Season 2 · Episode 3
Should You Change Yourself to Succeed?
Should you change who you are to get ahead, or wait to ripen into what you already are?
Today’s thought: trying to force your unique talents into a standard mold is like painting a banana red to look like an apple. It comes from a story in Nathan’s 30-year journal, about a green banana who rolls himself in red paint to be loved like the apples. Derek asks what that means for a show that won’t do politics to get views. From there we get into the pit of despair: why every creative person hits one, why the early pit is part of growing and the later one is much harder to climb out of, and why Derek still daydreams about a PhD, a novel in Spain and a dig in Turkey. Nathan explains CP2R, his test for whether something is yours to do.
Thought Mining is Derek Olson and Dr. Nathan Anderson taking one thought and staying with it for 30 minutes.
Chapters
- Welcome back
- How we think about a thought
- Today's thought: the bright red banana
- Nathan's banana story
- We've all been the red banana
- Red bananas only
- Thought Mining as a green banana
- The pit of despair
- Trusting your own instinct
- When do you want to hit the pit?
- The early pit and the later pit
- Not knowing yourself yet
- Envying other people's success
- There's always more
- CP2R: capacity, passion, relevance, presence
- What we took away
- You can wash the red paint off
- Wrapping up
From the episode
