HealthyGamerGG - How To Actually Have An Elite Mindset

Episode Date: July 13, 2026

In this episode, Dr. K dissects the mindsets of legendary athletes—including Michael Jordan, Kobe Bryant, Michael Phelps, Tom Brady, and Tiger Woods—to uncover the psychological mechanisms behind peak performance. He explains why common advice like "strive to win" or "prove your haters wrong" often backfires, and breaks down how daily conditioning, radical agency, and a strict present-moment focus can help you unlock an elite mindset in everyday life. What to expect in this episode: The Problem with Proving People Wrong: Why Michael Jordan's strategy of taking things personally and striving to be "the best" often leads to impostor syndrome and negative motivation for the average person. The Kobe Bryant Approach: Understanding why "loving to win" and "hating to lose" are both weaknesses that introduce performance-killing fear by pulling your cognitive resources out of the present moment and into the future. The Trap of Winning: Why focusing purely on outcomes—like winning an Olympic gold medal or getting a specific job—destroys your long-term motivation and wires your brain to seek lazy shortcuts for maximum reward. Practice Like It's the Finals: Tom Brady's strategy for eliminating the gap between everyday practice and game day, and why trying to reserve your maximum effort only for "important" moments leaves you unequipped to handle high pressure. Conditioning vs. Deconditioning: How giving 100% effort daily physically and mentally conditions you to handle immense workloads, rather than exhausting you. The Danger of "Half-Assing": Dr. K shares a personal realization about leaving dishes in the sink, explaining how tolerating small, incomplete actions actively conditions your brain for laziness. The Tiger Woods Mentality: A look at the profound psychological power of believing you control your own fate, even in a modern world dealing with high loneliness and economic struggles where many feel objectively powerless. Finding Your Agency: How to stop wasting cognitive energy on the 99 things you can't control (like a terrible job market or bad video game teammates) and start finding power in the 5% you actually have agency over. Dr. K's NEW Guide to Love, Sex, & Relationships is here! Order now: https://bit.ly/4dO3x0VHG Coaching : https://bit.ly/46bIkdo Dr. K's Guide to Mental Health: https://bit.ly/44z3SztHG Memberships : https://bit.ly/3TNoMVf Products & Services : https://bit.ly/44kz7x0 HealthyGamer.GG: https://bit.ly/3ZOopgQ Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Hey, chat, welcome to the Healthy Gamer Gigi podcast. I'm Dr. Alokinoja, but you can call me Dr. K. I'm a psychiatrist, gamer, and co-founder of Healthy Gamer. On this podcast, we explore mental health and life in the digital age, breaking down big ideas to help you better understand yourself and the world around you. So let's dive right in. A lot of people are obsessed with how athletes think. We ask them in interviews and things like that.

How do you handle doubt? How do you handle work ethic? because we are looking at our lives and we struggle with all of these things, right? So today what we're going to do is listen to what an athlete says and break down the psychological mechanism of what they're doing, why it works, and how to implement it. Let's start with one of the greats of all-time Michael Jordan. Ler Smith, he started the whole process for me because when he made the team and I didn't, I wanted to prove not just to Ler Smith, not just to myself, but to the coach who actually picked Ler

over me. I want to make sure you understood, you made a mistake, dude. So Michael Jordan is notorious for trying to prove other people wrong and taking things personally. And this is where I'm going to start out of the gate by saying, I think this is a non-optimal strategy, okay? So generally speaking, I think when we talk about performance, I advocate for like an egoless approach. I advocate for trying not to prove things to other people. And why is that? So if I think I'm better than you, right, I want to prove to you that I'm the best. So I'm going to practice really hard and I'm going to show up and we're going to compete. And then what if I lose, right?

What impact does that have? If I put all my eggs into the basket of I am better than you, I will prove to you that you are wrong and I am right. And I work really hard, but you're also working really hard and maybe you're better at it than I am. And then what happens if I lose? So I've worked with a lot of people who are very outcome oriented. I want to get straight A's. I want to be number one. I want to be the best.

