365: Hustle Culture, Burnout, and the Evolution of Self Esteem

High conscientious people are going to often going to see anybody south of them on that scale as being lazy or irresponsible. The question about all the burnout and the seeking all this kind of thing, you know, I can answer that that legitimate and carefully done surveys indicate that the more money people make the happier they are. So let's not be too quick to have a sort of quasi-socialistic attitude that the people that aren't working as hard and seem very comfortable and happy about it and move at a slower pace are happier. That's not actually what the evidence says. Highly conscientious individuals are looking to try to amass esteem and they're going to do so by trying to do a stellar job and they're going to be seeking for emergency situations where there's a high profit. Your effort is worth a lot more when the chips are down and somebody's in deep shit than when when everybody's fine. So burnout, you know, is a fancy name. It tells a little story what the word is. But what is it really? And what it really is, is it's two different types of exhaustion. We get a fractured village where the adjudication of someone's time and energy is having to be done internally to them. And it's going to be the often, the highly conscientious, competent and often agreeable person has basically overextended themselves very easily. Why? Because they are esteem seeking. I am on a personal crusade that's going to fail and I'm fine with it. And because I'm trying to make a point, it's going to change the way a few people think, but not many. All right, Dr. Lyle, how are you doing today? Good, good. All is well. How about yourself down there in LA? LA is going great. God, you know, it's not as hot, I'm sure. We would just weapon in Sacramento. It's visited you and Melissa. It was really, really nice and hot. I think dry heat though, right? Yes, you got it. Everybody I talk to in the Midwest is, you know, it's hot and sticky. We don't have to put up with that. So, you know, we're privileged. All right. Yeah, summer is on its way out. I think one more month and then we start with fall or autumn. But one thing that doesn't change is we get questions. And so now we've got a good website system where people are now been sending me their questions. So I really appreciate everybody sending me all these really well thought out questions. So I'm putting them on our queue and we get to them as we can. If you don't see your question or if you don't hear your questions out there for a while, it might be that we've answered it before, but I try to get them all in when we can and kind of clump them together if they're similar. So today we've got a couple of questions that are about self-esteem and then also one topic in the, you know, what we're going to talk about right now, which is, Dear Dr. Lyle is the attribution of laziness to others, a form of self-deception by people who are high in conscientiousness that they use to justify lowering our empathy to others. After all, no one chooses their personality. Some people are naturally less conscientious than others. Or does our nervous system just get irritated so that we signal our anger to lazy people in hopes that they change their cost-benefit analysis of their behavior? Sorry. That's a little complicated. I have to have a graph to actually figure out what exactly this person is asking. I think I know, I'll speak to the issues and hopefully I'm covering the question and you can check me on that. When a high conscientious people are going to often going to see anybody south of them on that scale as being lazy or irresponsible to varying degrees. So a 98 percentile conscientious person looks at a 75 percentile conscientious person and basically will say lazy and irresponsible. So if they're working with them in an interdependent fashion, they'll feel frustrated with a 75 percentile conscientious person for not pushing harder, getting things done better, triple checking on things and essentially quote letting the team down. So yes, the egocentric bias that's going to sit inside of an extremely conscientious individual is going to often be disgusted and irritated with those around them to varying degrees also depending upon obviously other features. How emotionally unstable is the highly conscientious person so they can get more upset and also how agreeable are they. So the more disagreeable, more unstable, we add that to very high conscientious and we get Steve Jobs screaming at everybody. So that's what that can look like. Now, the screaming that Steve Jobs is doing is because he's trying to alter the CB in the other people's heads about basically threatening them with consequences. If they don't shape up, in other words, a person's degree of conscientiousness and effort is highly context dependent. So if I have to get in something in by five o'clock otherwise at five oh one it's too late and I'm going to lose a thousand dollars on some penalty. Trust me, I'll get it done. I'll run red lights to get it done. In other words, I'm going to be running a CB on getting some place on time. If someone's chatting to me and it's like normally I'd let them chat me five minutes too long and then I'm going to be late for something but I can just deal with it. I'm not going to do that if I'm five minutes late and I'm going to cost me a thousand dollars on some penalty that I had to get mailed off. Getting my taxes mailed in on time so that I don't have to pay a penalty. So the amount of your conscientiousness and effort is variable depending upon context. And so one of the things that people do is they'll yell at people and snarl and threaten or otherwise try to influence them to alter the CB that will cause increased degrees of effort and conscientiousness obviously. Okay so I think that hopefully answers the question. In other words, a person's laziness is absolutely context dependent. It all depends upon what's the CB that's in front of them. And this is where we get you know the 21 year old college dropout that isn't getting off his ass. Why? Because he's an animal in a zoo in his mom's house. Mom's worried about him you know what I mean. But at the same time he gets to eat six cheese burgers a day. He's you know what's the problem as far as he's concerned. There's plenty of video games to play. In fact there isn't enough time to play all the video games that he wants to play. All right so the the the the amount of initiative that that a person's going to have is going to be both personality and context dependent, which is true of essentially just about everything in psychology is going to be an interaction between the personality and and the the environmental forces that are better at play. And that's going to be true here. Okay now I can imagine a person who's not as conscientious and they're getting you know signals of anger and they're getting yelled at and they're just clumsy. They can't quite fit the the the piece in the circuit board and you know at some point are there I mean I imagine there's going to be limitations at which point no no amount of anger will cause them to behave more conscientious. Is that am I thinking about that right? Yeah yeah that's that's a little different because that's not exactly conscientiousness but that that's literally performance capability and that's a different thing. Okay but it is also true that effectively no amount of yelling and threatening can actually get none of it's going to change anybody's personality. And so this is the Jim Rohn the great motivational speaker used to say the last thing you need is to sell stuff where you got to get in there