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Episode 130: Internal audience judgment, anorexia, why do people interrupt each other
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all right well we've got a couple of questions today on internal audience judgment question about anorexia and a question about why do people interrupt each other which I can't wait for that because I find myself interrupting people sometimes and kind of annoys me and them equally we get to that when I was at working at true north health center I would listen in on you dr. Lisle talking and during that time you came out with a DVD called the willpower paradox which I highly recommend people wanting to understand the willpower paradox of trying to eat healthy knowing the right thing to do and people struggling to do it is based off of Roy Baumeister's work but I remember in that DVD I remember watching it now maybe 10 15 times just takes me that long to grasp these concepts but when I watched it you had a slide that would describe how a deer if it were somehow to theoretically eat some magical grass that was a little tastier than all the rest of the grass that it would actually be so enthralled in this grass that it wouldn't lift its head up in time to watch the cheetah that's coming towards it by enough feet where it can actually endanger itself not that I fascinating that's this is the pleasure trap this is what you wrote the book on well as you know I read articles once a while get some news into me and sometimes it's just like funny articles here but this was a really interesting article it reminded me of this magical grass it turns out that in Germany there have been a couple of lifeguards that are now issuing warnings that more and more child drownings are actually linked to the parents obsession with their mobile phones and so essentially I've got a hyper normal stimuli on the phones and they're actually not watching their kids as much and these kids are drowning and their parents aren't really realizing it yeah which is that they ought to be very interesting them yeah now that's good good I for that that's exactly what's going on the said just as a sort of an overall view conceptually of what we're looking at here and that is that the what the what the mind is built to do is it's built to run you know sort of a universal cost-benefit analysis on all different potential courses of action that you could be taken at any given moment and then what it's doing is it's simply selecting the the the things that are the most important in sort of slotting them in a in order of efficiency and to prioritize them and so you have shifting attention that's constantly sort of you know juggling multiple agendas and if you can think about you could think this is I don't know if I've talked about this before but the curiosity is why it is that children on a playground you know seven eight nine year old children are so incredibly noisy and they're far noisier than junior high school students or high school students it's not even close and one of the things that you hear is not only quite a lot of noise but you'll hear all this periodic shrieking that's really loud and then you'll hear usually a second later you feel laughter behind it very often in other words you can tell pretty quickly that it's friendly and that everything's fine but the first time you hear the shriek you don't know that it's fine it's it's alarming and it occurred to me that the reason why this is is that the moms that would have been watching these kids in the Stone Age would the kids would be periodically shrieking in order to grab the moms attention away from the general village politicking and gossiping that the moms would be doing was they're picking berries and the that there's a cost-benefit analysis being run in everybody's head and the kids are trying to pull on the moms attention for their own security so by founding a lot of false alarms they continued to draw the moms attention to them you know fairly often as the mom has to worry is that predator said a predator said a predator and then the second he glances away from her friend looks back sees that the kids fine he the kids fine now back back to gossip so there's a there's this sort of conflicting you know there's a dynamics of conflict about what's in the kids best interest which is to have the mom totally focused on the kid versus what's in the mom's best interest which is to you know have to appropriately divide her attention to try to keep the kids safe while shell so furthers other agendas the so that the mind is exquisitely designed over evolutionary time to try to deal with these conflicting agendas problems and if you alter the stimulus environment in any substantial way you're going to get mistakes and so this is a the pleasure trap in all of its guises the you know drugs super normal food any gambling all super normal kind of feedback pornography these are all ways that that are altering the cost-benefit analysis that the brain is running and it winds up causing it's inexorable error in other words there's you're going to increase the error rate as the system is going to get you know essentially tripped into cost-benefit analytic mistakes so this is very interesting I mean we don't know if it's true and that knows we don't know it would be hard to believe that anybody has any good data on this but you know even one anecdotal indication or a couple is still likely to be suspicious in other words it would seem reasonable to expect that parents could be you know quite focused on cell phones I'm actually I have one suspicion about this this report even though I believe that it has undoubtedly happened I wouldn't I wouldn't think it would be obviously too widespread the at all but I'm amazed that we don't have increased amount of deaths and accidents on the freeways due to cell phones for the same reason and I don't know why and I think it's possible that what you have is you sort of have continued dude improvement in safety features of vehicles that that is that is mitigating what almost has to be