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

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2:25based 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 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 we're at troll 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 there was it's not just for people who've got big audiences right we all have a circle of influence in our lives.

3:15It'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 balance between those three. And I think what we're talking about speaks to that alignment piece, right? Which is when I 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.

4:08I really believe in that void that we create, there's a fracture internally. And I believe, having been a doctor for 23 years, that a lot of the problems that we see to do with, let's say, our lifestyle and the habits that we're trying to change, I actually think that if you go to the root cause, when there'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 to fill that hole. Yeah. In my first book, I riffed a little bit on this word disintegrated. So when you hear the word disintegrate in English, you think it means like coming apart, right?

4:52Like it disintegrated upon entering the earth's atmosphere. 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 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?

5:27The 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, particularly in something like sort of the internet ecosystem where you're like, 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.

6:15And then you kind of watch that person almost get radicalized by the people they bring into the circle. 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 it this to a great degree you can change who you are and get validation so then you start performing in life rather than living authentically you perform yeah 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 aligned with who you are i mean thinking about this with with this idea of virtue like we tend to think of virtue or who we are as this this thing this like i'm a good person i'm generous person i'm you know I'm whatever.

8:01We 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 verb and not a noun. Yeah, I love that. And so people will say, well, I'm a good person, but 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 and 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.

8:45And 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-dayness, which the good news is, means you can change positively also. So you can just start doing that thing. It's like not faking it till you make it. It's bringing it into being by doing it.

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