HealthyGamerGG - What High Performers Do That You Don't

Episode Date: April 21, 2024

In this video, we dive into the reasons why some people are high performers and how those lessons can help you in today's world. Check out Dr. K's Guide To Mental Health: https://bit.ly/3xsk6fE Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Today, we're going to talk about what separates the top 10% of performers from the bottom 75%. So, I know when we look at a lot of successful people, we'll be like, oh, my God, like all these, like, successful CEOs and stuff, like these people who are in finance, they're like, they're a little bit sociopathic, they're a little bit narcissistic, they're self-centered, right? Well, actually, yeah, they are. And that is a huge part of their success. So as a psychiatrist, I've worked with all kinds of people. So I was in Boston for about 10 years where I worked with people who were from like the MIT and Harvard incubators.

So these are startups that have CEOs that have these very, very bright ideas and are building these $100 million, $300 million companies. I've also worked with a lot of high performers from the fields of medicine. So people like surgeons, as well as people from finance like Golden Sacks and stuff like that. And then I've also worked with a lot of degenerate gamers. I've worked with homeless people. I've worked with people from jail. I've worked with people who are addicts, right? so people who are like 32 years old, addicted to heroin, and I have nothing to show for it.

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And what I'd love to share with you all today is what's separate. these two groups of people. And I'm going to do it in a very specific way. So the problem is that most of the time when we look at successful people, we'll say things like, oh, this person is disciplined or this person is good at resource management. But the problem is that when we look at someone who's successful, we don't know exactly how to do that. Right. I can tell that I suck at managing my resources, and I can tell that they're good at managing their resources, but I don't know how to actually get better. So a good analogy of this is like if you look at a gardener who has a really great garden. You're like, that person has a green thumb. Noting that that person has a green

thumb doesn't actually make you any better at gardening. When we use these terms like discipline or green thumb, or we say, wow, that dancer is so graceful. Looking at someone and saying that they're graceful doesn't teach you how to be graceful. You don't know what they're actually doing that looks like grace when they move. Right? There's a specific set of actions that they take that look very impressive. Oh, this is a green thumb, but you don't know actually what the gardener is doing. Today, that's what I'm going to teach you. I'm going to teach all three specific cognitive things that I see in the majority of the high performers that I work with. And as it turns out, these actually have to do with narcissism, sociopathy, and neuroticism. So we tend to think about

these three things as bad, right? But let's remember that sociopathy, narcissism, and neuroticism are features of the human race. We all have. have these to some extent. When we look at something like narcissistic personality disorder or antisocial personality disorder, which is what we call sociopathy, these are when these features of us are so extreme that they start to become problematic. But y'all may have observed that people who are quite successful are a little bit more of an asshole than you are.

And there's a good reason for that. And we're going to actually teach you how to be that in a good impot. positive way. So the first thing that we're going to start with is sociopathy. So one of the really interesting things is if you look at psychiatrists and surgeons, we test higher on the sociopathy scale than the average population. So let's understand a little bit about what sociopathy means. It doesn't mean that we're evil, right? So there's a lot of features to it. What sociopathy means is that we have the ability to restrain our empathy. We don't get bogged down. So when I'm a psychiatrist and I have fucking depressed people walking into my office every single day and I spend eight hours a day

listening to their problems, I must put up some kind of empathic shielding in order to not get bogged down by this. And this manifests in people who are very successful in a very specific way. They're very good at not getting suckered into short-term compassion and instead leaning into long-term compassion. So I'll give you all an example of two people. people in my practice. So two of them had a very similar situation. When they turned around 17 or 18, something happened in their family. One parent basically left the household. They had two younger siblings each. It's crazy how similar to these two cases are. One person leaned into short-term compassion, made the sacrifice for their family and was like, you know what? The right thing to do is to not go to

college and help raise my two siblings because my remaining parent can't do it all by themselves. The only choice that I have is to do the right thing. So this person didn't go to college, got kind of stuck in a menial labor job, and then 10 years later, like, even their siblings were not doing great because now you have this culture in the household of like not achievement but survival and all this kind of stuff, a lot of struggles later on. In the alternate case, we have someone who decided that, you know, like, yeah, it sucks that this is happening, but what I really need to do is like if I really want to provide for my family,

