How to Stop Playing Somebody Else’s Game and Finally Feel Happy
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What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
Welcome to 2%. I'm your host, Michael Easter. Today, we are talking to a man who has lived rent-free in my head for the past five years. His thinking has improved my life more than anyone else. The guide made me throw out my fitness tracker and stop caring about what it told me. He also made me realize that meeting a certain salary ultimately was not going to make me that much happier. He also reframed my relationship to news and social media and helped me use it in a way that improved my life rather than made me more neurotic. He even helped me understand why it was that my students who got Bs, B pluses, A minuses did so much better in the long run than my students who got As. And finally, he helped me understand why it is that the NBA when I was a kid is so much better than the NBA today.
Now, if you have read my book, Scarcity Brain, you're going to be familiar with today's guest. We're talking to Tina Nguyen. He's a philosopher at the University of Utah, and he has got a new book that I highly, highly recommend everyone read.
How does value capture affect our personal goals?
It's called The Score, How to Stop Playing Somebody Else's Game. In fact, in my book, Scarcity Brain, I traveled all the way up to Salt Lake City, Utah to sit down with him, and I devoted an entire chapter of that book to his work. That's how important I think it is. So we got a sweeping episode coming at you, but it has a ton of utility. It'll help you understand what it means to live a good life and ways in your life that you are being steered in directions you may not want to go in and what to do about it. So let's get into the episode.
On his podcast, Chasing Life, I'm Dr. Sanjay Gupta. CNN's chief medical correspondent brings you the secrets of the happiest and healthiest people on the planet so that you can live your best life.
Are some people just born happier than others? And what might they be doing that the rest of us aren't?
Follow Chasing Life with Dr. Sanjay Gupta on Apple, Spotify, iHeart Podcasts, Amazon Music, or wherever you get your podcasts.
Thanks for coming on the show. Thanks, man. Good to see you again. Yeah, it's good to see you too. Last time we met, you introduced me to the greatest, I believe it was a raisin croissant I've ever had in my life. And I constantly still think about it. And speaking of rich, fatty foods, here's actually where I want to start. I want to start with weight loss. Because I think that everyone at some point in their life has tried to lose a pound or two. So you used weight loss and your own weight loss journey in the book to get into this larger argument you make. So walk us through... weight loss and what happened to you.
The weight loss story is kind of like entangled with this whole like physical story, right? Like I grew up as a video gamer and reading nerd, hated my body, uninterested in movement, and... I think I just drank relentless amounts of juice all the time. And at some point, I had gotten big enough that my knees hurt and it exhausted me to walk from my car to my department, which I didn't like. And so I started trying to lose weight. And the first few things I did were really simple and straightforward. I cut out a few things. I basically stopped drinking orange juice in my body. Like I drink too much orange juice. Like my body, my stomach just felt better. I'd made a few tweaks. And I think a lot of people will recognize these tweaks.
So this is like back before the current awareness of like whatever protein primal diets. This was like 20 something years ago. And I just shifted away from like, noodles with cheese every single meal and started making like stews with meat and like with like rich rib tuber stew. And I just started feeling good. I lost a little bit more weight. I started exercising more. And then... my weight loss stopped. And I like, I really got focused on that. And I started being like, okay, I got to track stuff. So I got a tracker. I started entering a lot of information in. And each time my weight would drop a little more and it would, stall and I would have to do something more dramatic.
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Chapters
6 chapters
1
What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
0:00–1:02
2
How does value capture affect our personal goals?
1:02–11:27
3
What personal experiences illustrate the dangers of metrics?
11:27–31:15
4
How can games and metrics influence our happiness?
31:15–48:37
5
What role does quantification play in our daily lives?
48:37–1:18:40
6
How do achievement and striving play differ in motivation?
1:18:40–1:24:28
Speakers
5 identifiedMore from Two Percent with Michael Easter
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