increased amount of errors from attention splitting as a result of cellphones so I think that I think the effect is there that it's bit but it's being obscured by by advances in safety science so anyway neat little article nice little chilling warning and but good good I Nate well then for a minute there I thought you were speaking Australian with the good eye Nate but [Laughter] alright so let's go with the questions dr. Lyle yeah this listener dr. Lyle I have a totally slack internal audience far less judgmental than I am myself for example I follow a diet running midway between dr. mcdougal and dr. gold hammer however every couple of weeks or so I have say a couple of small pieces of dark chocolate I know I don't need these at all but my eternal audiences like lighten up to pieces won't hurts your overall diet that matters do I have my audiences backwards or is my internal audience simply truly reflecting what the world around me would say as its supposed to having written this I will say it's stricter in other matters keeps me on top of practicing guitar for example yeah I already think that yeah I think that what's going on is that that the person is actually running a pretty reasonable cost-benefit analysis on on these issues and also is is tapping into what the village would say about the person's decision-making and so I have to say after talking to spent my career talking to usually more than a thousand people about that are highly motivated to try to make diet lifestyle decisions that if this person is having a little dark chocolate a couple times a month this is like a 99 percentile player okay and probably they're having really good results and they're probably in very good condition so their internal audience yeah has not absorbed the the gold hammer gold hammer internal audience which would say the gold hammer effect which would say if you're not perfect here went out of line the so the this person has a reasonable brain is still very high conscientiousness really good execution and I think that all you're seeing is is that your your internal audiences is reasonable just as the outside world if they understood what you understand about health diet etc they would observe your execution as being completely reasonable about how well you're doing and so that's why it's giving you the feedback it's given you that's how that was just ik all right yeah yeah it's you know two pieces of dark chocolate I think that's the least of people's concerns when it was at 93% of people's calories come from processed foods animal foods nowadays yeah so that I would say this is an A+ player and the internal audience is giving them a pass on a couple questions they miss good enough yeah there you go all right okay our next question dear dr. Lyle what would you suggest to a person with anorexia everything that you've said about binge eating has made total sense to me from what I've experienced I don't have enter XE myself but I did have severe binge eating problems however I know people who have anorexia and I just see them wasting away in traditional therapy if you like to give that advice an awful nutritional programs that don't do any good well unfortunately the the people that wind up treating this as you would expect the people that wind up treating anorexia of course don't know anything about nutrition and so they're if they have fancy and patient programs they've got a nutrition on nutritionists on staff that doesn't know anything about nutrition either so as a result there's a great deal of bad advice in those areas and it's it's not uncommon for anorexics to be very fastidious and sometimes quite knowledgeable about nutrition and so they they are aware that the people that are so-called treating them are are making mistakes and that the anorexic often knows more than the people that are treating them about nutrition and so that's a problem and and so unfortunately the people treating them are way overconfident in this arena and and they give a lot of bad advice so so anyway that's an independent problem it winds up putting you know sand in the ointment of trying to get this thing right the however what from my viewpoint what anorexia is is effectively OCD from from where it is that I sit anorexia looks exactly like OCD to me that OCD obsessive compulsive disorder is is a essentially what this is is it's a characteristic of essentially overestimating the worst case scenario and and so whether it's hand washing or checking the stove 50 times etc it's there's a it's an interesting combination between the person imagines the possibility of the worst-case scenario that creates anxiety then oftentimes they do something some little thing they tap twice on their shoulder or they dance around the cracks or whatever it is that they do and then the worst-case scenario doesn't happen and I believe that that that that winds up operant conditioning effectively that pattern of behavior so the OCD winds up being a hybrid of this tendency to overestimate the worst-case scenario which is characteristic of of anybody on the bell curve of conscientiousness as we move to the to the further and further away from them from the mean of consciousness which is how much conscientiousness you have in general generally speaking is how much anxiety you have about the Inc average possible loss of the average average member of our species so the nervous system generates an anxiety in response to a certain degree of threat of survival reproductive chips so obviously the average person can get extremely anxious if the chips chips amount gets large but the OCD person is having a great deal of anxiety even when the chips are small and so anyway so that the they're overestimating the likelihood of basically if they touch the counter that they're going to get Ebola and then they're going to die okay so that's that's what's going on inside those heads effectively now the that being the case you can see how anorexia looks very much you know it's it's tracking this pattern so I see the anorexic as someone who observes the world and sees that the vast