and just pump them up and pump them up all the time. Like what a what a bunch of effort and for little bitty pieces whereas instead what you want is you want a bunch of holy terrors that you don't have to pump them up at all though that's just who they are. And so the and that's how that's going to work so but for certain people their their lives can be can be impoverished because they are animals in a zoo where they're not actually getting forced by normal sort of CB dynamics that would take place in life generally. And I you know I just had this as a case that came in an animal in a zoo it was you know lethargic kind of depressed overweight eating shitty food and the problem was the young person needs to be shown the door. Okay so not in the mean way that just like hey you know you need to be shown the door because on the Kalaharga Desert where we evolved 300,000 years ago no 21 year old was being fed by its mother. Okay that's just absolutely not the way it goes down. And so the fact that you know we've got 21 year old six foot 180 pound males you know that are having some troubles getting started in life are being fed by their mothers that you know if you want if you're the his mother and it doesn't bother you to feed the thing then go ahead and keep them there it's all fine there's no no judgment here. In other words we're just trying to live our best existence and if you're convinced that this is the best existence for your your son and yourself then I don't just make any difference to me. The issue is whether or not you're concerned that this is actually not his best interest and it's annoying for you to see it different story. Okay at that point where do we go we start try to impose a percentage of the of the environmental forces that actually cause normal human productive action and decision-making from the Kalaharga i.e no workie no food. No workie no eatie. And uh and it's amazing suddenly they're mobilized it's like yeah you could yell tear your blue in the face but until they're hungry they're not going to take any action and so that's that's how we look at these problems. Yeah very good doctor oh thank you I'm going to remember that we'll make a shirt it says no workie no food go on the beat your jeep merchandise. So our next question. Why would you give them on their on their 21st birthday when they dropped out of college? Reminds me my my grandpa was at my sister's graduation at high school graduation and he's looking around he goes why are they so happy? They'll have to go out and work on their own you know nobody feeds them anymore. Soviet grandpa you know. Yep you got it yeah all right what else we got Nathan? All right our next question uh Dear Dr. Lyle this question is about self-esteem and building long-term happiness through the meaningful pursuit of achievable goals which I've heard Dr. Lyle discuss and how it relates to burnout feeling overwhelmed and therefore unhappy with life in the modern world. If this really is the formula for happiness why do we see so many people today end up burnt out or overextended in their pursuit of achievement constantly striving for more? In Europe where I live there's a stronger cultural focus on slow living and enjoying simple pleasures with lefts emphasis on wealth and material success. People here appear happier in general are they just pursuing more realistic goals that are perhaps unrelated to building wealth? In the US why does goal achievements so often appear to come with unhappiness burnout and exhaustion? If it's true that the only way to truly have self-esteem is the meaningful pursuit of achievable achievable goals can we really be happy if you are not intentionally trying to make better yourself or make yourself more competitive? A super complicated question there's so many different places that that we could we could sort of enter this question. I don't think people are happier in Europe I think they're probably less happy. They're I think they've habituated to a state of affairs in a lot of places in Europe where essentially there's no big upside for personal initiative because of the tax structure the marginal tax rates are so high a lot of Europe is very socialistic and so government controlled but there's it's not it's it's like an amazing panning ass to start your own business you don't get to just start your own business you you got to go through a whole bunch of hoops to do so the you know it's ridiculous and so this is a now so I think that what you get is sort of rational apathy about the idea of becoming wealthy or becoming substantially better off so the as a result of that I think that's going to mute a lot of people's natural initiative the uh it's like hey why hustle if I'm going to give up 60 marginal tax rates or 60 percent in many of those countries it's like incredible like why would I uh and jobs are extremely secure so if you get a job and it's kind of a it I don't want to speak too broadly because I'm not super knowledgeable I only have little bits of knowledge about uh little different places in Europe and how it is that things go about their business but you don't have very dynamic economies you don't have startups and you know people with great opportunities to get stock options and and you know join some young company and work like hell and make a pile of money it's like I don't think so I think that's going to be very rare in Europe and people aren't going to start their own businesses very often that's not going to be typical you might take over your dad's plumbing business you know you might is in a legacy situation where somebody's already been grandfathered through the system and and so you just kind of walk your way into those things I think that that may be true but this is uh there's a lethargy about a lot of those economies they a lot of times have relatively high unemployment rates because the companies don't want to hire unless they because they got to guarantee your damn job nearly for life there's such incredible security associated with that so the I have somebody that's the wife of a of a major league executive now they got sent to Germany and she's just incredibly frustrated at the the the uh essentially all the the the defenses that the employees have against working you know I mean they're just incredibly secure they do not have to hustle and it doesn't look anything like running a company in the United States so are they happier well you're you've traded you know there's been you haven't chosen to trade this off you're just a cog in the big machine but you are stuck in a situation that I think has some positives to it but it also has some very significant negatives the um the the positives are that to some significant extent your uh if you take away that the wealth accumulation as a fitness indicator you know if you essentially take that out of the game then it's like well now I don't really have to hustle so hard so now I can go down to the park on the weekends and you know in other words so what a husband is at that point is just somebody that has a job and that the expectations of the income on that job are not particularly great because it's kind of defined by the entire system the way it is anyway so the and I have a a friend of mine that is a physician in in Sweden that's a pretty good living it's it's it's akin to a oh I don't know a 10-year a 10-year 10-year school teacher at a at a reasonably good district in the United States it's like there's a hell of a big difference in achievement and IQ between those two individuals the countries general standard of livings are extremely similar so what the hell are we doing with a physician with a