You Can Just Do Things

I'm Rufus Griscom and this is the next big idea. Today, the surprising power of just doing things. Do you ever feel like life is happening to you, like you're an actor in a script that somebody else has written? It's not an unreasonable way to feel. We all live inside a structure of rules we didn't create. Some of those rules are written down, others are invisible.

Which careers are realistic for people like us? When will we have earned the right to speak? Who are we allowed to approach? What counts is a reasonable request. We often mistake these social conventions for the laws of physics. But are they? What happens if we push against these conventions?

A good friend of mine, a guy named Bo Pody. really wanted to go to Williams College. This was back in 1989. He applied and was rejected, which is not a surprising outcome because Williams is a Tough school to get into, and Bo, well, he was a B minus student. So he called the assistant director of admissions and he said

We already have this episode, so unlocking it is cheap and permanent: the full transcript (78 minutes, 12,805 words), segment and word-level timestamps, and .txt, .srt, .vtt and word-level JSON downloads, as many times as you like, forever.

10 free credits is 10 episodes like this one a month. Episodes nobody has transcribed yet cost their length in hours, because we have to actually transcribe them.