majority of of people are struggling with their weight huge percentages of them and the anorexic being extremely conscientious it gets wind of this and realizes that there's a great deal of status loss that's associated with having excess weight on them and now they be behind their tremendous determination behind the high conscientiousness they they are determined to not lose that battle and so they're they're going to get an A+ in this they're just going to do it and and this this winds up being a great source of pride as well as a tremendous amount of anxiety that comes with any indication of any weight gain so this is one hell of a trap and it's it's reminiscent of the hand washer that washes their hands 100 times a day even though they're bleeding in raw and however their anxiety is such that they really feel like they cannot risk this and so they they fiddle around for 10min it's accidentally banging there hint hand on you know some manila folder that they were thinking they hadn't figured out that could have a problem and now they got to go wash their hands again and when they wash their hands they get the relief that says oh yeah that's right now we didn't die from flesh-eating bacteria between the last time we watched our Hansen now so therefore the hand-washing is essentially responsible for our continuing survival the so the anorexic also is is constantly relieved that the that the heroic overriding of the hunger Drive winds up resulting in them not getting fat and not gaining weight that day etc so it becomes a game with the scale and a highly anxiety provoking game watching the scale go up and down by the hour and and looking for contingencies and behavior that are responsible for the scale going down and of course that's going to be self-denial of hunger Drive so this is a this is one hell of an OCD trap it's unique in the OCD world because it's deadly so this is this is what makes the stakes so chilling in this particular disorder you're not going to get this in hand-washing and you're not going to get this and checking the stove another OCD thing is when you go over a bump in the road you got to go back and check to see if you killed somebody because then you're going to think that you're going to go to jail for hit-and-run you're going to spend your life in prison and blah blah this is this is how ICD works yet you know great imaginations flying off into the worst-case scenario with a wildly distorted assessment of you know the risk reward ratios that are involved so anorexia being what it is I mean what do you do well the best treatments we have for OCD is to try to get people to challenge their their mistakes by going against their instincts this is really hard this is the ultimate of bidding or djinns so the genes have built up program in that in that brain to to way overestimate the worst-case scenario in certain domains and it is interesting that in this case it appears very much tied to status Barty morphology which is very interesting that it overwhelmingly impacts women and gay men okay so it doesn't look like an accident that the system is sniffing the this major potential status loss here and it's real okay so the person is not completely out of touch with reality at all notice that the number one personal goal people in the United States is to lose weight that is the number one goal it's not making more money it's not finding the love of your life it's to lose weight okay so the anorexic is not out of touch with reality as far as sniffing the status variables in the culture the what they're out of touch with is they've got a distorted view of you know where where it is that they need to go with this it's a runaway trend and so this is this is very difficult to help people out of this trap and and again with any OCD to get people to go against the instinct to break what I believe is a conditioning pattern that will break up or mitigate their belief that what it is that they are doing is the cause of their you know intermittent success so with hand washing we have to have the person go for a period of time an hour or two without washing their hands and they get to see that they actually survived it and they didn't die of flesh-eating bacteria and so we you know we take them through these exercises and we try to build the resilience and and a questioning in their mind that their that their worst case scenario inferences are correct and eventually we can build some stress tolerance and you can oftentimes get the OCD you know it's not it's generally not eradicated but you can dial it down so you know probably there are some experts in the world would tell me well there's a bunch of things you're not considering and that's probably true there there may be some neurochemical shifts that are taking place in this emergency that that are somehow autocatalytic and they just keep a system like this in a sort of a firestorm and it's very hard to break out of I think that there's truth in that the a lot of times this will sometimes mysteriously go away and I don't know that anybody can necessarily point to an event or therapeutic intervention that was responsible for it so yeah this is one one heck of a of a clinically frustrating and obviously tremendously dangerous and scary thing for for people to have to face but yeah it's into my mind it's it's unique among the OCD problems and that that that while they're overestimating the worst case scenario of the status issues etc they're under estimating the rest of their lives and this makes this a heartbreaking heart-wrenching thing to watch and you know even though I'm criticizing the clinical treatment of it not only from you know it's anybody's guess as to how best do this but I do know that obviously a proper knowledge of nutrition could be extremely useful to people to treat this because if you the anorexic understands that if they eat to satiety on the foods that they are being encouraged to eat in inpatient facilities they will get fat okay that will happen they know it's going to happen because they've eaten those foods before and they've gotten fat