specialty making about the same money as a as a high school history teacher unbelievable and of course amazingly enough a high school history teacher in sweden makes about this about the same amount as this doctor incredible and gets three months off so I don't know why anybody would be a doctor there but the answer is this person's answer as well this is kind of what there's a lot of options what you're going to do with your life and that just felt like the most productive thing I could do with my life it would feel like it would be worthwhile pretty amazing so you sort of see um so now we say okay is that a good thing and you can almost look inside different personalities and you could see that in certain certain personalities would say yeah that feels pretty good I kind of like the idea that I I make about the same as bad as money as everybody else that the monetary differences don't have such profound consequences for life choices etc etc that we're all kind of in the same boat and that kind of makes me feel now that's not a bad life and I don't have to think about it's not worth hustling and I didn't want to hustle anyway so what the hell we'll just call it a day I can actually understand that certain nervous system certain personalities would actually feel better under those circumstances than they would in a wild west frontier okay and so but other people would be incredibly stifled like every impulse in them that had that had some get-up-and-go risk tolerance essentially a desire to hit the jackpot in life it's like no you don't get to do that you know it's like wow how can I get to America you know how can I get the hell out of here and believe me there's people all over the world even in well-to-do countries that feel that way you know they're like there's a lot of Frenchmen that would be like no I want to get the hell out of France and I want to get to the United States where there's some significant opportunity okay so the it is that there's no opportunities there I don't want to be making blanket statements and I hope you that people understand this but you know the the taxation and regulation structure in a standard European quasi-socialistic economy really changes the game for an individual and for some people it's like well there's no now it's no problem what we do every Saturday is we we don't go to Disneyland and spend a bunch of money that we don't have we just go to the local local park and we do this and we do that and we look at the the nice river and the little boats on the river and we have a really nice sandwich and the person that serves me my sandwich makes about as much money as I do and I'm a neurosurgeon so the I can see so if you're living there and you're and you're depending on who you are and who you're in and around and if your personal social ecology is good and you actually like your workplace you're like why would I want it any different the the question about all the burnout and the seeking all this kind of thing you know I can answer that that legitimate and carefully done surveys indicate that the more money people make the happier they are so let's not be too quick to have a sort of quasi-socialistic attitude that the people that aren't working as hard and seem very comfortable and happy about it and move at a slower pace are happier that's not actually what the evidence says the evidence says the people that are working hard making a ton of money are actually happier than the people that are working less and not making as much so it's like oh that's interesting what are we going to do with that information it's like well it's not a blanket truth okay so you know I happen to know a young man that makes a hell of a lot of money and he's not as happy on average as a lot of people that make very average money and this is what it's innate to his personality he's just inherently got a lot of little unhappiness circuits in there a lot of little rumbly circuits okay so uh I know other people that make lots of money and they are very happy I know people that don't make very much money and they're usually a little bit frustrated but I have a lot of people that make adequate money and it can be extremely happy and what counts is their social ecology their relationships okay they can be very happy at their work and then they get a new supervisor and then they're not happy or they can get have a mediocre supervisor's leaves and they get a new supervisor and it's a lot better in other words and romantic relationships play enormously as well do children how well they're doing and all that sort of thing and relatives friends etc just what you'd expect for a social animal so the burnout that you're talking about isn't as common as everybody thinks but but the burnout type situations it are going to be highly correlated with the conscientiousness of individuals so the individuals are very high conscientiousness in the modern environment wind up living in what I call they're they're in a fractured village so they have a problem if you are highly conscientious and you are agreeable you are going to wind up in a situation where multiple alphas multiple different hierarchical structures i.e. the church the school the work the n-laws whatever it is the pta you're going to have multiple demands on you you'll have multiple friends with multiple demands and so what's going to happen is is that that it's very easy for such individuals to get their lives badly out of balance that and that's because they're they're under the withering demand of somebody who is you know essentially some some other individuals got an emergency um and they are calling on our agreeable conscientious person to basically fill in the resource missing gap and the the nature of highly conscious individual particularly that's agreeable they they almost can't help themselves they're they're like a moth flying to the light the the more upsetting the emergency is the greater the value it is to rescue that person out of that emergency in other words they can sniff that the more urgency there is in other people's voices and their faces and in their words that means that there's more gene survival chips that are being saved collectively and therefore the person on the other side ought to be particularly grateful and therefore by helping them out of this emergency and coming through in the clutch i have now gained myself a lot of gene survival units as credit okay that's why people want to be doctors okay that's that's what's luring them into that is seeking gratitude that's what they're attempting to do uh can can you get somebody's gratitude if you you know feed them a decent vegan hot dog a little bit you know what i mean it's like yeah hey that's pretty good thanks okay but but actually it's a lot more if you save my leg from being amputated because you're a genius freaking surgeon and so it's like oh my god you know you just changed my whole life it's like yeah that thank you sounds a little different doesn't it and so uh highly conscientious individuals are looking to try to amass a steam and they're going to do so by trying to do a stellar job and they're going to be seeking for emergency situations um where there's a high profit because effectively your efforts were worth more your effort is worth a lot more when the chips are down and somebody's in deep shit then when when everybody's fine so somebody says hey man can you give me paint my grid if you like paint it this weekend it's like well not particularly i've got other things i would like to do but if it's like hey my garage just you know burned down and i'm going through it because i'm trying to find some stuff for my grandmother