John R. Miles

When people optimize for what society rewards rather than what actually makes them happy, it's like an increment at a time of your self-worth that's erased.

And when he and I were first talking about it, it was like the light bulb went off for me because that self-worth gets optimized all the time in things we do that we don't even realize we're doing.

And I realized this when I was in my late 30s, early 40s, because I was like, I keep coming into work.

And one, I'm an introvert and an extrovert type of world.

But two, I felt like I was optimizing so much of who I was.

to be productive at work and to show up in a way that would maximize my effectiveness in that work environment.

But the more I started to look at it, it was almost like I was putting a mask on every day, hiding who I was underneath it and what was actually making me happy.

Do you think that's a gap a lot of people are dealing with?

Corinne, I want to park this whole idea of personal utility for a second, and I promise I'm going to come back to it.

I want to go back to the concept of deals.

I, a couple months ago, was speaking with Alex Emus, and we were talking about his book that he co-authored with Nobel laureate Richard Thaler.

And we were talking about this in terms of

Deals that we think about in economic terms where you're overpaying for things and that's what causes the winner's curse.

I was hoping that you could talk about deals and how they impact our jobs, our relationships and our major life decisions and what makes a good deal versus one that is unsustainable.

Yeah, it's a person who's in a family ecosystem where if you think about this as the analogy of a house, all of a sudden they become the floor that everyone is stopping on or they become the refrigerator that's out in the garage.

Serves a purpose, but doesn't really get any constant love and caring, right?

So I think one of the things that goes on in society is so many smart, capable people stay in bad deals for a very long time, whether that's at work or at home, as you were just describing.

What do you think are some of the early warning signs that one of those deals or life arrangement is costing you more than it's giving you?

In your book, Having It All, frame all of this, that life is a set of exchanges of time, money, energy, effort for a perceived payoff.

So if we go back to what we were talking about with personal utility, and you think about the deals we were just talking about,