I need to leave them behind. I need to go to college. They worked incredibly hard in college, got an amazing job. So this person grew up incredibly poor and then, you know, got an awesome job and is now making literally millions of dollars a year, about 10 years later. And the other super cool thing is that this person now serves as a positive role model for their younger siblings. So their younger siblings are now crushing it because six years after they went to college, they're making $250,000 a year, which helps their family way more than making $35,000 a year working a menial labor job for a couple of years. So was it hard on their family for those few years that they were at college? Absolutely. But the key thing that I see about people who are very successful is that they

do not sandbag themselves through compassion. And so practically what I want you to do is look at your life, right? So what is the price of short-term compassion? What are the sacrifices that you make in your life in order to be kind and generous and supportive to the people around you? Because what I find in a lot of people who are in the bottom half of success and performance in an objective sense, I'm not saying that they're bad people. I don't think anyone's a bad person. I mean, there are some people, but not the majority. What I tend to see is some people get suckered into short-term compassion, get guilt-tripped into crap and then end up shooting themselves in the foot. They sacrifice so much. And then a year later, they don't have anything to show for it. But the people in their lives benefit from their

sacrifice. So you need to be a little bit more sociopathic. Be a little bit more focused on yourself. Don't sort of get suckered into that short-term compassion. This episode is brought to you by CarMax. Want to buy a car the easy way? Start at CarMax. Want to browse with confidence? Get pre-qualified with no impact on your credit score and shop within your budget. From luxury to family rides, CarMax has options for almost every price range, including over 25,000 cars under $25,000. Want to get started?

Head to CarMax.com for details and get pre-qualified today. Want to drive? CarMax. The second thing that we're going to talk about is narcissism. And this manifests in their mind in a very specific way. not just be a bigger asshole and just care more about yourself. No, no, no. So what I sort of see is a feature of narcissism is the people that I work with that are incredibly successful are very skilled at saying no. Now, pay attention to my words. Skilled at saying no doesn't mean that they say no more or that they say no less. What that means is that their proficiency with the concept of no is very high.

So what they know is when to say no and when not to say no. So what this looks like practically is that, you know, they're able to say no to their friends and even their boss or their colleagues when you need a little bit of help with this, a little bit of help with this, a little bit of help with this. If you have difficulty saying no, people around you will figure that out. And as they figure that out, they will lean on you for a lot of help and support and things like that. And especially if you have low self-esteem, this can be incredibly crippling.

because if you have low self-esteem, where does your self-esteem come from? It comes from other people being so grateful that you're helping them out. And then you kind of puff up your self-esteem because now you've loaned this person another $100, right? Because it makes you a good person, makes you a good friend. Oh my God, like this person, I'm paying their rent. It makes me such a good person. And then over time, what ends up happening?

You're sandbagging yourself because you're not investing in yourself. So you have to get better at saying no. And here's what I've noticed, a simple trend, right? So we're going to try to make this applicable. No green thumbs here. We're going to tunnel down. If there are opportunities which will benefit you in the future, say yes. If you are saying yes to maintain what you have here today, be super careful about that.

So what I found with my patients who are very high performers is that they are more likely to help someone new than help someone in their life for the fourth or fifth time. If this person asks for my help four times, five times, two or three times, sure. But if they keep on asking for my help, I'm going to say no. And I'm going to give my help to someone else. What this means is very practically, my boss needs me to work an extra weekend. I'm going to say no. But there's someone else at a different company or someone, one of my friends who's starting this project and there's some kind of consulting gig, I will say yes.

So it's not that you shouldn't work hard at your job or anything like that. I'm not saying bosses are evil. And there are many people who will learn how to say yes for their bosses because their bosses invested in them. They're nice people. You're going to learn something. You're going to grow as a result. but they're really skilled at saying no.

And the biggest difference that I see is that more successful people say yes to newer and newer opportunities and newer and newer people as opposed to the same people over and over and over again, right? Onward and upward and be helpful all along the way. The third thing that we're going to talk about is neuroticism. So this is where if I look at the people who are quite successful, they use sort of this B-tier coping mechanism technique. So if you look at the psychology or the psychiatry of coping mechanisms and outcomes from coping mechanisms,

there are basically three tiers of coping mechanisms. You have the top tier of coping mechanisms like cognitive reframing. You have the second tier of coping mechanisms, which are action-oriented. I know it's kind of weird that action-oriented is a middle tier. We'll explain why. And then at the bottom, you have something called emotion-focused coping. So when I work with people who are high performers, what I notice is that they utilize that middle tier, and I'll explain what that is.

