HealthyGamerGG - How To Be Awesome At Anything

Episode Date: November 1, 2023

💡 In this episode Dr. K discusses the common pitfalls of trying to become awesome at anything. Learn the key to making progress towards your goals and the things to avoid along the way. 🧠 Learn more from Dr. K in his guide to Mental Health: https://bit.ly/3QGfZEb Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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Because you're not awesome right this second. So you're going to go do your research and you're going to go do things like Discover Malcolm Gladwell's 10,000 hour rule, where if you put in 10,000 hours, you will be an expert at something. We go looking for research and all these kinds of optimization techniques. But the problem is that you can sort of learn that 10,000 hours is what it takes. to become an expert, but then you don't end up putting in the 10,000 hours. Or what we'll do is we'll learn about all this pop science and we'll learn about biohacking. I'm going to hack my biology, hack my brain, brain hacking, neurotropic. I'm going to take this supplement.

If I take this pill, 5995, by the way, once every month subscription, you can take this pill. It will make you biohacked. And once you are biohacked, everything will be easy and you will be all of your successes. They'll just buy the pill, okay? Please, thank you. This is the kind of crap that we do, right? We go looking for ways to become awesome at stuff. As shocking as this is, it's not like you take the supplement for a month and suddenly your life has been revolutionized and you're a different human being.

Unless it's something like cocaine or meth or something like that. And then people can really change. Okay. Don't take cocaine or meth. So today I'm going to share with you all my experience, not only from my personal life, but what I've seen as a psychiatrist, where I've worked with a lot of people who have a lot of potential. So these can even be people like 35-year-olds who will say, hey, I'm 35, I haven't accomplished anything in life. Is it too late for me to start? Or even people who are very successful and are accomplished investment bankers or doctors

and are struggling because there's just one part of their life, which they continue to suck in. And as I've worked with these people, I've sort of discovered that there's this XPD buff that they all carry with them. That there's something going on within you that even though you try to make progress, and you do everything that you're supposed to do or start to do everything that you're supposed to do, something gets in the way and all of your efforts get washed away, that you struggle with follow-through and you have nothing to show for it at the end of the day.

And so today we're going to talk about how to cleanse that XPD buff, to understand that even if you're 35 and you have sort of stalled in life, you can absolutely catch up and you can absolutely take on whatever you want to do. Even if you're 30 and you've never been on a date in your life, You can actually fix that. You can progress in a very meaningful way because of all that stuff like the 10,000 hour rule. The problem, though, is that it's hard to engage in the 10,000 hour rule. It's hard to follow through.

And this is the tricky thing. Anytime we try to apply the sage advice of the internet, there's something that is lost in translation. Because people out there, it seems to be working for them. And everyone's talking about how I did this. And then there's a lot of people who are talking about dropshy, and side hustles and like, I'm a side hustle here, I'm a side hustle there, I'm a side hustle off my side hustle. I'm going to side hustle my way all the way around the planet. I have a ring of side hustles.

We're going to do the great wall of side hustles and then I'm going to hustle my way into a circle or some shit like that. And then like you try to do that, right? Because everyone's like, oh yeah, this is going to work, man. It's going to work. And like, it doesn't work. Because something's missing. And that's what we're going to talk about today. So working as a psychiatrist.

I've learned that what's missing is actually internal. that even though you can have the right answer out there, there are some critical pitfalls within you that make it difficult or even impossible to apply the right learnings. The first of these pitfalls is the desire to become the best. And this is kind of interesting because isn't the whole point, isn't all, don't all these people say,

like, if you want to be the best, you've got to do this and you got to put in more time than everyone else. That's what everyone's saying. And so, like, you want to be the best, right? It turns out that wanting to be the best is stupid. So the first thing to understand is that you can't, be the best. The best is an abstraction of the mind. In nature, there's no such thing as the best. And if we really look at it, like, what does the best even mean? Does the best mean, like,

in this group of people that you know? Does it mean in the history of humanity? Does it mean the people that you kind of see on social media? Like, how do you even measure the best? It's all a sort of psychological construction. And it turns out that being the best actually is rooted in insecurity. So this is something that I'll kind of share with you all. So when I was failing out of college, right? So I'd gotten a bunch of Fs my first year. When I started my second year, I didn't think to myself, okay, the goal this year is to not fail every class. The goal was to get straight A's, right? Because the moment that we fail, we have to overcompensate in order to balance our failure. So if I got straight Fs, I need a 4.0. I need straight A's in order to have any chance of recovery.