And I personally think this is sort of a like a lose, lose strategy. Because if you try to be number one and you fall short, you fall short of your goal, this can sometimes result in negative motivation. For most of us, it results in negative motivation. And it's tough because in your brain, you're like investing a lot of energy for a particular reward. But if you don't get the reward, the behavior is oftentimes not reinforced, right? So I studied really hard to get an A. If I get a B,

I feel disappointed, and I'm less inclined to study again. This is what happens with most people. And even if you win, that can also result in problems. So a friend of mine was a first year law student at Harvard Law School. And I asked him, you know, what's it like being there? And he's like, it's awful. And I was really surprised because this is like really competitive. A lot of people want to go. And then I kind of asked him like, what's so bad about it? And he's like, one of the worst things that you can do is take a bunch of kids who used to be the smartest in the class and then make them average overnight. So there are some weird things that can happen when we focus on being the best. We can suddenly, we'll keep on climbing until we're average. And then that's a blow to our ego, right? Because our motivation is I'm striving to be the best, striving to the best, I am the best. I am the best.

And then suddenly, like, I rise enough to be average. And then now I feel like I'm not the smartest. In fact, I feel the stupidest. Like, when you graduate from Harvard Law School or Harvard Medical School at the bottom of your class, you're still a Harvard graduate, but you feel like a complete idiot. So we also see a lot of problems like imposter syndrome and stuff kind of crop up when you sort of have this outcome orientation. But I think there's a bigger and more subtle reason why, like, I don't like Michael Jordan's strategy. So sure, it can be very motivating, right? I'm going to prove them wrong.

Like, that's a very powerful motivated. I'm going to show them. One v.1 me mid, bro. One v.1 me mid. I think the reason that that may work for Jordan is because he's Jordan. Like, you get what I'm saying? Like, I've worked with so many people who are like, I'm going to be the best. I'm going to show the rest of the world how I'm better than them.

But they're not Jordan. And then we get to another really tricky thing, which is how much of Jordan. how much of who Jordan became, he wasn't born that way, right? So he's like, he believed in himself, I am the best. I'm proved this guy wrong. I'll prove that guy wrong. I'll prove that guy wrong. And then he succeeded in all of those things.

So this is what's so tricky about the Jordan strategy is like, it's not clear to me, you know, is he Jordan because he believed that? Or can he get away with believing that because he's Jordan? And honestly, like, I don't know, right? And this is why we're kind of diving into this because as a psychiatrist is arguably someone who's an expert in the mind, like, I'm not sure which one it is. I keep seeing comments. Dr. Kay, how do I apply this to a situation in my life? That's literally why we created a coaching program. Our coaches are certified on an evidence-based curriculum designed to help you get unstuck.

This involves analyzing your patterns, increasing your understanding, and working with you week to week to help you develop a plan to create lasting change. So if y'all are interested, check out the link in the description below. And so let's take a look at a different perspective. So here's Kobe Bryant. I always think that there's two types of players, players who love to win and players who hate to lose. Which one are you? I'm neither. Me neither.

Meaning that, you know, I played to figure things out. I played to learn something, right? Because I think if you play with a fear of failure, or you play with the will to win or that supersedes a field fairy, I think it's a weakness either way. And this is something I've seen a lot with the athletes, e-sports athletes that I've worked with, is that some people are motivated because they just really, really, really hate losing.

And they work really hard so that they never lose. Or they really, really, really love winning. I personally like Kobe's approach to this, which is that you don't focus on the winning and you don't focus on the losing, which can be so confusing. Because if you play with the fear of failing, you'll have the pressure on yourself to play, you know, to capitulate to that fear.

If you play with the sense of, I want to win, I want to win, then you have the fear of what happens if you don't. But if you find common ground in the middle, in the center, then it doesn't matter. You're unfazed by either, right? And that enables you to really just stay in the moment, stay connected to it,

and not feel anything other than what's in front of you. So, you know, I try to just be dead center. And so Kobe also alludes to something that we just talked about, which is that if you are afraid to lose, you are going to have some amount of fear. And if you strive to win, you also have some amount of fear, because what if you don't win? And so in both of these cases, if we look at the mechanism, if you love to win or hate to lose, both of those come with a side of fear. And then how does fear impact that performance? And Kobe highlights what the mechanism of loving to win or hating to lose actually

comes with, which is fear. So there's a fear of losing if you hate to lose. And then there's a fear of not winning if you love to win. And so the problem with this strategy, if you're striving to be a winner, striving to be the best, or striving to no longer be a loser, is that they both come with a side of fear. And then the mechanistic question is, what impact does a side of fear have on your performance? And it's beautiful because he stitches this together. So let's think about fear for a second. Fear is an emotion that causes you to project into the future. You are worrying about a problem that could happen. If I lose, then what?

