand miles starts with one step.” When I used to approach things that I knew nothing about, I would feel a trepidation or almost shame that I didn't know it. Now I try and flip it around and go, well, you know, I've got a lot of the basic tools, I'm going to learn about it and I'll figure it out. It's not like I'm starting from a place of deficit where “I should know this and I don't.” It's more like, well I'm starting at a ground level and I'm gonna try and increase my level of understanding of it. And that's a more positive framing that gives me a little less anxiety.
BK: Yes, that's a beautiful way to look at it. That reminds me, you asked me earlier about my upbringing and coming here, that's something similar I used to think about when I first started here. I was 19 or 20 when I came to the US, I'd grown up in Nepal. Ten years later, I started realizing that I'm still not quite from here (the US), but I wouldn't quite fit in Nepal either. I felt like I was neither here nor there. So it's almost a sense that that struggle for belonging, right? Then I got a little older and then I started thinking about my people, their culture, and how much what my upbringing from Nepal had helped me here.
One of the things I keep going back to is long-term thinking and compounding. Compound interest is a concept from finance, but it's also applies to everything else we do in life. Thinking about everything I learned in the US, the community I built, everyone I met here, and I'm able to expand my horizons. Then suddenly it occurred to me that like, it's not that I don't belong neither here nor there, but it's actually I can fit in here and there. And that flip made everything completely different. I started connecting everything, embracing both things.
EF: You have to share the experiences from both. I obviously don't have the expat experience, but my career has been bizarre and I’ve traveled all over the country. It's spanned sectors in academia and private practice. And I'm doing a little of it all now. I find that, when I go to academia, my private practice and business side flares up and I'm like, “Well why are we doing it this way? This would be more efficient. This is a way you could increase your margin.” But I still like all the things about academia— when I've been in the private sector, I wish we had the time to dive deep on some of these weird cases. We'd catch a few things we wouldn't get a chance to in a private lab because (there) it's all about volume and money. Where that turns into a benefit instead of a disadvantage is if you can bring those ideas to both parties from your different experiences and they're willing to listen to it, you can make some positive changes. A couple of the places I've been in university labs, I've brought some ideas from the private sector. They've taken them and it's really been an improvement.
BK: Absolutely, I feel like it applies to everything, right? You don't have to be an expat, just having been in couple different places, that could be industries or companies, or whatever else. When you can marry the ideas from a couple places, the product is always better. Sometimes, it's not just adding, it could be subtracting!
EF: Yes… “We don't need that…that is a total waste of time and money.” I think that's something to bring to university and government and more bureaucratic organizations.
So, I love your focus on storytelling and your background from Nepal. I mentioned at the top you're actually a writer. You've actually already written a novel, “Dreams from Nepal,” and you're continuing to write. Now you've got a blog called “Writing in Public.” Tell us a little about your first novel, what you're working on now, and why you're motivated to do it in front of the world.
BK: “The world” is a broad term here <laughs> but I’m just kind of putting it out there. Yeah, let's take it in order. So the first novel, just a little bit background: I am new to literature. I did not start reading until the time when I started the app business around 2009, 2010. Anisa, my dear partner, is the one to thank here. She grew up reading, she loved reading. I would keep telling her, “I don't get it. Why do you read? It's easier to just watch a movie.” And she said, “No, no, you don't get it. It's the process.” That first year I read one or two books, and I started really enjoying it, Eric. I started getting it, why people read. You get to envision the world from your lenses and you get to be in there. You get to be in the characters, you feel the emotions, right?
You get to envision the world from your lenses and you get to be in there. You get to be in the characters, you feel the emotions
Fast forward couple of years: I could not stop reading. I started reading non-fiction and fiction in parallel. I would read 50 plus books a year. I would do audio books, eBooks, paper books, all of them, I just kept reading. And the more I read, the more I started getting drawn to this idea of writing, which I knew nothing about. And this is one of the big misconceptions we have is like, you see something great out there and all of a sudden you feel like you can create it.
EF: “Oh, that's easy. They (writers) are just sitting in a room with a computer. How hard could that be?”