when I say fat they might be ten percent overweight but they know what that means as a 17 year old girl that means that you are you know is definitely costing you in heterosexual chips arena and they don't want to have that cost they're too high conscientious to to tolerate that cost so the all of the reassurance is by the staff that doesn't have their own act together and descenders don't understand enough not nutrition can be very counterproductive and so hopefully as as better nutritional information somehow arrives in locations where they're dealing with this as they learn about T Colin Campbell and and Caldwell Esselstyn etc it is people learn a little bit more about what legitimate and nutritional science can demonstrate with respect to hitting the satiety mechanisms you know in a way that are comfortable and healthy and keep people lean and healthy then you know then we're going to find better success I believe with this condition alright I just got that yeah that's a very tough one to do so yeah okay our next question dear dr. Lyle I only consider the information-sharing aspect of communication I can't make sense of why most people seem to prefer talking to listening and will interrupt others with their own stories or ideas I have more than one friend who won't let me finish a single sentence and I too am annoyed by this despite theoretically getting more information for less what other aspects are at play well first of all we have to understand that communication is fundamentally for the benefit of the person who's doing the communicating so if we think about communication within the simplest possible structure you have the the sender you have the message and you have the receiver and the the purpose of the communication is to improve the circumstances of the person of the sender that's the point okay now the way we're going to otherwise the sender wouldn't send the message so is somehow in the sender's mind remember the message requires energy it's going to require the neural energy to figure out what message I'm going to send and then it's going to require the physical energy to actually contract the muscles in order to send it and you're also taking time and attention away from other other possible goals so this is no joke there's a this is a concerted sophisticated effort in order to get something so the sender sends a message and the purpose of the message is to alter the behavior of the receiver in some fashion we don't know in what fashion the purposes so let's suppose we've got some guy telling a big grand story about how he held the Roberts sword point on his ship you know to an attractive lady in a bar okay why do we think he's doing this okay we understand that it's not to get her to worry about sharpening her sword putting on on her boat no she's not trying to he's not trying to have her learn something that she can imitate she is trying to grandstand his genetic greatness okay and in order to get laid that's why he's doing this so the point is to impact the behavior of the receiver and in impacting the behavior of the receiver it is perceived by the sender that if the communication is successful in the way it's intending to impact the receiver then it's it's profitable for the sender and it was profitable enough to be worth all the trouble as opposed of everything else they could have been doing with their time so it turns out that we live human beings live in a in a matrix of a scheme process that the number one survival and reproductive variable that's going to it's going to impact most your ability to survive or reproduce as to what is what other people think of you what I call a scheme and so you you are competing for a scheme in esteemed marketplaces in in your version of the Stone Age village you've got potential mates potential friends potential trading partners as well as family members and so these these define the four basic relationships of human nature and so what human beings are doing is is that they are their commune they're chirping along essentially and when they're chirping they're chirping with a with an intention in mind the attention may not be in proft improbably isn't conscious in other words they're simply there running natural programs inside the system attempting to make an impact on the receiver now Richard Dawkins would say they're manipulating the receiver and he uses that term very narrowly and scientifically in other words that he's not using it pejoratively or acting like this is sneaky he's simply saying the purpose of the communication is to manipulate the behavior of the receiver and that is correct okay it's a one way or the other it's to alter the behavior of the receiver maybe not in that moment obviously it could easily be in the future so father could tell the son listen if this set of circumstances ever comes up you know there's a fire I want you to go down the fire chute okay over here this is how we're going to do it yours the ladder blah blah blah so we're trying to you so these things can be absolutely aimed at influencing the behavior of the receiver in the future so so people that are and to think about this that of course people are going to interrupt each other and they're going to be trying to push their own agenda because when one of them is talking they're attempting to manipulate the receiver and the receivers like well now wait a second I have an agenda and I'm trying to manipulate you okay and so you're going to see that this is a swirling cauldron of efforts to try to get survival and reproductive games now why would we listen at all because very often what the communicator or the sender is sending is a useful message for the receiver and it's going to actually influence the Seavers behavior why because it's going to improve their behavior relative to what their behavior would have been without the communication so the so it would have been impossible to evolve a communication system within a species if it weren't the case that the net benefit of receiving information wasn't wasn't outweighing the net benefit or the net possible loss