DailyJim: What motivates us to want to be different than those around us?

Hello everyone, welcome to another Daily Gym. This is the episode for Tuesday, June 11th, 2024, and I missed a few days. One yesterday, Thursday, I think one other last week. I don't remember. I actually missed quite a few.

As you can hear, my sniffles. I should have done this earlier. My sniffles are still here. They're getting better, but they're still hanging around. Today I want to talk about what motivates us to do something better than other people.

Or maybe to be really different than other people. I don't know what we'll call it. But this idea of, you know, I was thinking last episode was about abilities and how we lose the abilities. And i've thought over these last years i have developed so many tools to help me get better at saying how i'm feeling resolve conflict treat people with love um be emotionally healthy or whatnot but i look at my current state i'm like but i'm not there right now what's going on like my physical emotional health is not very strong i'm not so excited to wake up i don't have a lot of enthusiasm if you want to call it emotional health um i find myself closing off and not expressing as much, definitely hiding from the internet more and more. And I'm like, what? Why? And I think about it, and for me, I think it comes down to the fear of being really different.

So maybe it's not even being better, but it's being really different. Now, there's definitely a fear that I have of being better at a specific thing than other people are. Um and not just slightly better but a lot better and that fear of being an outlier the fear of really standing out um and i found that despite knowing how to do all of these things at least theoretically i'm not doing a lot of them or maybe i'm doing more than i think i am but i don't think I'm doing a lot of them where I'm not doing them to the extent to which I could do them.

And I think a lot of that is because of the fear and the discrepancy between how I behave and how other people behave. So it would be like if I have a lot of friends who play basketball and we're all at about the same level of basketball. If I get very good at basketball, they may no longer want to play basketball with me. Or if I play with them, then I may no longer want to play with them because now I'm trying to pretend I'm not so good or maybe I'm playing with only one hand or I'm hopping around on one foot, whatever I have to do to try to make it even. Or I pretend that I'm not that good and I lose on purpose and then a lot of people don't like that either. I think a lot of times we like the fair match, we like the fair play. And so I've been asking myself, is this what's preventing me from becoming more emotionally healthy? Is this was preventing me from using the stuff that I've built to get better at these skills? I think so. I think it's not. I had a conversation a long time ago with one of the guys who helped start Google Glass, which was one of the original kind of AR goggles that they had, augmented reality goggles. And I remember talking with him once, and he said, it's not about having the skills to do something. It's about having the motivation or desire to do it. So much of it is the internal battle about whether we should or should not do something.

And lately the thing that has been giving me motivation is to frame it as emotional leadership. Now I've said this many times before, I'm sure many of you might be thinking, Oh, this is the same conversation, but it's, For me, that framing helps me go, okay, now I have a motivation to do this. Now I have a reason for standing out and being different. It's not because I want to be emotionally healthy. Because frankly, being different than everyone is not necessarily going to make one healthy or liked or loved.

But asking myself, if I'm not going to do it, who's going to do it? Who is going to be that person in somebody's lives who pulls them up, who gives them hope, who says, you know what, you can do it. And I know a lot of people have done this for me in terms of physical health. You know, I have friends who run ultra marathons or friends who lift a lot of weights or friends who have done a lot of martial arts or friends who have done a lot of yoga and flexibility training. They inspire me to get better. And even if they're not super good at it, just them starting to go out for more runs or starting to pay more attention to what they eat can inspire me. So it doesn't have to be a super high level of emotional leadership, but just a leadership aspect of choosing to go in a different direction.

And I can talk more about this another night. But just saying that I think I felt less motivated to do this podcast and just more afraid of standing out too much from the crowd.

And by the crowd, I mean friends, family, colleagues, just kind of walking into the room and being the odd one out. But what if I just accepted it? Not only accepted it, but wanted to be the odd one out, to be that lighthouse, that beacon that says, uh-uh, we're going in this direction, or I'm going in this direction, I'm hoping to pull people in this direction as well. Maybe a lighthouse is not a good example to try to, you know, Tell boats not to come too close. But maybe it's more of a celestial body that has gravity or magnets or something along those lines. I'm sure I talked about that before. But yeah, just reflecting on how we can know how to do something, but if we don't have the motivation to do it, especially if we don't have this motivation to stand out, to be different than other people, I think our default is to really try to blend in and to just fit in with others and so finding the motivation for why we would want to stand out and how not only why personally do we want to but for whom are we standing out who is this going to help if we go in the direction, even if those people don't necessarily like us going in that direction maybe it'll help them in the long run so a little vague perhaps but i hope the point resonates and uh hope you can understand me through my nasally clogged up voice all right talk to y'all soon bye.