and i don't know i'm all upset oh well that's a little different i'll come over you see it's not the best thing better to have a crisis in progress that that literally you could make a difference in the outcome so the so do people get burned out yes who is it they are people that are seeking resources that effectively um that wind up generally behind emergency processes i.e. the star that we have to really make our numbers because we're almost out of money we've only got three and a half million dollars left and we've got exactly seven months between us and bankruptcy but if we work like living hell and we work you know 18 hours a day and live on benzedrine if we all pull together right here we could all get rich ah well depending on who you are if you're in those set of circumstances and you sort those circumstances out then and you can feel the emergency and the drumbeat of the crisis then you are willing to go 18 hours a day and live on benzedrine for the next seven seven seven months and then when it fails you are exhausted now we've got burnout okay so burnout you know it's a fancy name it's a it tells a little story with it what it's what the word is but what is it really and what it really is is it's two different types of exhaustion one of them is physical exhaustion so people get physically exhausted the number one thing that they tend to sacrifice is their sleep okay so uh why is that because there's not enough time in the day to answer the bell on all of the emergencies that are coming from five different directions in my life that never would have happened in the stone age except a few times where the entire tribe was in deep trouble for some reason and we we had to work extremely hard to fend off an urgency okay well that's fair we can do that three times in a lifetime and for I don't know 72 hours that's not not a big deal hell everybody that's gone through a organic chemistry final has done that so the um but what is it in these people's lives oh it's an extended period of an emergency and it's and it's because we've got too many different people that don't have line of sight on each other so your boss and your uh your kids and your spouse and your you know I don't know side side business partner and your church and your pastor they don't have line of sight on each other they don't they can't see you making the choices they the the choices of what you're going to do with your time today are not being adjudicated through an open process where everybody that's in the game puts in their two cents but everybody can also see what the most impressive pressing need is the village was not meant to be fractured so when big gem says no sorry he can't help you without today he's got to help me it's like done so our individual isn't having to essentially negotiate those conflicts within them and within their individual uh conflicts of interest with with people on the other side the wife says oh but you promised that you were going to help me hang the curtains tonight I just was all set up to do that it's like yeah the big gem says that I've got a deadline well big gem always says there's a deadline yeah well that's my job for god sakes and I'm trying to get promoted etc etc but the point is is that in the stone age environment the wife isn't going to say oh well you need to help me with this how come you're always going to big gem big gem is saying hey we got to have your help it's unbelievably important different a big gem is staring down the wife and saying sorry about that Mabel this is how it goes down so that is how we get burnout we get a fractured village where the adjudication of someone's time and energy is having to be done internally to them and it's going to be the often of the highly conscientious competent and often agreeable person has basically overextended themselves very easily why because they are esteem seeking and they don't want they are they have a reputation of being the person that can do everything or do it all or do something well and now they've got two of them at once and they've only got time for one and a half and what do they do they take it right out of their sleep okay and so uh in doing so and they take it away from their their relationships that they can afford to operate on credit in other words i.e. family wife friends those come last what comes first is the emergency that somebody needs and therefore I have to leap in the middle of it and try to be a hero or at least not be the goat okay so um so let's not overestimate how often burnout happens because it doesn't happen that often it's a relatively small percentage of individuals I don't meet many of those people okay so most people I know walking up and down my street got it pretty easy and I don't see anybody burned out that's a lazy middle class shoot for the middle people like me okay all right yeah yeah yeah I think you're pretty high up there Dr. Laugh no no the truth is is that I am not somebody who typically has got my life out of balance by push push push push push hard you know if that were true I remember in 2006 about three years after the pleasure trap John McDougal came to me and said you know Doug it's time for you to write another book as if this is what one does you know what I mean because if you're John McDougal you're gonna write a dozen so every two or three years you're gonna write another one because you're always got to have another book coming out and it's like I just smiled yeah you're right you know what I mean there's no way in hell there was all I was gonna write another book when I had something to say that was really important and it was gonna get done when it was gonna get done it's not gonna have some clock on it but if you're John McDougal you know or you're you know I don't know somebody else if you're Steve Jobs you freaking just produce produce produce produce produce produce now we can see from our standpoint from our thoughtful European questioner that we see such individuals and we can hear of stories and we can even see examples where those individuals oftentimes aren't aren't particularly happy and you can see that they're tired they're burned out they're pushing like hell they're frustrated that they don't have as much accomplishment as they thought that they should have this actually describes a lot of really high achieving people but it's not America versus Europe or a different way or a different cultural thing it could be seeded or in other words a more free enterprise-based culture that doesn't have such outrageous regulation and marginal tax rates which the United States is no day at the beach it's not what it has been okay so the however the there is sufficient freedom of opportunity and upside in the US that it's going to stoke the motivation of a lot of potentially extremely conscientious high achievers and those people very often as whether it's whether it's some woman who's who's theoretically two pounds overweight and is upset about it even though she's eating perfectly i.e. a high you know hyper conscientious net case or it's a guy that wants to open you know at least a dozen stores between now and his death for god's sake he's not going to retire till he gets at least a dozen it's like okay these individuals are inherently difficult to find happiness they so you can equate the notion that it's the high driving achievement that is causing the unhappiness it's like no this these can be innate to the organisms the organisms themselves are ceaselessly seeking accomplishment that's in them it is a component of their DNA okay and they can be dramatically different from other people you can basically you can through a