So then at the highest levels of performance, you cannot afford fear for a very simple reason. The moment that you start thinking about, if I don't win, then what? Then 1%, even 1% of your cognition is not focused on the now. You are not thinking about the shot that you have to take. You're not thinking about what am I going to play right now? What is the next move that I want to make? A percentage of your mind is focused on solving problems that don't even exist and comes away from solving problems that you are actually dealing with.

And so what do I see as a psychiatrist? The more anxiety someone has, the more they frankly suck at life. Their performance drops, and I don't mean that in a brutal way, their performance drops in any given thing. If I'm afraid that this person, I'm super into this person, we're on our first date. Oh, my God, I'm afraid that they won't go on a second date. So what am I doing? I'm no longer in the present.

My cognitive resources are no longer attending to the problem at hand. And literally fear destroys people's lives because they're spending so much energy, solving problems that don't exist and may never come to pass, while ignoring or not focusing the problems that are right in front of them. And we can see from Kobe that if you want to perform at this level, you cannot afford even 1% of your energy solving fears problems. And so let's take a look at another clip. Winning a gold medal is absolutely incredible.

There's nothing better than standing on the podium listening to your national anthem play. But for me, I'm somebody who I knew that I had seven other events after the first day. So I have to throw that in the back of my head to then get ready for the next race. Every day is a new challenge, right? A day that we can prepare ourselves even more. I have to make sure I'm eating the right amount. I'm sleeping the right amount. My body is as fresh as I can possibly be.

So that means sitting in an ice tank, getting massages, getting stretched, all of these small things that end up adding up. We would call it putting money into the bank. So if we listen to Michael Phelps, you know, he has a really fascinating take. He's like, you know, I can't get caught up on winning a gold medal because I have to compete for seven days after. after winning a gold medal. And I love this attitude because it's kind of like insane, right?

It's like when winning a gold medal isn't enough. But that's the reality of his life. And I think the really weird thing is it's actually the reality of ours as well. So now we get to another really interesting motivational trap, which is trying to win and trying to achieve something. Because the whole internet will tell you, oh, my God, like strive to achieve. Be number one, bro. Be the best.

Be the smartest. Here's how you be an amazing startup founder. here's how to make $10 million in 10 seconds, right? Here's how to get a 10-inch dick. Like, there's all kinds of stuff that we're like just achieve, do better, more, better, more. Bigger cars, bigger tits, bigger dicks, like all of it, right? And so there's something really interesting about that. If you strive to achieve, once you achieve, you have your goal and the striving will disappear.

So even winning, and I've seen this before, you guys may have noticed that in sports or e-sports or whatever, there are many more one-trick ponies. There are many more people who have happened to win once than there are people who have win like tons of things, right? If you look at all of the Olympic medalists in swimming, the number who have earned fewer medals than Michael Phelps or even a single medal is going to be way greater than the number of people who are like Michael Phelps who have won again and again and again and again. And that's because so many of us are oriented towards this outcome of winning. And I see this as well in weird places like midlife crisis, right? I'm going to strive to achieve. I'm going to get a good job. I'm going to do this. I'm

going to build a career. I'm going to get a house. And then you wake up one day and you've like achieved everything that you wanted. You wanted all of those things. And the wanting of those things is the source of your motivation. And one of the worst things that can happen to you is you can actually get them. And we see from Michael Phelps what the solution to this is, is to focus on the action itself, focus on the preparation. Focus on the present. We hear this time and time and time again. What does focusing on the present mean? It means working on a daily basis, devoting yourself on a daily basis. Because when we orient ourselves to a particular outcome, this is kind of weird, but if you pay attention to yourself, right, if I want to achieve something, if I'm not focused on the present,

what I'll look for is shortcuts. So if you look at like how you literally spend your day, many of us spend our days trying to avoid work while getting something, right? Most of us are happy to, like, cheat a little bit or collect a salary if a company forgot to stop paying us. We're happy to do all kinds of things. And I'm not saying that any of those things are necessarily bad, right? But I'm sort of saying, like, I want you to pay attention to how you focus on doing the minimum and getting the most.

