Derek Thompson

my thoughts get longer and more textured and I'm able to sit with ideas for a longer period of time because I haven't just been trained by the bop, bop, bop of Twitter.

But also, if it's a really great writer, you know, Roth, Updike, Johnson, I will start to have thoughts

that almost mimic the thoughts that I'm reading all the time.

And I love that.

And that's what I thought of when I read the line, the things you work on work on you.

The writing I read works on me and becomes the pattern of thinking that I end up employing.

And I love the fact that we're so susceptible to our work and to our passion that way.

Everything you said is true, and also if you try really hard, if you're obsessed, if you're passionate, if you throw yourself into things, you will get disappointed.

You will have disappointments.

How do you deal with disappointment?

To employ the 17,000th metaphor analogy of this podcast, in a way what I'm hearing you say is that valleys should be as sharp as mountaintops, right?

That like when you fail, when you're in the valley, be there.

You're bouncing right out.

And it's interesting, in your example, your valleys are precisely as sharp as your mountaintops.

They are as long as two days.

You're in there for two days, and then you move on, and you're back to the side of the mountain.

And I like that as a general principle that sometimes...

it's very easy to allow our valleys to be wide and our mountaintops to be narrow, where if we fail, we spend days, weeks, months, years wallowing in some way on that failure.

But when we succeed, it's a rival fallacy in half a second.

Oh, I succeeded.