BK: And I have all these stories that I want to share, to bring to the world. So I get this crazy idea that I'm going to write a book. I start writing…and it's difficult! I have no idea where to start. I write in bits and pieces here and there, a short story I could get to a novel. It takes a lot of planning, lot of persistence. And so the first novel, “Dreams from Nepal,” I wrote it in a haphazard way all over the place. It does have a lot of autobiographical pieces in there, which I feel like a lot of first novels have.
Somehow I managed to finish a fairly short—I think it was a 160, 170 page—novel. So it's probably more a novella than a novel, but I managed to finish it and nobody knows about it at this point, not a single soul, including my partner at home. I've gone through slowly piecing it together with an editor I found online. English is not my first language. So you can imagine it's crap, but I want to put it out there. My reasoning is if I'm comfortable with it out there and getting feedback, then it's going to help me put more work out there. Everything I do after this, no matter good or bad, is going to be better than this.
That’s why I decided to share with the world, that first project. Since then I've spent more time learning about how novels work, in structure and everything. I've started multiple projects and not finished. I've got multiple folders with 50,000-plus words that I've decided to abandon midway. So this year in January, what I decided was I'm going to try a little more structured approach to creativity. I took a page from Eric’s book, which I had learned a couple years ago when Eric was finishing his dissertation.
You took an approach which was part public/private accountability, right? You worked with a friend (Conor) and said “Hey, I'm going to finish my PhD dissertation by this day. If not, I'm giving you this check, please donate it to whichever cause.” Conor made it more interesting by saying, “I’m going to donate it to a cause that you are totally opposed to,” something anti-Eric. That made it even more interesting.
EF: Yes, I forgot about that! It was a substantial sum too, I was like, “I can't afford not to finish.”
BK: So I was trying to do something similar, but I wasn't committed enough to put any significant amount of money behind it. But what I did want to do is put in public, which is why I call it “Writing in Public,” and set a weekly goal and share weekly progress. I also set up a long-term goal of when I wanted to finish the first draft and shared all of that. What I also did at the same time was I set up calendar reminders for all the times where I'm likely to lose steam and what, which has happened before. So I put all of that in the newsletter early on and I said, “This is where I'm likely to give up. Help me stay on track. Oh, and if you don't hear from me, please ping me.” So we are end of May, I've been writing every week. I just did the 21st episode of the newsletter and I'm close to 70,000 words for the new novel.
EF: Wow, that's incredible!
BK: 70,000 words of junk, mind you. <laughs>
EF: The magic is in the rewriting and persistence. When you were talking earlier about folders of abandoned drafts, you know (Franz) Kafka hated most of his own writing and most, if not all, of it didn't get published during his lifetime. And he asked one of his friends, I forget the guy's name, to burn it upon his death. So the only reason we have some of those seminal works like The Trial and The Castle is because his friend is like, “Yeah, he doesn't know what he's talking about. Let's publish it.” <laughs>
BK: Yeah, my goal is to have a piece of work that I can start chopping. What I'm trying to do with the first draft is I want to tell the story. You need to put the effort, something worthwhile will take time.
EF: Absolutely. Going back to kind of the story about my PhD dissertation, in addition to the financial motivation that you mentioned, we were looking to leave Alabama. My wife Lenore got a great job in Tampa, Florida. We had to move and it was time to go, do or die. And I wrote it over a very compressed schedule. I'm not going to say how long I took it because I feel like it was a lot shorter than most people generally write their PhDs, but I was writing 10 to 15 hours a day every day for let's just say…a bit. And I was going kind of with a similar approach where I was like, I have to get structure down. I have to get volume and content written. I can clean it up as I go.
For the longest time—for years—I struggled with the blank page problem. But once I got those various forms of motivation and a plan, I was like, I'm just gonna get it down. I don't care if I hate it at the end of the day. Every few days, I would go clean it up, tighten it up, edit it. And when I go back and look at it, it's not terrible! You just have to get there and do it. I mean, it would be unfinished if I took a perfection approach to it.
BK: That's the big part, right? Getting it done. And similarly, you know, we think about similar concepts in business too. You need to get it out, get feedback to build upon. Otherwise, we're always going to be in that state of trying to fix something that's never going to be done.