Because if your goal is an outcome, oftentimes the way that our brain is, wired as minimum effort maximum reward, right? That's why all of us are beating ourselves up that we didn't invest in Bitcoin, or maybe you didn't, your Bitcoin billionaire. All of all of us are wishing, oh, we invested in Tesla and bought Tesla options or invested in the SpaceX IPO. We all wish that we had made one decision that with no effort would have given us everything we want in the world. But I want you to think about how crippling that would be for your motivation. Just a little bit of self-disclosure. So I went through a midlife crisis recently. And one of the things that I realized, I started meditating like hardcore again. And one of the things that I realized is like, you know, because I'm a successful startup founder, arguably, but I'm not making a ton of money, which is neither here nor there. And then I sort of realized, oh, like, this is the universe's way of, like, keeping me motivated. And I realized that the worst thing, because I am a degenerate, I was addicted to video games,

I've been so lazy and unhealthy in my life that if I won the lottery tomorrow and I had 100 million dollars, I don't know if I am strong enough to keep making content. Right? I look at this and I realize that my, and I'm financially successful and I'm comfortable and all that kind of stuff. Like, that's not an issue. But if I had been one of these like billionaire startup founders that had taken all this capital and like could retire at the age of 43, which is how old I am, like,

man, I would be working so little, right? All of my lazy tendencies would take over. And what we hear from Michael Phelps is he's not what the root, the way to get rid of laziness is to focus on the present. Every day is action. Every day is work. Whether you win or whether you lose, we separate ourselves away from that. We sever success and failure from our actions and we're just going to be doing the work on a daily basis. And the next clip we're looking at is from Tom Brady, who I think really exemplifies this.

Through my work with Greg Cardin, the sports psychologist, he would say, when you go out on the practice field and you run a two-minute drill, and they put you in there in practice, you treat that fucking drill like it's a game when it's driving. It's Ohio State. Like, I don't want to hear this. It's only practice. I don't want to hear it's like didn't matter because nobody was watching. It needs to matter as much to you on that practice field as it does when you do it on the game field. And it was an eye-opening experience. Tom worked with what sounds like a sports psychologist who is very good. And he taught Tom one really important thing. He's like every time you're on the practice field, there's no difference between the practice field and the real game. Okay. And so this is really important, right? And we're sort of seeing a theme here, same theme as Michael Phelps where he's like,

whether you're on the practice field or you're in a championship game, no difference. You are going to give 100% on a daily basis. Now, Brady focuses a little bit about how. that protects him from the nerves of a championship game, which is something that I've seen a lot. Y'all, if you guys watch sports or e-sports, you may notice that there are some players who choke, right, where the pressure gets to them. You have to be able to withstand the pressure, which Phelps talked about as well. So how do we train ourselves to withstand pressure? We train ourselves by making no difference between a championship game and an everyday practice. And this is what I

see with so many people that I think is like a huge problem, right? It's such a fundamental thing, is they don't live every day with maximal effort. There are some days where we have to force ourselves to muster up effort. And there are many days that we try really hard to exude the minimum effort. So Brady's saying when the gap between game day and practice is zero, that is what leads to optimal performance. But if you look at the way that we live our lives, we actually try to separate it out. Oh yeah, when I go to work, I'm going to work really hard so I can get it all done and then I can come home and I can veg out. But I want my weekends. I only want to work one day a week. I want a life of luxury. I don't want to work hard. And when I'm forced to work hard, I'll work hard. Or I want

to work in a burst, right? I have ADHD and I get ADHD hyperfocus and I want to get everything done in 12 hours. And I want to veg out for a month. I love that approach as well. Peels to me, right? It appeals to us, but it's not what works. Now, what a lot of people will say is, but I can't do that. I can't give 100% every day. I'm exhausted. Giving 100% once a week exhausts me. Giving 50% five days a week is so tiring. And this is where we get to a really important mechanism that I think is a little bit between the lines, which is conditioning and deconditioning. So if you look at athletes, what they're focused on is conditioning. So you may say, oh my God, if I treat every day like game day, I would be ragged.