I need to go from the worst student to the best student, because that's the only. way I can fix the problems of the past. But now I've actually set myself up for failure. Because if I got straight F's, I'm not going to get straight A's, right? And even if I get a B, what do you think that's going to do to my motivation? I started this year and I'm going to, I'm going to be the best. Right? Like, let's go, son. And then I get a single B and then what happens? Well, screw it. I got a single B. Now I can't be the best. And so you give it complete passion and hard work ethic for one month and you get a single B or any other result. Yeah, I'm going to learn how to pick up women. I'm going to learn how to be the best girlfriend. I'm going to be the best boyfriend.

And then the moment that someone rejects me even a little bit, I'm like, well, screw that. I'm not the best anymore. So the crazy thing about being the best is that it actually sabotages your motivation. It actually pushes you to give up because unless you hit your target, which is going to be really hard if you're starting from straight F's, you're actually shooting yourself in the foot, and it's not going to work. So the first thing that you've got to do is abandon being the best, because being the best is actually rooted in insecurity. Your attempt to be the best is your attempt to actually fix the shame that you feel.

And it turns out that if we metabolize that shame, if we kind of acknowledge that, hey, like, I screwed up, let's focus on doing better. That's the right attitude to actually end up as awesome. And this is from someone who failed out of college and then wound up at the top of my med school cohort and I like won a couple of awards in med school, right? And the main thing is that I stopped trying to be the best. I just focused on learning the material. So when you are trying to get awesome at something and when you want to get really good, notice that thought of I want to be the best. And the more that you notice that thought, don't actually lean into it.

Take a step back from it. Don't do anything. Don't start out doing anything to be the best, despite what all the internet gurus tell you. as an internet guru and I recognize that's a little bit hypocritical, okay? So take what I say with a grain of salt too. The reason that people struggle with follow through and really give up and can't really become awesome is because they have the wrong reasons. Now this may sound kind of confusing because it isn't this like, oh my God, like I'm entitled to my reasons,

I'm allowed to want what I want. No. I mean, sure, you can want all that crap, but if you want to be good at something, you have to have scientifically the right reason. And we know from a ton of research that certain reasons lead to consistent positive. positive behavior. Now this starts with sort of a problem with the word reason, okay? Because reason is not one thing. It's not a reason. Reasons actually your discrete things in your brain. So the first kind of reason is a desire. So a desire is an impulse that you want to satisfy. Okay? So desires are born of the sensory organs. If you want to play a particular video game, where did the desire to play that video game come from? It came from seeing an advertisement or watching someone else play it. If you desire a hamburger because you're walking down the street and you smell a hamburger, that's where the desire for a

hamburger comes from. So desires come from the senses. Okay, that's the first thing. The second thing is that desires are kind of like a lose-lose situation. Because if you do something and you satisfy the desire, if the desire is the driving force and you satisfy the desire, then the motivation is going to disappear because you're done, you're done, right? So I really want to eat a hamburger. I eat a hamburger. And then I don't want to eat any more hamburgers. I'm full like I'm done with the hamburger. Now the smell of a hamburger is actually a little bit disgusting. So that's the, that's what we've got to be super careful about is that desires are actually like even as we fulfill them, which means as we make progress, our motivation actually decays and we end up not becoming awesome because we kind of give up

because we're sort of done, right? So good examples of this are like, I'm going to learn how to play an instrument. I'm going to learn it's too hard. That's the other thing is that if a desire does not get satisfied in a certain amount of time, there's a part of your brain that calculates whether something is worth the effort. And if the desire isn't satisfied, your brain will tell you to give up. Because your brain sort of has this expected value of what we're going to get. And it sort of has this idea of effort. And if the effort is not worth the value, it'll actually like cancel your motivation.

It'll be like, yeah, this is not worth it, right? So if I buy a guitar and it's like, yeah, I saw someone else being such a mega-chad playing guitar. Oh my God, they were so amazing. Everyone loved them so much. I'm going to learn how to do that. And you pick up the guitar and you're like, this hurts my fingers. Oh my God. It hurts my fingers. And then your brain is like, this is not worth it.

