Thomas Curran

And there was a lot of financing to go to university.

So I took that up and I managed to scrape my way to a local teaching college to study sport with every intention of being a PE teacher.

That was going to be my ambition.

And I guess you could say I was lucky, really, because at my time at that teaching college, I happened to intersect with a professor who was on his way to a more prestigious university.

I must have impressed him because he took me with him to do a PhD.

And that was when things started to really get quite crazy because I remember instantly being inside this hyper-competitive university environment, being surrounded by people who were just way smarter than me, more erudite, way more put together.

People were pumping out publications.

Some of them were even getting grant money at university.

And in that environment, those early feelings of shame and inferiority that I kind of brought with me started to come back again in mega doses.

And I think my response really looking back was to develop what I can only really describe as an urgent need to lift myself above other people through an excessive form of striving.

Like made sure I was the first in the office and the last to leave and made sure people saw that.

You know, I'd regularly do

80 hour weeks and I'd let everybody know in the office that I was doing that I sent these kind of weird conspicuous emails to my academic supervisors in the early hours of the morning and sometimes last thing at night just to let them know that I'm working and I can remember one Christmas doing a thousand words of my thesis on Christmas day and at that time

I felt really proud of it.

You know, these are incredibly unhealthy things to do, but nevertheless I believed if I didn't do these things, then there's no way I was going to succeed.

Yeah, so all that work did end up paying off and I was able to elevate myself through the academic ladder, up the academic ladder, I should say, into second tier and then elite institutions.

And that's when I did a very important TED talk at a resort in the US back in 2018 and

And I think going to that TED Talk was when I finally realised I'd sort of made something of myself here.

But nevertheless, I really felt out of place at that conference.

There's people there were paying thousands of pounds.