But that's only until you start doing it, right? So if I sort of think about just a simple idea of like going to the gym, if I'm deconditioned, a small workout will feel exhausting. But the more that I do it, the more that I literally engage in conditioning, the more I am able to handle immense effort on a daily basis. Right? So if we think about the human body, the human body is designed for. a 24-hour cycle, for the most part, arguably 25, 25, 26, 27, 28 hours. But basically, we're designed to reset on a

daily basis. If we look at the animal kingdom, we'll see that they all reset on a daily basis for the most part, right? And then you may say, but in my life, like, I can't afford that because, I mean, I've been there, right? We have 24-hour calls. I've done 30-hour shifts at the hospital, and you can't like reset immediately after that. Right. So there's absolutely things that make this difficult. There's no question about that. Your boss is demanding. You have to work over the weekend. Like now you're exhausted on Monday morning.

You know, and by the way, weekends are like the most terrible invention in humanity because weekends are when we allowed ourselves the right to burn out during the week, right? Like it's kind of crazy that we said, oh, yeah, like, we're going to work you so hard that you need two days of recovery. And then it's like back into the meat grinder. But we're still stuck with this basic issue of like, sure, the world is this way. but what are we going to do about it, right? Because this is the world that we live in.

And what I tend to find is that the more that people decondition themselves, and this is where you've got to figure out what works for you, you know? Like, what is it that you can do that will help you do more work on a daily basis? So in my case, like, I also work a ton. And this is where, like, some people like, oh, my God, Dr. Kay is turning into a hustle culture influencer. Oh, my God, dude. Oh, my God. And it's like, I'm not trying to be a hustle.

culture influencer, what I'm trying to share with y'all is like, there is a way to be very productive on a daily basis. And a big part of that is conditioning, right? So I tend to work really hard on a daily basis, work six to seven days a week. And I'm not saying this because like, oh, like, I'm great. Like, oh, my God, you guys should do what I do. But kind of, yeah. I mean, like, it's like, look, if you all want to work hard, right? If you want to work in ways that are engaging for you, you have to work hard. So one of the key things that I've learned is like devoting yourself to not separating out an easy day from a hard day, giving your 100% on a daily basis for things that are small and things that are big increases your capacity to give 100%. So I did something, just a little bit of

self-disclosure again. I did something kind of interesting recently where when I was growing up, my mom used to say it's a Gujarati phrase, VET Uttarwanu, which means I do things half-assed. So, like, if I try to throw something in the laundry basket and it lands on the ground, I don't pick it up. If something, you know, like, I'll leave some, I'll leave my dishes, I'll leave them in the sink, or I'll leave them on the table instead of rinsing them and putting them in the dishwasher. I realize that there are a thousand little things that I do that are like half-assed.

And I realize, like, how much this is hurting me, that if I can't even bring myself to do this small amount of work because I feel tired. But I'm not like so tired that I can't rinse something and put it in the sink. And what I realized is that I was actually conditioning laziness into me, that I was half-assing some things. And then my mind got used to half-assing things. And then I started thinking to myself, how can I half-ass this? I tried to half-ass more and more.

So recently, about a year ago, year and a half ago, I stopped doing that. I noticed this thing that pissed my mom on. pisses my wife off as well, which I'm sure there's some Freudian analysis too. I'm going to stop half-assing things. I'm going to put my keys where they go. I'm going to put trash where it goes. I'm going to put things properly in the laundry basket. I'm not 100%.

But what I noticed is when I started half-assing things for myself, my capacity to whole-ass things increased. I was training myself. And so the more that you give 100%, the more you will be able to give 100%. The next clip that we're going to look at is from top. Tiger Woods. And this one in a lot of ways may be the most controversial clip that we look at, not because it's Tiger, but take a look. Golf is a microcosm of life. There's going to be ups and downs. There's going to be challenges.

