Story 1: Jagged, White Bone

Story 1: Jagged White Bone Transcript

Jonah Willihnganz: From Stanford University and KZSU, this is the Stanford Storytelling Project.

John Krumboltz: My name is John Krumboltz. I'm a professor of education and psychology here at Stanford University. Originally, I wanted to be a doctor. One day, the family was having breakfast together in our dining room, and we heard a scream from outdoors. And we all ran outside, and here was Mrs. Hankins, our next door neighbor, lying on the ground, screaming. And she had fallen off a stepladder, and here was this jagged white bone sticking out of her leg and blood oozing out all around it. And I started to get sick to my stomach just looking at that. And I had to leave immediately, and at that moment, I realized I could not possibly become a doctor. Because someone might come to me with a broken leg, and what would I do? Vomit all over them? No, that would be totally unacceptable, I realized. And so I cannot become a doctor. I'll have to do something else. I don't know what. 

I was, for a while, I was interested in becoming a baseball player, see? And my goal was to play baseball, play first base for the Chicago Cubs. And then one day, our team played another baseball team where the pitcher on the other team, his name was Lefty Rozak, was 16 years old, and he was about six foot three. And I was a little shrimpy 12 year old kid. And so he wound up and he threw the first pitch. And this pitch, the ball comes straight at my head at about 90 miles an hour. And so I ducked down into the dirt and I looked up and here is the baseball curving around right over the plate for a called strike. And I realized at that moment that my career plans needed to change again.

Charlie Mintz: You're listening to State of the Human. It's the radio show of the Stanford Storytelling Project. I'm Charlie Mintz. That voice you just heard belonged to John Krumboltz, a professor in the education department here at Stanford, and we'll hear from him more a bit later in the program. We're calling this episode Trial and Error. We've got an hour of stories about people doing things for themselves and seeing what works and what doesn't. It's an hour all about figuring it out for yourself.

For me personally, this means something, because what I know can be divided into things I learned myself, which would be a very small pile, and things I learned from books, from movies, from other people, from teachers, from my parents. And it seems like the majority of what I know, like history, who was John Tyler? I have to take it on faith that there was someone named John Tyler who was president. I've never seen him. I've never met him. I've never met anyone who knew him, but it's in a book and on the history channel. So I buy it. And it's all kinds of things like that. Everything in math that I can't count on my fingers. Who even knows if a calculator is right? But there's a lot of value to figuring things out for yourself, because especially when it comes to how to live, what philosophy you hold, then you've got to figure it out for yourself. You can read books, you can go to the self-help section or the philosophy section, which definitely some overlap there. But how do you know? How do you know if Buddhism and renunciation and non-attachment works for you until you've felt it? How do you know that hedonism doesn't? How do you, people say all the time that a life of pursuing pleasure and gratification, sex and delicious food is empty in the end, but how do you know? That's why I'm so interested in these three stories we've got for you today. Stories about people trying to do things for themselves, which is really hard.

Our first story, Professor John Krumboltz helps out a graduate student, a woman who was kind of stuck, and she needed to try some things before she could get unstuck and get some resolution to her problem with men.

Second story is about a woman who just doesn't feel good, a little bit of depression and a little bit of just wanting more out of life, and she takes a really unusual, weird, maybe even gross step to fix this. Lots of people said not to do it, but she did it anyway. Our last story is about someone who wants to believe. What he wants to believe in is that there's something more to life than what's around us, than what rational people say. He wants to believe in transcendence, and he tries to believe it for a really long time.

So those are our three stories. Should you stick around? I can't answer that for you.