socialistic economy basically completely undermine that and they're not happier they they're that is not a good situation for them better for them to be all elbows and teeth in the middle of a street fight duking it out with reality because that's what they like to do that's as good as it gets for them okay steve jobs would not be you could say well boy he yelled at people and screamed at people and wow what was that about you know i mean that couldn't have been a very good life he he made some he hurt the feelings and was damn near enemies with the people that he worked closest with what is that you know is this is that a wrong way to live it's like no it's not a wrong way to live there was the right way for steve jobs it what are we going to try to make him the head of a post you know the it's a little post office in in oh i don't know rural stock home and this is going to be a happier life uh-huh not going to happen okay this guy um i was talking to somebody that knew Muhammad Ali uh very well and the that person said Ali loved to fight he loved to fight he also loved to train it's like wow i can't even get myself i keep telling myself Doug you know you're really out of you know i go play basketball i walk past the weight room and all these people working apps like you know you could do this a couple times a good to work out once or twice you know a year you know i could work out come on Doug you could work out like what's you know what's a month i mean how bad would that be the point is you know don't have Muhammad Ali's genes this is uh these are different animals and to say that he ought to take it easy and not do what he did it's like really you got to be kidding me on the other hand you have an urge or rage to to read all the books behind you're in the shelf as well so it's just different yeah different yeah yeah i'm just as great as he is what Nathan yeah let's stick up for me there no as good as he is at fighting you're as good as he is in in the intellectual arena in psychology that's the thing that's very seriously but the point is is that the i don't care i'm just me okay and so my job in this life is to to uh to to find the the social uh ecological circumstances that are that optimize my existence that means intermediate level effort and work that means finding work that i felt like that i could actually get the most gratitude back for okay and so uh that that actually fit my personality so it wasn't going to be i wasn't going to be somebody that uh i love it when i run into these guys that are just you know uh clearly asperger is extremely smart and are super high tech guys and they're like yeah okay let me just fix this for you and their hands are like flying over the keyboard they're doing this and it's like it's all over in like three and a half minutes like there's no way like the the learning curve that that guy went through to do all that stuff and they fixed this incredible mystery of how the computer was supposed to work on the software was supposed to work it's like thank god you know just so you know uh nathan's kind of like that but it gets one not worse than nathan the people that can't even talk to you they're just mumbling to you while they figure it all out the uh that goodness you know what i mean and i feel gratitude for that so the yeah what was this about burnout is the right way to live uh also the person is talking about self-esteem now i i am on a personal crusade that's going to fail and i'm fine with it and because i'm trying to make a point and i don't know that it's never going to it's not going to change the way people think uh it's going to change the way a few people think but not many the our culture and the language equates self-confidence with self-esteem they cannot help it that's that's it it's i want my kid to have more self-esteem okay i want i felt good to me that's right it's my self-esteem went up i don't i don't i i have no problem with the fact that people are literally using two very different terms for exactly the same phenomenon because they're they're not seeing that there's another really important phenomenon that is completely independent of self-confidence and that is what i call self-esteem this is a different thing okay um and self-esteem is a feeling and feelings come from judgments so self-confidence comes from the judgment the it comes from what albert bandura called perceived self-efficacy in other words it i believe that i could do that so self-confidence comes from a kid that has done all of his math homework and he knows the material cold and he feels self-confident walking into the test that's a feeling that he has based on the judgment that is coming from his analysis of his competitive situation okay that is not self-esteem people not to me self-esteem is inherently a moral judgment that comes from the person watching their own efforts and judging whether their efforts have been appropriate and worthy have they done things in the right way and have that have they done them as well as they could that that will not influence your self-confidence your if you know you're the 25th best skier in the world and you have done things to the best of your ability but you have qualified from i don't know mozan beak and you managed to get into the olympic games and somebody asks you well are you you know are you going to go with confidence you know it's important that you have your self-esteem that you know that you feel like you can win it's like no actually i have absolutely zero expectations that i'm going to win i i know that i'm not going to get on the podium okay i'm confident that i will that i'm prepared okay i i i've gone up a down mountain i'm not likely to fall down the mountain and make a fool of myself but i'm very likely out of the 28 competitors i'm very likely to come in the bottom five okay i might actually be 28 and if i'm 28 that would surprise me a bit okay so the um i'm not confident of my competitive situation what i am is that i myself my self-esteem is the the process where i have an internal audience that's generated by part of human nature that is essentially a moral mechanism that is watching my efforts the i i believe that that evolved because human beings if they're living in cross proximity and they all want the same things they want the same girl they want the same boy they want the same food they want the same shiny shells in other words you're going to have tremendous conflicts of interest when members of the same species are living on top of each other it's going to be a problem okay so how are you going to adjudicate those things well in a barn yard with chickens they got a pecking order and they'll freaking peck your head like i'm a bigger pecker than you are and so therefore you better get out of my way okay that's how they solve the problem but human beings solve the problem the um chickens you know that chicken started to peck the food under my feet and i'm bigger than it is i'm going to peck its head and it's going to find out it better get the hell out of there through very simple pain pleasure you know feedback mechanisms i'll change their cb in a hell of a hurry but what if i've collected a bunch of egg you know a bunch of nuts in my little leather sack and i've sat it under where my tree is where everybody knows that's my stuff okay and then i've left it there it's safe from the bugs and now i'm going to go do something else because i don't want to be carrying the sack i got something else that i'm going to do and i'm going to need two hands and i don't want it in my wet okay now somebody's hanging around there looking at those nuts thinking boy if i took a handful of