How To Actually Have An Elite Mindset

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**Dr. Alok Kanojia** (1:03)
Hey chat, welcome to the Healthy Gamer GG podcast. I'm Dr. Alok Kanojia, but you can call me Dr. K. I'm a psychiatrist, gamer, and co-founder of Healthy Gamer. On this podcast, we explore mental health and life in the digital age, breaking down big ideas to help you better understand yourself and the world around you. Let's dive right in.
A lot of people are obsessed with how athletes think. We ask them in interviews and things like that, how do you handle doubt? How do you handle work ethic? Because we are looking at our lives and we struggle with all of these things. Today, what we're going to do is listen to what an athlete says, and break down the psychological mechanism of what they're doing, why it works, and how to implement it. Let's start with one of the greats of all time, Michael Jordan.

**Michael Jordan** (1:54)
Leroy Smith, he started the whole process for me because when he made the team and I didn't, I wanted to prove not just to Leroy Smith, not just to myself, but to the coach who actually picked Leroy over me. I wanted to make sure you understood. You made a mistake, dude.

**Dr. Alok Kanojia** (2:11)
So Michael Jordan is notorious for trying to prove other people wrong and taking things personally. And this is where I'm going to start out of the gate by saying I think this is a non-optimal strategy, okay? So generally speaking, I think when we talk about performance, I advocate for like an ego-less approach. I advocate for trying not to prove things to other people. And why is that? So if I think I'm better than you, right? I want to prove to you that I'm the best. So I'm going to practice really hard and I'm going to show up and we're going to compete. And then what if I lose, right?
What impact does that have? I put all my eggs into the basket of I am better than you. I will prove to you that you are wrong and I am right. And I work really hard, but you're also working really hard and maybe you're better at it than I am. And then what happens if I lose? So I've worked with a lot of people who are very outcome oriented. I want to get straight A's, I want to be number one, I want to be the best.
And I personally think this is sort of a like a lose-lose strategy, because if you try to be number one and you fall short, you fall short of your goal, this can sometimes result in negative motivation. For most of us, it results in negative motivation. And it's tough because in your brain, you're like investing a lot of energy for a particular reward. But if you don't get the reward, the behavior is oftentimes not reinforced, right? So I studied really hard to get an A. If I get a B, I feel disappointed. And I'm less inclined to study again. This is what happens with most people. And even if you win, that can also result in problems. So a friend of mine was a first year law student at Harvard Law School. And I asked him, you know, what's it like being there? And he's like, it's awful. And I was really surprised because this is like really competitive. A lot of people want to go. And then I kind of asked him like, what's so bad about it? And he's like, one of the worst things that you can do is take a bunch of kids who used to be the smartest in the class and then make them average overnight. So there are some weird things that can happen when we focus on being the best. We can suddenly, we'll keep on climbing until we're average and then that's a blow to our ego, right? Because our motivation is I'm striving to be the best, striving to the best, I am the best, I am the best. And then suddenly like I rise enough to be average and then now I feel like I'm not the smartest. In fact, I feel the stupidest. Like when you graduate from Harvard Law School or Harvard Medical School at the bottom of your class, you're still a Harvard graduate, you feel like a complete idiot. So we also see a lot of problems like imposter syndrome and stuff kind of crop up when you sort of have this outcome orientation. But I think there's a bigger and more subtle reason why like I don't like Michael Jordan's strategy. So sure, it can be very motivating, right? I'm gonna prove them wrong. Like that's a very powerful motivator. I'm gonna show them one v one me mid bro, one v one me mid. I think the reason that that may work for Jordan is because he's Jordan. Like you get what I'm saying? Like I've worked with so many people who are like, I'm gonna be the best. I'm gonna show the rest of the world how I'm better than them, but they're not Jordan.