EF: Absolutely. Well, I've been enjoying following along with your Substack and I'm curious to hear your next steps of progress. Just got a couple questions left for you. One, piggybacking off on this, who are your literary heroes? You mentioned that you love to read, who are some of the people you really look up to as writers?
BK: Even though I've been reading for about 10 or 12 years now, I'm not that extensive, right? I don't have a lot of classics that I've read. So my literary heroes are probably newer writers. There are few writers that have really changed the way or motivated me in a way to write. Couple of them are people who started later in the career. So to me that gives me something to relate to. One of them is a physician named Abraham Verghese. He wrote Cutting for Stone, it's a book I recommended to a lot of people because he does such a beautiful job of connecting science with literature and culture. And he was not a trained writer.
Another person is this Australian writer named Graeme Simsion. He wrote a book called The Rosie Project. He was a database guy, in IT consulting for a long time, then decided he wanted to go back to school, did some screenwriting. I believe he was in his fifties when he actually published the book. And then there's a Swedish writer by the name Fredrik Backman. He's got a lot of popular books, a big following. I just love his way of writing about simple things that gets people interested and deep into the characters. His characters are amazing day-to-day human beings. So those are the few that come to mind.
EF: Well, I didn't know of two of those, so I'm going to definitely have to check those out after. So my last question (hopefully there's not too much overlap): What are three recommendations for our audience that helped you learn about the world? This could be books, podcasts, movies, really any format or medium.
BK: Let's see, this is a interesting one. So with books, one book I recommended even to you is by the author named Cal Newport, who is a scientist at Georgetown. Love it. As a writer, “Deep Work” has changed the way I view work and how much we can achieve in a short period of time. It's one of those concepts that has significantly changed how I view what's possible.
We grossly overestimate what what we can do in a short period of time, but underestimate what we can do in long period of time.
Something along the same line I mentioned earlier, the concept of compounding, which essentially comes down to persistence and patience. I don't have a book to recommend or anything, but just overall that thinking around long-term compounding as a skill. This involves learning, building on top of what we have continually and thinking about what can be done in long term. There's this code that’s attributed to a lot of people: we grossly overestimate what what we can do in a short period of time, but underestimate what we can do in long period of time. It's something I keep trying to practice. I am not great at it, I need to keep reminding myself. There's a lot of talk about overnight success. We need to make ‘over-a-year’ and ‘over-a-decade’ success cool, right? You know, we need to get people excited about those concepts.
EF: That’s the stuff that lasts. You know, even with my own work with the All Science Project, I have very much taken the approach that I don't want to do clickbait. I don't want to do stuff that's viral or manipulates our dopamine centers, something angry or controversial. Positive news or nuanced news or, “Well, it's a little more complex than that” doesn't sell as well as stuff that's kind of the quick trash mainstream stuff. But that's what I've taken, and I think it's gonna be a slower journey. To me that's more satisfying, and I hope more likely to last than something you saw on Buzzfeed six months ago. <laugh>
BK: Yep. Our preference for news and content that was created within the last month or week is so high compared to the old wisdom. But it's what keeps coming back, right? Those are two. Eric, I don't know if the third one is really a skill or actual research, but something that has helped me a lot is just the love for learning and love of books. It's what's helped me keep learning and making time for those things, even though sometimes it may feel like it's not immediately applicable.
EF: Yeah. I went to one of the “weird” new vet schools, Western University, and they had a very problem-based learning curriculum and one of their whole mantras was lifelong learning. That was really instilled in me as a vet student, the idea that you don't know everything now. You can't know everything and you have to keep relearning it. It’s the idea that if you're practicing 20 years later from what you learned in vet school, you're woefully out of date. And frankly, with the, with the pace of research and medical news that probably is compressed to several years out. You just have to keep learning. It keeps moving so you can't stay in place.
BK: Yeah, absolutely. If we're not learning, we're unlearning almost.
EF: Right, exactly. Well, that's probably a pretty good place to leave it. This has been a wonderful conversation. I'm so glad we got to catch up after a couple years apart! And I look forward to following your work and seeing what you're doing, I hope you take care.