So whether you satisfy it, it's going to be gone. Or if you don't satisfy it and it's too hard, it's going to be gone. So either way, we don't want to use desire as a reason. Second reason that is bad is actually not a reason at all. It's emotion. So if we are driven towards a behavior due to an emotion, like let's say that I am lonely and I use that loneliness as fuel to connect with other people. That is not going to be a sustainable way to do things. Because as I'm lonely, a couple of things will happen. The first is that I may run into other negative emotions. And then it becomes a battle of emotions. So then like, I'm lonely, so let me leave the house.

And then, uh-oh, here's social anxiety. You forgot about me because you were all alone in your house. But here I am, now that we're interacting with other people, I'm going to tell you you're doing a terrible job and make you feel bad about yourself. And then what happens is since you gave into the emotion, as your motivation, you are vulnerable to other kinds of emotions taking away that motivation. The other really interesting thing, if we just look at the brain and also the yogis kind of figured this out, is that emotions fluctuate, right? Like, this is what's kind of interesting,

but, you know, if you had an awesome 13th birthday party, it's not like you're happy for the rest of your life. And the good news is if you, if someone dumps you and you feel heartbroken, there's a good chance that you won't be heartbroken for the rest of your life, right? emotions actually fluctuate and they come and go. And there's a part of our brain called the limbic system, which actually tries to equilibrate emotion. So there's this principle of homeostasis, where, you know, as we feel a ton of emotion,

our brain will actually start turning on circuits to tone down the emotion. And this is why, like, when you get angry, right, you get really, really angry at the beginning, and then slowly over time, the anger kind of decreases. So we don't want to use emotion as a reason to actually get good at something. because the emotion will actually disappear over time. So now we get to what is a good reason. And what we really want to focus on is values.

So values are things that you care about. They're not desires. They're not things that you want. They're things that you care about. And they're not emotions. There are things that you as a human being say, this is important to me. And there's one really interesting scientific difference with values.

Is that when we start operating in relation to our values, we can tolerate negativity. So working as an addiction psychiatrist when I sort of like try to get people to quit stuff, right? Like, let's say heroin. And heroin withdrawal is like bad, man. Hopefully you've never experienced it. But you actually want to die. Like most, a very common experience that I've had with most of my patients is that they become suicidal

when they're going through heroin withdrawal. They're like, I would rather be dead than go through this. You've got diarrhea. Every part of you aches and hurts because your pain sensors have been so numbed by heroin that when the heroin goes away, they go through withdrawal. And withdrawal for a pain sensor means inflicting physical pain on you. So you just feel a ton of pain. You feel terrible.

Your nose is running. It's all kinds of just mess, right? And so if you sort of think about how does a human being get through that? How does a human being stick with it? They have to have something that they care about enough to tolerate that negativity. So if you want to get good at something, instead of just getting excited because you saw someone else do it, or instead of just doing it because you feel like doing it, the first thing you're, should do is really ask yourself what about this is important to me and spend some time actually

introspecting or even write it out. And there are a couple of really interesting ways that you can apply it. So start with introspection. And the second thing that I want you all to do is when you start doing the task, there are going to be times where you don't want to do it. And then ask yourself two questions. This episode is brought to you by Redfin. You're listening to a podcast, which means you're probably multitasking. Maybe even scrolling home listings on Redfin, saving homes without expecting to get them. But Redfin isn't just built for endless browsing. It's built to help you find and own a home. With agents who close twice as many deals, when you find the one, you've got a real shot at getting it. Get started at redfin.com. Own the dream.

Question number one is what is more important to me right now? Is it more important to actually go out and try to make friends because this is what I care about? Or is it more important to me to give into the social anxiety and not put myself through the discomfort. And the second thing that you can ask yourself is tomorrow, which choice will lead to pride and which choice will lead to regret? And really stop and ask yourself, take a deep breath and ask yourself, which of these will lead to pride and which of these will lead to regret? And then give yourself the option to say, okay, you know what?

