Season 2 · Episode 4
When Planning Becomes Procrastination
When does a careful plan help you decide, and when is it a polished way of not starting?
Today’s thought, from Nathan: over-systematizing your life with conceptual frameworks is just intellectual procrastination. Nathan collects frameworks; four of them hang on his wall. Derek mostly plays jazz. They work through two of Nathan’s: COURSE, the framework behind this show, and ALT MAP, which Nathan once used to plan a project at his cabin until a friend who builds things for a living told him none of it was necessary. Derek runs a judgmental thought about a stranger’s tilted hat through COURSE and finds a third-grade jester hat at the bottom of it. Then the turn: if nothing can satisfy every requirement of your framework, no action is necessary. Where is the line between thinking it through and talking yourself out of it?
Thought Mining is Derek Olson and Dr. Nathan Anderson taking one thought and staying with it for 30 minutes. Season 2, episode 4.
Chapters
- No action necessary
- Welcome back
- How we stay with one thought
- Today's thought: is over-systematizing just procrastination?
- What is a conceptual framework?
- Two ways to build a shed
- Why Nathan collects frameworks
- COURSE: the framework behind Thought Mining
- What it means to be present
- The guy in the tilted hat
- Running the hat through COURSE
- Skipping straight from C to E
- ALT MAP, or "just build the shed"
- A shed vs moving to Italy
- When a framework stops you from starting
- Making room for creativity
- Playing jazz vs walking a worn path
- Catching your own judgments
- Wrapping up
From the episode
