This document is my notes on this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MId2AotFA4A. If you’re interested, feel free to watch the video instead of reading my interpretation of it because this is documenting a conversation and there’s a lot of emotion/nuance communicated via the video that’s hard to get across in these text-based notes.
This is a call between Dr. K and a guy name Nithin.
Intro to Nithin’s situation:
- Nithin tries to achieve his goals, but every time he tries he can do it for a few weeks and then stops because he gets paralyzed
- He finds generally more success if he tells other people about his goals/gets external validation, but if he doesn’t get any external validation he stops within a few days
- He had a sad incident where he was in a robotics team with his friends but then they all of a sudden started a new team without him and he felt guilty but he didn’t know what he did wrong
Why Does Nithin Want These Things So Bad?
- In particular why is he so anxious about meeting his goals of playing the piano and exercising?
- Dr. K - Imagine yourself after 3 years of playing the piano and going to the gym (i.e. achieving your goals), what is that person like? How does your mind view that person/how would it feel to be that person?
- Nithin clearly gets very happy and is smiling and is like wow I’d be confident and it feels so joyful (and a little embarrassing to be so vulnerable)
- Dr. K - And now how does it feel to not be that person?
- Feels bad, feels like he doesn’t fit anywhere
Digging into the Problem:
- Mind is the enemy, if you give it time to think it will paralyze itself
- Guilt is a strong motivator
- Nithin has decided he doesn’t like himself and so he needs to change. No more not getting invited to robotics team loser Nithin, now he wants to be chad ripped good at piano Nithin lol
- But now he’s noticed that loser Nithin’s mind isn’t useful, it gets in the way and stops him from making progress. So he found a way to trick it which is guilt (he felt so guilty when he got kicked out of robotics team, and told himself never again, so guilt is his best motivator)
- So now he creates artificial guilt by telling people about his goals (e.g. I’m going to the gym) so that he’ll feel guilty if he doesn’t do it which tricks his mind into getting him to the gym
- Your mind is a horse and your guilt is a whip saying “you better move”
- Creating a sabotaging but effective cycle
- Why it’s sabotaging gets explained at the end
- Weirdly enough, you don’t have to abandon that strategy immediately. It’s unhealthy long term, but every day you go to the gym is a win
- The long term strategy is to think about where these goals come from, and realizing that you don’t like who you are and you believe doing some external action will give you confidence/pride/esteem in yourself
- E.g. I don’t like myself, let me go get a fancy car and then the world will love me
- But why do you need the world to love you? You need the world to love you because you don’t love yourself
- So all of your goals are coming from a non genuine place, they’re coming from a hatred/dislike of yourself rather than a deep inspiration/passion
- Think about when you stopped being proud of yourself (Nithin says for him it was right after he stopped being a “gifted child” in high school)
- Think about what’s a single thing you can be proud of for yourself, not about impressing other people, do it for you
- Nithin says helping other people makes me happy, Dr. K responds you have to pay attention to whether you’re happy because of how they thanked you or because you made the world a better place? He says he’s happy he made the world a better place but still feels like shit
- Then a hypothetical, would he choose being chad ripped Nithin who can play the keyboard who has a great job his parents can brag about, or mediocre Nithin who parents say his job is okay but he gets to help make one person’s life better every day
- He says he’d choose chad Nithin
- Good exercise to play around with what he cares about/why
- Dr. K gives Nithin a task which is practice helping a person and then even if you feel like shit/no better of a person, accept yourself and how you are as okay
- As you learn to accept yourself as you are (not as who you will be when you achieve xyz), that’s what gives you confidence in yourself
- Chad Nithin will still be striving for xyz other goal, and he still won’t be happy with himself
- “You must forsake the path of the Chad to become the Chad” lol
- Nithin says this is gonna be really hard
- Dr. K says yes because you’ve always taken the easy way via guilt
- “Guilt hurts don’t get me wrong, but don’t tell me it isn’t easy. It’s so easy to go to the gym when you’ve told everyone you’re going”
After Call
- Negative emotions are bad but they are very powerful, so we trick ourselves into harnessing them
- And that’s not necessarily bad because it works in the short-term, but in the long-term you’re tying your success/motivation to suffering
- But there is another way which is self-acceptance/self-understanding, but we rarely bother to explore it because the negative emotions path works well enough