There's going to be ebbs and flows. And ultimately, when it comes right down to it, we determine our own fate. As tough as that may be to accept sometimes, it's not being afraid of it. And it's okay. It's okay to feel uncomfortable. I've been asked this question numerous times. And so the really scary thing is that, you know, he's saying we control our own fate. But literally, if you look at, like, research about people's sense of agency in the world, for some generations of people, like as in, like, certain age groups, we are at an all-time low for belief in agency. So 50% of people under the age of 30 in the United States who are adults, who have jobs,

live with their parents. We have some of the lowest rates of homeownership. We have the highest rates of loneliness. We have, you know, low fertility rates all over the country. And, you know, people are feeling like they are out of control in their life. And especially when it comes to things like loneliness, like this kind of makes sense, right? Because literally, technically, I cannot control my loneliness. My loneliness requires another person to fix.

Like, it is the one thing that is like, I can't just be like, oh my God, now I'm no longer lonely. Like, let me hug myself. This is what's really scary. Hugging yourself doesn't release any oxytocin. So oxytocin is an emotional bonding hormone that alleviates our anxiety, makes us feel safe, you know, calms down our amygdala, calms down our stress signal. But it requires another human being to hug you in order to get that oxytocin release. So how is it that someone like Tiger Woods believes?

this, right? And this is where there's a very common narrative right now that we sort of live into patriarchy, that they're the people who have power and the people who do not have power. And the reason he believes this is because he's one of the people with power. Like, of course, people with power have agency, but we don't have agency. There's a powerful and the powerless, powerful have agency, powerless don't have agency. And I'm not disputing any of that, right? That's absolutely true, that some people have more power in this life than others. But what we're focused on today is the psychological mechanisms of beliefs on this on your life. And what I want y'all to think about is if a human being believes they have agency in life, what impact does that

have on their life? And if a human being believes they are powerless in life, what impact does that have in life? Now, be clear, I'm not talking about an objective measure of power, wealth, or agency. I'm talking about the belief in your own power. And what I see Tiger doing that I encourage many of my patients to do that I try to do myself is to take the lion's share of responsibility in my life. And this is what's so hard is because when I work with patients who feel powerless and oftentimes are very small amounts of power, this is what's so devastating about it is if you believe you are powerless completely, then there's kind of nothing that you can can do. The hardest part of my job is for someone who believes they are powerless to try to carve out

the 5% where they do have agency. Sure, you don't have agency 95% of the time, but you do have agency over this 5%. And to lean into that, because that's your only option. And you can even use an analogy of like playing a video game where your teammates suck, right? How am I supposed to win when my teammates are so bad and you were correct that you can't control the skill of your teammates. But if you believe that you can't win, and this is like very well known, right, so you can take any advice for climbing rank in any video game. And it's like focus on what you can control and then you will climb. The more responsibility that you take for the game, the less you blame your teammates and the more that you focus on improving your own game, you will climb. This literally is what's separated

people who are platinum from bronze, right? High rank from low rank. And this is also what separates amazing athletes from mediocre athletes or washout athletes. This is what separates people who have control of their life. They are deluding themselves into believing that they have control. But that belief in agency shifts the way that your mind thinks. It looks for things that you can do

instead of spending cognitive energy on all of the things that you, you can't do. And this is something that I can absolutely attest to. Once you start taking responsibility for as many things in life as you can, that responsibility comes with some degree of power, right? It gives you a road forward. So I'll just share one last example with y'all. So I recently was trying to help someone find a job as a programmer. And the person came to me and they said, the programming market is terrible right now. And this is true, right? Programming, we have the highest level of unemployment of CS grads that we've ever had in the United States. All of the big tech companies are laying off thousands of people. People are starting to use AI to code instead of programmers. There's

no question that the state of the world is bad. So this person was saying it's hard to find a job. Can you help? And I said, sure, maybe I can pass your resume around. But then I noticed something kind of interesting. So I asked, you know, I asked around and stuff. And then I noticed that this person had a lot of problems on their resume and on their portfolio. That even though the world is a bad place, there were a lot of things that they can improve. And this is the key thing to understand, right? If you were looking out at the world and you were saying, oh, my God, things are so hard right now, that is a separate question from can you do anything? Sure, the amount of things that you could do could be lower. Sure, your chances of success could be lower, but is there anything

that you can do? And this is what separates top athletes from people like me and you. We focus on the 99 things that we're not able to do, and they focus on the one thing that they can do. Thanks for joining us today. We're here to help you understand your mind and live a better life. If you enjoy the conversation, be sure to subscribe. Until next time, take care of yourselves and other.