those nuts then the Doug's not going to know the difference and so they're tempted to steal okay however they would then be doing something against the overall fiber of the group's interest they're a member of the group therefore it's costly to them to have sort of a lack of respect for private property and so as a result of that what they're going to have evolved in order to make this possible is they're going to have a feeling of anxiety and guilt that's going to come into them as they contemplate stealing my nuts okay and if they steal my nuts they're also going to feel guilty okay and then it's going to turn out that the reason that guilt is there is it's something to dissuade you from doing exactly what you're tempted to do so it's a way to adjudicate essentially the resource acquisition problem of do i steal the nuts and therefore basically steal an hour of that guy's effort and get the calories for it and hopefully get away with it or you know or is that going to be too costly because if there's any way that i could get caught that it does massively important reputational damage to me in the village this is really bad i could get kicked out and therefore drastically reduce my odds of survival so human beings evolved what we're going to call a conscience and Freud called it a superego uh i call it an internal audience in other words it's a it's a mechanism that's watching you and it's a very useful mechanism because once you have that you can actually have your internal audience actually do all kinds of of essentially analysis of your behavior in you know when nobody else is watching so it doesn't have to be a moral issue per se it can be whether or not you're staying on your diet or not it's like okay well what is that that's a judgment as if other people were watching you the internal audience is a facsimile for other people in the village and if you do a good job on your diet and you were tempted and you know you could have cheated and nobody would have seen it but the thing is is that you know like let's suppose you're some gal or some guy and you're in a marriage and you know that your spouse is not that happy with the fact that you're overweight and you've like you know that that's a problem and it's a conflict in the relationship and so you know that it's kind of incumbent upon you to do something about it if you value the relationship sufficiently pleasure traps difficult very hard you know etc there's all kinds of reasons why this is difficult but let's make no mistake about it nobody else can stop you you cannot be stopped from succeeding at that task this is a total matter of personal action and no other nervous system in the world can dissuade you from doing the right thing and nobody can make you do it you have to choose okay so we've got a conflicting situation in my head but there's some tasty little thing over there but there's also a waistline that is being judged as basically like i you reneged on the marriage deal i'm in good shape and you're not you know i'm not so happy with the situation and therefore well how much anxiety does that have how much does it bother me how much did the sexual dynamics care to me anyway okay it's complicated okay so now that individual's like got a dilemma they've got a time when nobody's around there's there's the graham crackers there or whatever the hell it is or i'm out on my own i could pull through it drive through that any problem at all and nobody in the world would know who i am what i'm doing and that i'm you know basically going against a contract that i've had with myself and with my spouse for god's sake effectively well if you swallow that cheeseburger there's going to be the pleasure of the cheeseburger and the satisfaction of the cheeseburger and the confidence that you're going to survive because you've got plenty of calories and we're fine but there's going to be an internal audience wrinkling its brow in disgust okay that is the self-esteem mechanism so remember we have to look at the self-esteem mechanism on a continuum of good to bad just like confidence is low to high so self-esteem is the feeling that comes from um a it's the same it's the analog feeling process just as perceived probability of success is what causes feelings of confidence okay you can't say just be confident you've got to feel confident there's no possible way to feel confident without having a high perceived probability of success there's no way to have a high perceived probability of success without any evidence that indicates that we're going to be successful so all kinds of psychotherapy turns you know causality upside down or inside out people have absolutely no idea how to achieve confidence you achieve confidence through doing the necessary work in order to see whether or not we can gain the competence we may not be able to gain the competence okay but we must gain the competence get evidence that we have the competence and then once we have the competence the evidence that we have the competence will cause us to feel confident period end of subject the confidence is the feeling that is the result of the calculus that the brain is doing about perceived probability of success that's how it works it doesn't work any other way you can't talk it into anybody in a needle it's not possible self-esteem can only come from the a mechanism of self-respect self-respect is your judgment i.e. the internal audience which is a facsimile of other people's brains looks at your actions and respects them it says that is adequate appropriate action and it's maybe not even easy and if it's not easy but it's absolutely appropriate action then we always respect hard work somebody that's not very bright and is making mistakes but we see how hard and diligently or working we respect the hard work we may not admire or value their confidence level but we respect the hard work we respect the effort that that person is putting in that same mechanism works through the internal audience the internal audience is a facsimile of other people's nervous systems watching your efforts and if you give excellent and diligent effort it will give you an esteemed signal and you will feel self-esteem okay i was describing this to an extremely high-achieving female that her situation was that she was having some competitive struggles in her in her life business thing super successful but now suddenly there's problems and so and i'm trying to explain to her that what counts here is you have to make some changes and some decisions about how you're going to do things differently because there's different competitive environment all of a sudden that all you can do is you can do the very best that you can and what will happen is that your self-esteem will be intact and and but not your self-confidence suddenly know you're you are we are no longer in a confident situation we may not succeed financially we may have to have some big changes and we may have to completely go down a new direction and it could be humiliating all of that's true but the self-esteem can be invalid because your efforts will dictate that and she says so self-esteem is kind of like the booby prize it's kind of a really interesting reaction okay and i'm like yeah that's an interesting way of looking at it uh no it's actually foundational so self-esteem is the foundation of human happiness because if you win by cheating it's an empty victory you know some people can say oh i'm not so sure about that yeah well i believe that's true you know i don't even want to know what it feels like to be in Lance Armstrong's nervous system that guy has to be associated with i believe that he is okay so that is