of being duped on occasion into doing something in the sender's best interest but it was actually costly to you so communications are going to come in two general patterns they're going to be both win-win communications ie a father telling his son hey get out of the street and the second would be a win-lose which is the slick salesman telling some some little old lady hey I want you would you invest in my swampland it's a good deal so that would be win lose so you're going to have obviously sophisticated mechanisms in the head of the receiver to try to be analyzing the utility the information and whether or not they're quote being manipulated in quotes in other words in the negative way to into a win-lose situation so that's when somebody gives you a red red ribbon deal on a car and you know on some used car and you're feeling like way second that's a little too good to be true or an investment proposition the Madoff victims didn't think that through okay it's just a little too good rate of return and they didn't sniff anything that was up some people did but some other people on Wall Street actually sniffed but there's no way that guy could have been generating those rates of return he couldn't have possibly been that much better than his competitors in the market but the normal person wouldn't have known this they just would have thought that it was you know just a good deal so the anyway that's neither here nor there so the point is is that information is not being generated on any kind of altruistic basis for quote some informational utility some general informational utility it's always being generated by a sender with a computation in mind that this is a this is an excellent use and an efficient use of their time right now to do this and they're attempting to essentially sow and reap some some survival and reproductive chips involved in ie generally esteem and so so of course there's going to be a battle to to do that process and and pushy disagreeable people like me you know don't let you finish your waiting a wild it would use that clip finally we've got a good chance all right very good all right let's go on to something else all right well we have a caller on hold Oh getting to ask a question sure I'd like to welcome program Brian from Jacksonville Brian welcome to show hello Brian oh yeah you doing Brian hey how's it going good job Jacksonville tonight cool and breezy that's all right oh yeah that's right a little bit warm but uh not too bad you know okay all right what's going on what are we working on and what are we trying to figure out okay so um my question is about one to one to quit basically not a job but a goal um my deal is I you know my original was IT and when I got you know I was I was in the service and then when I got out I had the GI Bill and IT industry wasn't doing too well they're bringing a lot of h-1b workers so I kind of went into accounting which um you know it's not that I enjoyed IT more than accounting but accounting paid the bill so I started doing that and I got a undergraduate degree in it and then after doing that for a while I happen to find out just by happenstance that I had actually more money on my GI bill because Congress passed my bill basically so I you know I figured if I'm going to do this I might as well be a CPA it's more for is more for like satisfy my ego right because I'm like if I'm going to be an accountant I want to be the best accounting I can be accountant I can be and I'm kind of stuck in the local area per se like I have a son here so where I'm at um you know there's a lot of you know there's I don't know I kind of wanted to State work so the the pay is not that great I I did it just again more for ego purposes so I went back to school I got my masters so I can sit for the CPA I graduated it was hard it was a notoriously difficult program but I did it and now I've been studying for the CPA exams there are four of them and it's you know it's it's a it's a tough exam you know what I mean and part of its been I've had stuff come up my personal life I went through a custody battle and that takes a large amount of time money and resources I want to remove I'm part of it it's very hard it's very hard testing site for and part of it is i procrastinate about it and so it's six months on it and I haven't taken the first test about one-third of the way through for staying for the first test I'm kind of wondering when I should just throw up that white flag like should I you know I don't know how do you decide when or how would you recommend deciding when to say all right obviously this isn't working out I should abandon this thing that I'm working towards I mean I would get I would get a salary bump from it I get prestige and it'd be embarrassing to just quit on the other hand it's like it's just a very difficult test and you can do practice tests and I just don't know I can pass them in you know just to sit down for that test you have to have a master's in accounting it's only 25% of people pass all four tests on the first time so it's a very dreadful test and I'm just I'm just not quite sure what I should do you know whether I should just like yeah go ahead yeah let's look at a few things here the uh-huh so let's let's try to we're trying to get a feel for what your what your mind is doing is it's it's running a cost-benefit analysis on the whole thing and as an accountant you can appreciate that okay so the what we're going to try to do is we're going to try to look through to see if we can understand all the elements of the cost-benefit analysis and see if there's anything in that analysis that's got some funny little tails to it that we don't that we haven't examined and put on the microscope well enough and so that that we might sharpen our estimate of the real value of that issue okay so let's look at this let's look at straight money for example what what's your age Brian I am 37 37 okay so we've got sort of a long career in front of us so the and we do you think that is in terms of how it is that you like counting and how much you've got invested so far