PLEASE NOTE LEGAL CONDITIONS:
David The Optimist owns the copyright in and to all content in and transcripts of The Optimistic Perspective Podcast, with all rights reserved, as well as his right of publicity.
WHAT YOU’RE WELCOME TO DO: You are welcome to share the below transcript (up to 300 words but not more) in media articles (e.g., The New York Times, LA Times, The Guardian), on your personal website, in a non-commercial article or blog post (e.g., Medium), and/or on a personal social media account for non-commercial purposes, provided that you include attribution to “The Optimistic Perspective Podcast” and link back to the davidtheoptimist.com/podcast URL. For the sake of clarity, media outlets with advertising models are permitted to use excerpts from the transcript per the above.
WHAT IS NOT ALLOWED: No one is authorized to copy any portion of the podcast content or use David The Optimist’ name, image or likeness for any commercial purpose or use, including without limitation inclusion in any books, e-books, book summaries or synopses, or on a commercial website or social media site (e.g., Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, etc.) that offers or promotes your or another’s products or services.
Hello and welcome to the optimistic perspective podcast.
I’m David The Optimist and in today’s episode I’m going to have a different approach than the last episodes.
It is a different approach because first of all this episode has no script. Considering that I’m also dyslexic it’s going to be a bit difficult for me to maybe express myself the way I want to express and share the things that I want to share, considering that my first language is not English.
Until now I used to write down the episodes and there are not that many episodes. I think this is the seventh episode of the podcast
But I reached a point where I felt like the structure is holding me back in a way and by structure I mean having written down word by word what I want to say and by doing that I guess I had control over my thoughts and my message.
So I’m letting go of all that and right now there’s no script.
I’m doing it as a response to also changing the way I approach my writing.
Until now, all of my articles or I guess yeah all of the articles are based on what I’m thinking about something and it’s my thinking on a specific topic and also my experience on that topic.
So it’s purely based on who I am, what I think, what I do and so on and what I also observe let’s say. But it’s mostly on my thinking, my behavior, my actions and yeah it’s just David in these articles.
And I want to move a bit from that to more scientific based articles.
I’ve been reading a lot of books and research papers lately in the last half a year.
I found out of value and it feels like when I want to write articles the way I used to, it feels like my experience doesn’t give as much value as my experience with all the research papers and all the data to back my experience.
So that’s the approach from now on and to make some sense out of this episode, which is… I don’t know, I even struggle on naming the episode. But I think I’m going to talk about letting go of structure and the fear behind that and what’s happening with me when I try to do that.
But before going into the topic I would like to share a belief that I have around research papers and studies and data. While many research papers are done properly and they provide a lot of data, also I’m a strong believer in the exception of the rule. Just because 2,000 people, 10,000 people, 100,000 people were part of an experiment in the research study and then something concluded based on that experiment and the research study, it doesn’t mean that it applies to everyone.
I’ve been thinking about it for a while now, I think more than five years, that the exception of the rule is really important when it comes to these studies and I like to have that in mind when it comes to the shift in my work because, as I said, I’m going to approach most of the things that I do from now on with the research in mind but I also want to have in mind the exception of the rule.
As in, let’s say, and this is hypothetical, 1,000 people go to an experiment and all of them are supposed to write something with their right hand. As soon as they switch hands, they also go through a different thinking process and 90% of the people who were part of the experiment had the same experience, as in they changed their thinking process. But what happened to the 10% that didn’t have any change in their thinking process?
So I’d like to have that in mind when I’m going through all these structural changes and all these changes that I’m going to put into practice in my work.
I know that was a big introduction but I’m going to move on to the topic of this episode which is around structure and letting go of the structure.
When I’m looking at specifically about the articles that I write and the podcast and the episodes that I did until now, letting go of the structure and letting go of specifically the script of the podcast, it comes with some sort of fear that I’m not going to be able to manage, that I may not know what to say, that I may struggle when it comes to putting things out the way I want to put them and for sure writing things down and being able to correct things as I write them or just after I write the whole script, going back and reviewing it – that was a big part of the process and it was a part of the process that was making me feel in control of the whole thing.
And right now that’s not there anymore and I don’t know how to react to it because even now I struggle with sharing how I’m feeling about what’s going on because I haven’t even taken let’s say a few minutes, not even a few minutes to think about it. I just knew that I was struggling without the script and I guess it’s always been like that because even in the past when I had to speak in front of people, no matter how big or small the audience was, I struggled with just sitting in front of people and saying something valuable to them and I felt the need to prepare that.
And while it makes sense from a development point of view, as in if you’re just starting things out and if you don’t have control over the topic and the subject and whatever, preparing your speech would help a lot. But at the same time I’m not there anymore.
Even more than that, the way I look at what I’m about to do from now on is going through a lot of books, a lot of research papers and making notes and then especially here on the podcast, sharing my thoughts and my views on the notes that I take and the research papers that I read and the books that I go through.
At the same time, while I’m sharing with you all these, there’s a thought on the back of my head that says I hope “I’m not rambling” but I think rambling is part of an episode without the script and I’m trying not to judge myself or to punish myself too much for doing something without too much preparation and just being myself and being okay with who I am and who I’ve become in all these last years.
As I’m speaking about this process and what’s going on with me on the process, I’m thinking if there’s something else besides the fear of the unknown because as I said, there’s no structure
For the future episodes, I’m still going to do it once per week, I want to be consistent.
I think I’m going to make a list with what I want to discuss about in that specific episode just so I don’t go from having a really powerful structure to having no structure at all and eventually, maybe I’ll get to a point where there will be no structure but for now I feel like even looking right now at this episode (that I’m still recording as it seems), I feel like I need a bit of a structure.
And letting go of that structure puts too much pressure on me right now. It feels like as soon as I’m going to have a topic in mind based on some research paper or some book or whatever, I feel like having no structure will impact the quality of the episode.
I’m thinking about stopping here with the current episode.
This episode is just a transition and the podcast could have survived without it but for those who are listening, I want to kind of be transparent and put out this part of me that is trying to find the proper way of doing it because right now I don’t really know what to expect from podcasting and while I have a few things and ideas that I want to share like let’s say part of the big picture when it comes to specifically the topics and the things that I want to say out loud, I think I’m struggling a bit with that and sharing my struggle as a part of the process is something that I want to be transparent with.
From time to time, just expect this kind of unscripted episode where I just maybe rumble a bit or I’m not too coherent with what I’m saying or I’m repeating myself or maybe it doesn’t make any sense to you any of the things that I’m sharing.
I don’t know if this episode provided any value to you but saying things out loud this way made me feel a bit more comfortable with my skills on just doing an episode without any script and we’ll see how it goes from now on.
This has been David Optimist, thank you for listening.