The Daily Stoic - BONUS | Seeking External Validation is RUINING Your Life - Dr. Rangan Chatterjee

Starting point is 00:00:00 Look, ads are annoying. They are to be avoided, if at all possible. I understand as a content creator why they need to exist. That's why I don't begrudge them when they appear on the shows that I listen to. But again, as a person who has to pay a podcast producer and has to pay for equipment and for the studio and the building that the studio is in, it's a lot to keep something like The Daily Stoic going. So if you want to support a show, but not listen to ads. Well, we have partnered with Supercast to bring you a ad-free version of Daily Stoic.

Starting point is 00:00:40 We're calling it Daily Stoic Premium. And with Premium, you can listen to every episode of the Daily Stoic podcast, completely ad-free. No interruptions, just the ideas, just the messages, just the conversations you came here for. And you can also get early access to episodes before they're available to the public. And we're going to have a bunch of exclusive

Starting point is 00:00:59 bonus content and extended interviews in there just for Daily Stoic Premium members as well. If you want to remove distractions, go deeper into Stoicism and support the work we do here. Well, it takes less than a minute to sign up for Daily Stoic Premium, and we are offering a limited time discount of 20% off your first year. Just go to dailystoic.com slash premium to sign up right now or click the link in the show of descriptions to make those ads go away. Welcome to the Daily Stoic Podcast, where each day we bring you a Stoic-inspired meditation designed to help you find strength and insight and wisdom into everyday life. Each one of these episodes is based on the 2,000-year-old philosophy that has guided some of

Starting point is 00:01:50 history's greatest men and women to help you learn from them, to follow in their example, and to start your day off with a little dose of courage and discipline and justice and wisdom. For more, visitdailystoic.com. world. I know full well that some people are literally choosing their guests based upon how they're going to perform on YouTube. And I try to not judge anymore. It's one thing that I've realized in my life. It doesn't help me, right? So I just observe. And I'm like, oh, that's interesting. Choosing guests like that is going to have a certain outcome. There's going to be a consequence. The question for that individual or those individuals is, am I happy with that

Starting point is 00:02:55 consequence. Am I happy with that outcome? And for me, I've realized, no, if I only choose based upon how it's going to perform, then I'm kind of losing my soul along the way. And I'm, you know, I was with a mutual friend of ours ritual last week. We were chatting about the same thing about how do we go about choosing the guests who we want to speak to? And this actually, it's not just for people who've got big audiences, right? We all have a circle of influence in our lives. It's how you, interact in everyday life? How do you make choices? You know, in my previous book, I had this framework for happiness and I said there's three ingredients to happiness. Alignment, contentment and control. Each one of those is not enough in isolation. They're all important and you need

Starting point is 00:03:45 balance between those three. And I think what we're talking about speaks to that alignment piece, right, which is when I say alignment, I mean when the person who you really are on the inside and the person who you are being on the outside of one and the same. So when your inner values and your external actions start to match up more and more, I think at any point in our life, when we start to create a void there and a gap between who we are and who we are being in the world, that will come to bite you at some point. I really, I really believe in that void that we create, there's a fracture internally. And I believe, having been a doctor for 23 years, said a lot of the problems that we see to do with, let's say, our lifestyle and

Starting point is 00:04:30 the habits that we're trying to change, I actually think that if you go to the root cause, when that's that internal fracture in who you are, you will put in things like sugar and alcohol and online scrolling for three hours or pornography, whatever it is. It's there in the cracks. To feel that hole. Yeah, in my first book, I was, I riffed a little bit on this word disintegrated. So when you hear the word disintegrated English, you think it means like coming apart, right? Like it disintegrated upon entering the earth's atmosphere. Yeah. But like if you think about it more as disintegrated, like not integrated, I find that's the state that a lot of people exist in. So you have different parts of yourself and they're not integrated with each other. So you

Starting point is 00:05:20 might have a set of values, like this is how I was in my 20s, you have a set of values, you have what you think is important, who you want to be, and then you have your job, which is maybe in an industry, or it's being done in a way, or it's forcing you to perform in a way that is not, those things are not integrated, right? The other word for this is compartmentalization, but you can't really compartmentalize, right? You just have these different things, and eventually they kind of, they find some way to conflict or you have to find some way to reconcile them. And so I think a lot of people, that particularly in something like sort of the internet ecosystem where where you're like

Starting point is 00:05:59 if I have this person on, it will get a lot of engagement. It might not be true. It might be bad for the world. They might be a crazy person who's spreading a harmful message, but I have to get a certain. So I think you see that. And then what happens is those people tend to spiral because they have that person on. They engage with this sort of energy. and it does so well that it becomes harder and harder for them not to do more and more of that

Starting point is 00:06:25 and then you kind of watch that person almost get radicalized by the people they bring in and we see it and so you know I used to be driven a lot by external validation as a kid as a teenager in my 20s and over the last five or 10 years I've really changed that by intentionally you know doing daily practices to change how I show up in the world to change how I see myself to change my external actions. And I kind of feel that a lot of us, because we have this reliance, this over-reliance on being liked by other people, we start to change who we are in order to be accepted by others. But that's very, very dangerous because, and I think the online world magnifies this to a great degree, you can change who you are and get validation. So then you

Starting point is 00:07:16 start performing in life rather than living or things. authentically, you perform and you get rewarded for that performance. So you keep doing that. But again, you're creating this internal void. And I think it's better, the truth is it's better to be yourself and not be liked by some people, but be authentic to yourself in the long term and frankly, in the short term, you're going to feel better. You're going to find there's a contentment, there's a peace. And in terms of like this idea of making changes that actually last, I think it's going to be much more likely when you're actually becoming much more aligns with who you are. I mean, the thing about this with this idea of virtue, like, we tend to think of virtue or who we are as this thing, this like, I'm a good person, I'm generous person, I'm, you know, I'm whatever. We think it's this thing that we are as opposed to this thing that we do. Exactly. Right. And Aristotle was very clear that virtue was an action, not like a state of being, that it's a it's a verb and not a noun. I love it. And I so,

Starting point is 00:08:25 so people will say, well, I'm a good person, but you know, this is what I do professionally or this is what I believe, but I'm going to engage with or interact or platform, all these things that I don't really believe. That's not how it works. As you're trafficking in this stuff, as you're engaging it, as you're doing this thing because it's what the algorithm wants or what you think your boss wants or just how this industry operates, you are becoming that thing. And you're becoming not the thing that you see yourself as or believe that you are because you're not doing that thing. And so the idea is like if you want to be something, if you want to see yourself a certain way, it has to be rooted in the actions that you take the day to day. Which the good news is it means you can change positively also.

Starting point is 00:09:09 You can just start doing that thing. It's like not faking it to you make it. It's bringing it into being by doing it. Hey, it's Ryan. Thank you for listening to The Daily Stoag podcast. I just wanted to say we so appreciate it. We love serving you. It's amazing to us that over 30 million people have downloaded these episodes in the couple of years we've been doing it. It's an honor. Please spread the word, tell people about it, and this isn't to sell anything. I just wanted to say thank you. I don't know.

The Daily Stoic - BONUS | Seeking External Validation is RUINING Your Life - Dr. Rangan Chatterjee

There aren't comments yet for this episode. Click on any sentence in the transcript to leave a comment.