I want to be proud of myself tomorrow. That's important to me. Making progress is important to me. And as you actually move in that direction, you'll discover that leaning towards your values allows you to actually make consistent progress towards something. The next thing that I want y'all to do is to use your infantile and pathetic knowledge that you've gained from a tiny amount of progress as soon as possible. So if we look at why do we not continue to progress towards things? One of the main reasons is because this idea of delayed

gratification. So some human beings are born with high conscientiousness, which means that they can delay gratification for a long period of time, and then they can continue to invest effort. But if you're like me and if you're like most human beings, you need to see some kind of return in order to continue being motivated and progressing towards a goal. Now the problem is that when we're learning something for the first time, we don't feel confident in sharing it or using it. And so as a result, if you kind of stop and think about it, what does that do? Right? So I'm investing, let's say a year of my life learning this particular degree, right? So I'm, let's say I want to become an electrical engineer. And I spent one year of my life learning this stuff, but I don't use

it. So all my brain sees in that moment is the cost of one year of suffering with no gain. And then year two rolls around. And now you spent two years learning this crap, but you still don't see any benefit from it. Three years go by. And at this point, you're burnt out because you've pushed yourself. You've exhausted your reserves of willpower and you still haven't seen anything for it. And now you start to do worse. You have less energy. You're getting C's. You're skipping class.

You can't focus, right? And so things start to fall apart. And this has been my experience with so many of my patients, which is that things start to fall apart. So how can you prevent that? Use your infantile and pathetic knowledge as quickly as humanly possible. Okay. So what does that mean? That means that even as a first year, as you go into your second year, start to

tutoring first years, right? Because you've actually learned something. Even though you're only 25% into your four-year degree, you've actually made 25% of the progress. You're 25% of the way done. That's really awesome. The problem is that the way that we structure progress, we don't actually try to apply our learnings very early on, right? We think that I have to be at the end of something. I've got to be perfect. I got to be the best. And then I can unleash myself upon the world. And I would be so amazing. Oh, my God. Then everyone will love me. And if I were to start to share what I've learned or try to teach people or try to apply it in some way, then it's going to be embarrassing.

And I won't be the best. So I can't do that. But we really shoot ourselves in the foot by sort of adopting this approach. Because when we do this, we actually don't open ourselves up to the chance for behavioral reinforcement to kick in. Anything that you want to learn how to do, try to get some advantage out of it as quickly as possible. So if you're learning how to play a musical instrument, try to play it in front of someone else, even if it kind of sounds pathetic. But you can work on some of it, right? You can play like 30 seconds decently and it sounds like a song.

Just go to someone and say, hey, can you guess what this song is and play 30 seconds of it? They know you're new. You know you're new. You don't have to be the best. No one's expecting you to be perfect. And yet we feel so embarrassed that we don't give ourselves the opportunity for positive reinforcement. And then we wonder why we give up. why we don't follow through.

The last thing that I'm going to tell you about is a very, very subtle but important pitfall. So if you want to get awesome at anything in your life, it's going to take effort. It's going to take work. And Malcolm Gladwell wasn't wrong that it sort of takes 10,000 hours to become an expert. Fine.

But that's not actually the problem, right? The problem is that we can take this abstract concept of this will make me awesome. But when we download that concept into a human being, we open ourselves up to all of the flaws of a human being. And in my work as a psychiatrist, the most wasted potential I've seen

because you know you're capable is when we let this human element get in the way. Whether this is working with a professional e-sports athlete or it's working with someone who's a doctor or it's working with someone who's 40 years old and hasn't really done anything in life. It's all the same. At the end of the day, all of these people,

whether a doctor, engineer, painter, you are a part of your equation for success. Your life, you can learn as much stuff as you want to. You can read as many books and you can figure out as many productivity tips and you can take as many supplements as you want to. But at the end of the day, you are a part of the equation. And the number one thing that holds you back from being awesome is actually yourself. So look for these pitfalls, avoid them at all costs, recognize them, sort of dig into yourself and you will be awesome at anything you want to in a very short amount of time. So there are oftentimes formulas. and write answers to being awesome, right?

Something like the 10,000 hour rule, where even if you look at residency training, it's about 10,000 hours. That's how long it takes to become a psychiatrist. So there's a lot of value to these rules, and even you can take things like supplements or you can meditate or whatever. Everyone has these formulas for being awesome kind of figured out.

The problem, though, is that if the formula works, why isn't everyone awesome? And that's because as you translate the formula into a human being, the human element, And so the crazy thing is really the most important thing that is keeping you from being awesome is yourself. And so the better you understand these pitfalls, the more that you learn to maneuver around them, the more awesome you'll get.