PAPERBOAT MEDIA / THE INSPIRATION SERIES
Maya Shankar.
More to become.
The scientist, the violinist, and the enduring curiosity that connects them.
A PORTRAIT BY ROB URBAN
On change, the people we are becoming, and the things we carry forward.
Before Maya Shankar’s violin was an ambition, it was a connection to her grandmother.
In a conversation with Jameela Jamil, she recalled her mother bringing down the instrument her grandmother had carried from India. She loved her grandmother, and the violin already meant something to her before she learned to play it. Years later, after a hand injury at fifteen ended her plans for a performing career, she began to recognize how much of her love of music had been a love of connecting with people.
I find that a beautiful place to begin understanding her. A biography can move quickly from violinist to cognitive scientist to podcast host. Her account lets us see a person discovering more about an attachment she had already spent years honoring.
What I admire in Shankar is that attentive curiosity. She is interested in what matters to people, how we come to understand ourselves, and what becomes possible when the future stops resembling the one we expected.
WHAT WE CARRY FORWARD
The earlier
devotion
still matters.
Shankar’s musical training included Juilliard’s pre-college program and private study with Itzhak Perlman. Her later academic work took her to Yale, Oxford for a doctorate, and Stanford for a postdoctoral fellowship in cognitive neuroscience.
It is an extraordinary sequence, and also a sequence that can make a difficult transition look deceptively tidy. A résumé has no good column for the time when the old future is gone and the new one has not yet become imaginable.
Anyone who has cared deeply about a craft knows how much it can organize. The hours, the friendships, the standards you hold yourself to, the small private pleasures of getting something right. Those things deserve a place in the story of a change.
That is why I value the continuity Shankar describes. An earlier devotion can still tell you something true about yourself. The setting may change while the underlying interest finds another way to live.
Respecting a new identity does not require insulting the old one.
AN IDEA PUT TO WORK
A clearer message.
A real difference.
Her curiosity also became practical public service. Shankar founded and chaired the White House Social and Behavioral Sciences Team during the Obama administration.
In a 2015 account of the team’s work, she described a project with the Department of Defense. A payroll-system change meant service members needed to re-enroll to keep retirement-plan contributions going. The team helped make the message clearer, set out the steps and personalize the communication. The redesigned email prompted more re-enrollments in the first week than the original.
I admire the attention behind a project like that. It starts with a very human possibility: a person can intend to do something and still struggle to act on a confusing message.
There is kindness in making the next step understandable. There is rigor in checking whether the change helps. This is expertise made useful at the point where someone needs it, in an ordinary piece of communication that could easily have been treated as finished.
Two lives.
Two different questions.
Her podcast, A Slight Change of Plans, brings that interest in human behavior into personal conversations. The scale is intimate: one person, one history, a change whose meaning may still be unfolding.
Two episodes show why the particulars matter. In What If Closure Never Comes?, Helena de Groot discusses questioning and revisiting her decision about having children. In A Dream, Revisited, Felicia Hsu considers the cost of pursuing her long-held ambition to become a doctor.
One story begins with a decision being challenged. The other begins with a dream sustained by years of effort. Bringing them together makes room for a more interesting conversation about change. Persistence can be deeply meaningful. Reconsideration can be serious work, too.
I appreciate that breadth. It gives listeners more than one way to recognize themselves. A person who is learning to want something different deserves as much curiosity as a person finding the courage to keep going.
Expertise that
makes room
for someone else.
The particulars are where the person lives.
The combination of science and storytelling is especially valuable when it makes our questions more precise.
A scientific idea can help someone name a pattern. A person’s account supplies the circumstances: what they cared about, which choices they could actually make, who else was involved. The conversation becomes richer when both kinds of knowledge have room.
This is part of what draws me to Shankar’s work. She has the training to think carefully about behavior and a public project organized around hearing from people whose lives have changed. Her expertise creates an opening for other people to be interesting.
As a writer, I admire that choice. The temptation to explain can be powerful. So can the satisfaction of finding a lesson that fits neatly at the end. A good question sometimes does more for a reader. It leaves them with a new way to look at their own experience, and enough room to decide what they see.
A BOOK TO SPEND TIME WITH
The Other
Side of Change
Who We Become When Life Makes Other Plans
RIVERHEAD BOOKS / 2026
Her book The Other Side of Change: Who We Become When Life Makes Other Plans, published by Riverhead on January 13, 2026, extends the conversation through personal stories and cognitive science.
I am drawn to the question in its subtitle: who we become. A change can alter what we do, but it can also reveal an interest, a value or a capacity that had less room in the old arrangement.
There is hope in leaving that discovery open. We can know that something mattered without knowing yet what comes after it. We can be grateful for a new possibility and still miss the future we had imagined.
The most useful encouragement makes room for a person’s own pace. It offers company while they are figuring things out. That is the possibility I find compelling in bringing research and individual stories together: understanding can grow alongside experience.
A GENEROUS KIND OF ATTENTION
Someone to
think alongside.
Maya Shankar matters because she has made the question of change worth sustained, humane attention. She brings an accomplished mind to experiences that can leave people feeling uncertain about their own.
Across her work, I see an interest in helping people make sense of what is happening. Sometimes that means a clearer message and a usable next step. Sometimes it means a conversation in which the old plan is allowed to matter. Sometimes it means finding words for a possibility that has only just begun to appear.
I admire that combination of intelligence and care. The violin, the research and the listening suggest a life shaped by curiosity about other people, with new forms for expressing it.
A plan can end without the person becoming a blank page. There is still experience, still affection, still something worth discovering. Shankar gives that continuing life her attention. It is a generous thing to offer.
Maya Shankar, in brief
Who is Maya Shankar?
Maya Shankar is a cognitive scientist, author and host of A Slight Change of Plans. She founded and chaired the White House Social and Behavioral Sciences Team during the Obama administration.
What is A Slight Change of Plans about?
A Slight Change of Plans brings personal accounts of change into conversation with ideas from cognitive science. Its guests explore experiences including reconsidered ambitions, unexpected events and changing understandings of themselves.
When was The Other Side of Change published?
Riverhead Books published The Other Side of Change: Who We Become When Life Makes Other Plans by Maya Shankar on January 13, 2026.
SOURCES & FURTHER LISTENING
This portrait draws on Shankar’s conversation with Jameela Jamil, her Pushkin biography, her 2015 account of the behavioral science team’s work, the linked episode descriptions, and Riverhead’s book information.
Another life.
Another way to see.
I’m Rob Urban. I write about people, ideas and the choices that give work its meaning. If you have a story to tell or a business question worth thinking through, you can find me here.