The Importance of Independent Thinking

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When there's a contrarian position being taken, there are two kinds of people taking it. There's the independent thinker who happens to kind of have come there for this particular topic And then there's the person whose identity is being contrarian and who It's not actually independent. That's like you're in your own prison Which is I that I can never conform because now my self-esteem is tied to being someone who doesn't conformAnd that's not really great either. But yeah, you know real actual independent thinking you have to continue to remove prison balls that your mind's going to put up.

Ryan speaks with Tim Urban about his new book What's Our Problem?: A Self-Help Book for Societies, why everyone who wants to improve at something should aim to do it slowly, what it really means to “trust the process,” why they like writing so much, and more.

Tim Urban is a writer, illustrator, blogger, and entrepreneur. He earned his A.B. from Harvard University, graduating cum laude with a major in Government. Since starting his long-form, stick figure-illustrated blog Wait But Why in 2013, he has become one of the most popular writers and thinkers on the internet. His articles have been regularly republished on sites like Quartz, The Washington Post, The Atlantic, Time, Business Insider and Gizmodo, and his 2016 TED Talk: Inside the Mind of a Master Procrastinator has been viewed over 50 million times on YouTube alone. Wait But Why regularly receives over 1.5 million unique visitors per month on average, and his blog is read by over 300,000 email subscribers. His work, which covers a wide range of topics, including technology, human behavior, self-improvement, and more, can be found at waitbutwhy.com and on Twitter @waitbutwhy and Instagram @timurban.

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