a not that he doesn't have conscientiousness he has extraordinary conscientiousness okay i think he's extraordinarily disagreeable and i think uh this is where our friend jan hawk would say yeah you've got to pay attention to jordan peterson's distinction in conscientiousness versus you know you could have conscientiousness about being doing the right thing to other people and you can have conscientiousness about achievement and Lance Armstrong is uh an extraordinarily high achieving individual with incredibly low conscientiousness about how how he what achievements he's seeking he was not seeking to be the best bicyclist he could be he was seeking seeking to be the winner of the tour to france as many times as he could win the damn thing it didn't matter how he did it okay didn't matter how much cheating he did and so i don't i'm not interested in experiencing Lance Armstrong's moments of victory what what a sick thing that is okay i'm interested in the guy who knows that he's probably going to be in the bottom five of the giant slalom in innsbruck and he knows that that's where he's going to be because he doesn't come from a big ski culture but he's just good enough and he's respected enough on the world stage and he had just enough qualifying points that by god he got into the olympic games but nobody in this world expects him to be anywhere in the top 10 and sure enough he finishes 28th but he had good runs he did technically he actually the competitive spirit of the whole thing pushed him out to the level of his abilities and he's skied as well as he's ever skied in his life and how does he feel when he's done well if you meet those people you know that they feel pretty damn happy okay that's that's what that feels like like man look what i did that is tremendous self-respect the self-esteem feeling that comes along with it and a sense of moral rightness that is irreplaceable my attitude is is that there is no victory that if you cheated it and did a shitty job or even succeeded without giving your best that you do not to get the best possible experience that a human being can have and there is no devastating failure that you can have that its effects will not pass and be anything other than transient when you have done your very best and you know that you did your best but you got beaten something went wrong or you expected to win and didn't or you didn't expect to win but you damn near dead whatever the hell the thing is your job it really is how did you play the game okay and so that's what self-esteem is and self-esteem is not a consistent thing it it shifts around it can change from hour to hour okay there are moments when i i'll get i'm kind of adrift it's between goals or projects or demands and i'll find myself amazingly for for a short period of time a little bored and and a little lethargic and a little self-indulgent and i don't feel that good and i remind myself you've only got a hundred thousand hours left okay and you'll never get this hour back and that that will snap me into wait a second what i'll be doing right now okay and then if i start to do something that i kind of don't want to do that it's a little messy there's something i don't i know that i got stopped on before etc etc if i will push and put in some effort even if it's filing doesn't even matter what it is if i'll start to put effort in within 15 20 minutes i feel significantly better okay i'm making progress towards something that's worthwhile i have not wasted my time and my internal audience is seeing that i'm actually putting some effort in and i'm you know i'm essentially serving my team so that's how i look at that and so that's uh i'm on like my crusade and the book that i've written you know i talk very much about the difference between self-esteem and self-confidence and i actually outline carefully the difference of those two things this is important actually it's important for for for me personally to understand this i think it's important for anyone who ever learns it that it's important it's super important for if you're a psychotherapist you should know that your client desperately creates confidence the reason why they are depressed or anxious is because they lack it and they want more than anything to be confident that this is the competitive nature of reality that you want to know that you are going to be successful versus the microbes and that they're not going to kill you and that's why you're going to go wash your hands but then you're anxious all over again okay that that's your immune system against the germs that's one thing that causes a bunch of anxiety it also is depression that i can't get the girl or boy that i want i can't get the job that i want i can't get the money that i want i can't get the you know the friendships that i want in other words i can't get the familial connections that i want there's things that i want and i can't get them and i've tried very hard and i fail and now i'm depressed well you should be that is the point of depression is to to accentuate the failure feedback that you receiving from other people in the steam signals to try to cue you that your strategies are being ineffective you're effectively like a playwright whose play is flopping and peoria and you're scratching your head because you think it's really good you think it's good enough and it's not and they're they're giving you feedback and so that's incredibly necessary that's why they take it to peoria so they don't have the incredible expense of a new york broadway opening and they blow a bunch of money when it wasn't ready when it wasn't good enough so your depression is a failure feedback system that's telling you that that's telling you you need to reanalyze strategies do you have the confidence to do this and of course your confidence feels low it's supposed to feel low okay and it's and you're supposed to be you know the idea that oh you can't have those negative thoughts what the hell are you talking about you think that the Apollo engineers have that thought well but it can't have any negative thoughts about things that can go wrong you better have every damn negative thought about everything okay and so i am never concerned when someone is depressed the moralized has a bunch of quote negative self-down talk my job is not to talk them out of it my job is to understand what historical circumstances took place to them that gave them the failure feedback and what were the competitive circumstances what did they do to try to put themselves in a position to compete for that situation and we got to keep the backward chain moving all the way to do you have the confidence can you get the confidence okay the world when it gives you feedback isn't willy nilly they can tell who's faster down the hill they got stopwatches and a clock okay they can see it okay they can tell who's in better shape than who's not in a better shape they can tell who's better at either the violin and who isn't so if you're trying to compete for anything you bring your a game and if your a game isn't good enough then you're either in a league that's too high or you got some work to do okay and so where does it begin where does success success begin it begins with self-esteem it begins with doing the work necessary to gain the competence that will result in the confidence that will result in positive feedback from other people that will result in the victories of life that you are seeking okay but if we try to skip over and we don't understand what self-esteem is if it's like you know if we don't understand then you know that that is where i'm always beginning the action what what is it you know what