So when they are unhappy, when they have some kind of negative experience inside them, the way that they fix that experience is by fixing the environment. Okay. So for example, if my boss is unhappy with me, what I'm going to do is work incredibly hard to make my boss happy with me. If I get a bad performance review, I'm going to work as hard as I need to to get a good performance review. If my boyfriend or girlfriend is unhappy with me, I'm going to work extra hard to make them happy. If my parents are unhappy with me, I'm going to work extra hard to make them happy. So what they literally do is they look at, even though we'll use a different kind of example. Let's say I look at myself in the mirror and I am ashamed of myself.

The way to fix that shame is to go to the gym. This sounds very reasonable, right? Why is this the middle tier? What the fuck? Like, I want to be able to do that. We'll get to that second. So what these people end up doing is trading. suffering for success. Because when you start to use this kind of coping mechanism, there's no

internal contentment. See, this is a very important understand. This means that in order to fix my internal feelings, I need to shape the outside environment. So if my boss doesn't like my work, I need to work extra hard. Now this is a little bit tricky because what if your boss is a narcissistic asshole? What if your boss is overly demanding? What if your boss lacks compassion? That means that your boss will never be happy with you no matter how hard you work. And so what this creates is a really interesting situation because really pay attention to this. On the one hand, it means your boss is never happy and you're always suffering. But what it also means is that you're working your ass off constantly, which helps you rise over time. So this is what we kind of call toxic fuel. And if we look

at people like studies on medical students, what we find is that medical students have some of the highest neuroticism, which means neuroticism is a tendency for internal worry. Medical students have no chill. And what that does is that have no chill, that panic makes them study on a Friday night in the library instead of going out to party. Because everyone else, normal people are like, I studied all week, now I can have fun. The fucking medical student is like, it's never enough. I could fail. Oh my God. What if I failed? Then I won't get into med school and I won't do this and I won't do this and I won't do this and all of my life will fall apart. So it's very interesting, and this is what's kind of weird, is it's very adaptive in the short term. So when these people work

with me, I try to help them get out of that tier because as long as you are shaping your external environment to make you feel better, that also opens you up to other kinds of things. So for example, it's very healthy to look at yourself in the mirror and say, you know what, I'm unhappy with the way that I look, let me go to the gym. But some people, when they look in the mirror and they've gone the gym, they're still not happy with the way that they look. So they need to do something more. Oh, let me get some fillers. Let me get a little chin tuck. Let me get some Botox. Let me get a little bit of plastic surgery. Let me get some lip filler. Right, because that feeling, no matter how much you try to fix it on the outside, no matter how much I try to make my girlfriend love me more, make my boss

happier with who I am, make myself confident with who I am in the mirror by shaping my body. that can get out of control very, very quickly. So while it results in success, it costs suffering. At the end of the day, though, this is what I see in the top 10% of people that I work with. They are a little bit more sociopathic. They are a little bit more narcissistic. And they are a little bit more neurotic. And if you're someone who's in that bottom 50% or you're not happy with what you're doing

in your life, I would encourage you to do these three things. Ask yourself, am I a victim to? short-term compassion. Do I actually sabotage not only my own life, but the capacity to help other people by sort of sacrificing in the present day? And if the answer to that question is yes, you need to cut back on that, right? Really be a little bit more calculated. And speaking of being calculated, be a little bit better at saying no. When is the right time to say no and when is the wrong time to say no? If I say yes to this person, will I need to say yes tomorrow? Will I need to say yes the day after that and the week after that because if so this person is going to be

a sandbag for you and it's not that I'm saying don't help those kinds of people but just recognize what that will do to your life it'll move you out of the top 10% to the 20% 30% 40% and the more of those people you have in your life the more you're going to sink and the last thing is if you want to start to use some of that toxic fuel right so if you have some negative emotions and this is something I should have kept in mind so the bottom 50% of people use something called emotion-focused coping. And so what that means is when I feel bad in here, I'm just going to fix the emotion. I'm not going to do anything in my outside life. What I'm going to do is numb it, usually, video gains, substances, things like that, or even things like

venting. So what I'm going to do is I'm going to go to my friends and I'm going to bitch about my problems and I'm going to feel better, but my life will actually not be better tomorrow. So don't use emotion-focused coping. It's better to use action-oriented coping. And then one day we'll talk about cognitive reframing, which is a topic for a different day, because what we're focused on right now is how you get your ass from the bottom 75 to the top 10. Ambition comes in all shapes and sizes. At First Citizens Bank, we're fit for your ambitions, whatever shape they may take. Whether you're planning for today or tomorrow, we've got the flexibility and know-how to help you reach your goals because we're built for what you're building.

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