How You Peel Bananas Shows You Can’t Tell Right From Wrong

Question everything.

I love talking to people about peeling bananas. This isn’t a kinky codeword. The talk often has life-changing consequences.

Most people grab the little antenna on top to rip the banana open. Although this seems like the biological equivalent to a can’s tab, it’s the wrong side.

Monkeys, the banana-peeling pros of the world, pinch the little dark nub on the bottom with two fingers. The peel parts into two big strips easy to pull off, exposing a naked and ready-to-munch banana.

You often think you know what’s right but actually don’t. The same applies to everything in life.

How Do You Know What Is Right and What Is Wrong?

Every day, you feed your brain new information.

You read self-improvement articles and newsfeeds, watch YouTube-videos, or listen to your friend’s ramblings. If you don’t question them, you don’t have a curation system in place to decide which information is true and valuable — and which isn’t. You believe stuff because everyone believes it.

But you weren’t always this way.

As a kid, you questioned everything. Evan Hadfield, the creator of the Rare Earth series, tells a thought-provoking story about a Japanese preschool class he supervised. After a lesson, a three-year-old boy named Kazuki licked the entire classroom floor from one end of the room to the other. Slurp.

Evan, a responsible 17-year-old at the time, got a good laugh out of the show. But when he asked Kazuki why he did it, he got an answer as innocent as only a kid’s words can be:

“Because I didn’t know what it tasted like.”

More than a decade later, Evan can only guess the floor tasted gross — the only one who knows for sure is Kazuki.

At one point while growing up, you started believing what people told you instead of forming your own beliefs. Floor tastes gross. You have to go to university, else you’ll flip burgers. Follow your passion to work your dream job. Save money for retirement. Some of these might be true, some might not. How do you know what’s right?

You don’t.

You’ll never be right, but you can be less wrong

Your brain is your best friend and biggest enemy at the same time.

It draws logical conclusions from known information and assumptions, a process called inference. You use it to make sense of the world, but this isn’t free from error.

For example, you see a little lever-like stem on a banana and assume it’s there to pull off the peel. Opening thousands of other packages that way has conditioned you into this assumption. Zing.

Let’s take it one step further. You assume bananas are healthy because they’re fruits. Yet, they’re also very energy-dense and contain lots of sugars. A zoo in England even stopped feeding them to monkeys because they can cause diabetes. Zing again.

“When we learn something new, we don’t go from ‘wrong’ to ‘right,’ rather we go from ‘wrong’ to ‘slightly less wrong.’”

— Mark Manson

That doesn’t mean question every banana you eat. That would be extremely annoying and time-consuming. Question your diet instead.

Don’t question every move you make at work, but question your career trajectory.

Don’t question everything you do, but question if you spend your time on what matters to you.

Don’t question every new piece of information, but question if your beliefs make sense.

Asking a few questions regularly is better than asking a ton of questions all at once. Your beliefs form slowly, like snow falling on a street during a long winter. If you don’t want to slip, you’ll have to use the shovel every day.

The Biggest Misconception About Monkeys and Bananas

If you never question yourself, you never become the creator of your reality.

You live your life on autopilot, adhering to beliefs you subconsciously adopted and rules you never questioned, chasing goals you never reviewed. You shouldn’t. Your life, your choices. Question everything.

Here’s one last question to ask yourself: Do monkeys really eat bananas the way I described?

They don’t. According to primate expert Katharine Milton,

“the entire wild monkey-banana connection is a total fabrication. The edible banana is a cultivated domesticated plant and fruit. Wild monkeys never encounter bananas […] unless they are around human habitation where bananas are or have been planted.”

And when monkeys get their hands on a banana, they just bite open the peel. No special technique.

I didn’t know this either until I wrote this article. Yet, I told the story to people for years. Again, I’ve become a little less wrong — and so can you.

Question everything.

I help men create a vision for their lives, make an impact, and achieve their dreams by being more authentic. Sign up for my free 5-minute newsletter and become part of the Authentic Men Tribe!