did we learn what do we find out that we need to do now that we can see what you need to do you need to eat differently okay you need to get get up you know you need to get to bed earlier on time turn the temperature down in your house so you're cold enough that you can start you sleep earlier and you sleep deeper okay shut all those things off so that you can get to work on time in the morning without being bleary eyed and ineffective in looking like the the rent of the litter that the that the manager is looking at you know what i mean it helps to have that by father who you know didn't mince words so anyway this is the story so we begin with how can we improve your fundamentals and when you work to do the things that very often you don't want to do that's when you see your self-esteem rise okay that's where you see it rise and it's useful to for people to be aware that that's what's happening along with it so often self-confidence rises okay very often self-confidence will rise because your efforts will you will watch yourself going up learning curves whether it's in didactic information learning organic chemistry or whether or not it's physical information processing and learning how to throw a dart better that one way or the other whatever it is that you're seeking to compete either in a classroom or on a planning field or whatever the hell it is or looking more beautiful that as you start to see that your efforts are having an impact then your confidence rises and that confidence then changes the cb on the entire enterprise about whether or not it's worth continuing to pursue it and put more energy in and this will likely cause what i call an achievement cycle okay people say yeah okay that's the secret no that's not the secret that's how the process works and the process also works that if you put in the energy and you're you earn the self-esteem through the diligent effort and then it does not yield you the feedback at the rate that you would think would be reasonable you abandon it they're like oh that's a terrible thing no it's not that's what life has to be you know every cat chasing a mouse if the mouse finally gets away you paw at the hole for a while and then finally you walk away because it's not worth getting it so this is part of life's nature is that we're going to search for goals that are challenging that need to be at the upper reaches of our ability to compete for those goals if you're a william hamilton it's trying to figure out the underlying mathematical structure of biological nature for god's sakes he knew that he had the chops to compete with the greatest minds that had ever lived and so that's where he turned his attention and he succeeded okay so someone else it's literally holding down a job at the goodwill okay fine whatever it is everybody's going to have their own competitive sphere and in that competitive sphere their job is to compete as effectively as they can to do what earn esteem in the right way from the people that matter okay so that's what we're attempting to do contribute to the village display to the village try to win nates to the village try to win friends try to win trading partners in other words by doing what doing things well what about the best of your ability yeah depends on your personality if your steve jobs your life is going to look weird out of balance and strange and have burnout and burning out people around you fine that's you you're the freak okay very few people are there the uh uh most people though when they fail what they often need is somebody that can analyze the roots of that failure for them and they could get them right back to square one to the fundamentals that and and pick you basically walk them through the nature of what that achievement cycle probably will look like and then from there have them do little tests on that on efforts to see whether or not there's a learning curve or a bodily changing curve that makes sense relative to the overall scheme um and therefore as we start to get feedback from reality about how our circumstances change as a result of our efforts whether or not it's worth continuing okay so this is this is the nature of life it is about achievement processes but it's always you know trying to keep them in balance making good decisions and then also making appropriate adjustments when things don't go you know the way that we thought that they might maybe they should or could anyway long story dr well thank you so much it's uh uh i think part of this podcast we love hearing you talk about self-esteem processes and self-confidence building processes and i think this is great uh yeah just i mean i i hope that you enjoy the the warmth and sacramento and if you don't unlike the european counterparts you can actually turn on the ac uh and get a little cooler so listen i i i've had business take me your beautiful place beautiful stuff also very good standards of living we we can make uh we can we can poke fun at uh folks if we want they can poke fun at us that's all that's all a good fun the uh this particular issue is the particular issue that that uh that this person brought up very interesting one deep one many people have looked at this and many many people uh uh many people that i have met have felt like you know americans have felt like yeah i'd rather live under the scandinavian socialism those those are the personalities of the individuals here that actually would rather be in those set of circumstances remember that the extraordinary differences in wealth that are possible in a place like america um are possible in europe too too but you've got to cathast born into it you know i mean there's much more flexibility here um that that's what the american dream was all about uh was about that was trying to have a set of circumstances where governments were not being oppressive and predatory uh about fortunes and the however that creates a world vastly different than the kalahari that we evolved on and so it is a strange world where material resources could be so dramatically different from one person to the next and that could never happen on the kalahari so we with them with the fabulous world shiny and extraordinary world that we live in and the extraordinary human achievement of basically manipulating the location of atoms in order to build things like fancy tv set cell phones you know wall to wall carpeting you know air conditioning and heating and and swimming pools with heaters this is not a world that our ancestors could have dreamed of even a hundred years ago okay the all kinds of people now many people live truly more opulently more comfortably than william randall first lived in her castle okay in other words yeah it was bigger but it wasn't as nice there's houses all over you know all over the world that are now built way more human friendly and more elegant and chic than them one of the richest men in the world built for his indulgent playground and so is it is it fabulous yes it is are there is it a two-edged sword yeah it is a two-edged sword and so the um but this person the question was the you know some deep complicated thinking trying to look at many other many angles involved as as many thoughtful people have done and it's a it's a complex question but but hopefully you know some of the things i talked about today shed light on particular angles yes okay all right dr all thank you so much and uh we'll look forward to talking to talk to you in a couple weeks fantastic nathan and between now and then i might even see you yes well maybe a couple weeks yeah yeah okay got you all right nathan we'll see you soon all right suck you later dr all thanks bye bye