do we have a feel that this is probably what you're going to be doing here for the next twenty something years well what I'd like to do is merge my IT experience with my accounting experience so a new trend in the field as a candidate is auditing accounting information systems so what they do is they bring I IT guys in an accounting guys in because you can't just audit the transactions because you also have to know whether the actual systems are secure so they bring the IT guys in to audit the system so if you have both your CPA with IT experience they look at that really favorably because basically you're two for one right you can do and that's unusual skill set to have literally how to bring new people in to do that let me ask you this is it enough to have your IT experience and your existing accounting background with a master's degree or is the CPA a huge indicator of capability that would make a big difference it is a huge indicator of okay which is why so hard got it makes complete sense okay so so you can smell that there might be quiet few chips on the table if you were to pull this thing off yeah I've never seen someone who's not a second level level supervisor in other words who's not a supervisor of a supervisor who hasn't there if you have your cker at least two levels off in management I'd off the bat generally god I'm handing this where that was on the case right and you also it sounds to me like you've got something you know as much as i TN accounting people going to have I'm going to call it quote passion for the idea of having this sort of integrated career with these two things yeah it'd just be a really nice way to combine my experience and time it often or not I suppose yeah there you go yeah I mean if we're talking passion we could talk to artists about some great new parking technique but but you're look at this and what I hear is that you you can smell some really nice perks and chips on the table and inherently interesting in terms of the integration between the IT and the accounting correct okay all right so it sounds like this is not just some some halfway interesting peacock feathers on you to have a CPA that there's and you know another eight thousand dollars from the state because you have this thing that there's actually some potentially significant chips associated with this achievement that's how yeah I would say so yeah that's it all right you know what's worth doing it's totally worth going on so if it's totally worth doing the fact that it's hard is is you know it's moderately unpleasant however there's a we have to look at this thing as a competitive problem because they're not going to ask for the impossible they're just asking for the different you know it's difficult if you happen to be some some person that had an extra ten IQ points or something then then it might be relatively simple okay but for most people everybody that I have ever known took that exam it was a fricking dogfight okay it was a it was a major major challenge of their life and so when I look at something like that it's like okay all right this means that you know we're going to have to bring our a-game it means that we're going to be organized as hell we're going to have our life organized around this thing we're going to time it because my understanding is the clock doesn't start till you've passed the first exam or something like that I can't remember how that works you've got that correct right so you've got two years to pass is that what it is two years to pass all the exams after you pass the first one it used to be the 12 months that they extended it I believe to 16 months but they may very get harder oh yeah okay say listen so the truth of the matter is is that you can't afford to go in ready to take one exam you got to be ready to take - Val you're going to do it okay so you're going to take your sweet time and there's going to be steady techniques that that you know things that that I've identified but I actually coached somebody through this once and it was remarkable that they did not have strategy that I gave them and my the strategy I gave them was a hell of a lot better than the one they were using so I you know I'm not going to kind of work my way through that we can you can I can call you can talk to me later and I can walk you through this in about 15 minutes about how it is that we would have a strategy and my strategy may not be the best strategy but it's it's something that you you should know about the the there's quite a few little nuances - the good thing about this is that it's a hell of a lot of memory work okay yeah memory right yeah that's kind of what this thing is so this is a big memory project and and what we're going to want to do is we want to do something that most people would never do which is to go in ready for two instead of ready for one and you guys lock doesn't start till you till you're ready so you're going to actually go in heavily you know you may not be fully ready for two but you are 'we ready for the second one in other words before we ever take the first one the end we did the first one that we take probably a good strategy is to don't be taking the easy one first so we want to take one that we think is relatively difficult and we're going to and you know we're going to need to be ready we're going to just swing and try to hit that thing while we're already ready for number two okay that gives us then the remaining 16 months to pass three exams of which we're already pretty well ahead of one-on-one okay yoga this is though whenever I see something difficult like this and it seems exhausting and impossible and people are wondering whether they're worth it the maybe it is worth it maybe it's not worth it now my eyeball estimate of this thing is that it's worth it you're 37 there's a lot of chips on the table okay you've gone to a lot of trouble to get this degree to allow yourself to sit for this exam you you have started the studying and you realize oh boy given my you know giving a non-urgent level of effort is not getting it done it's correct okay it's set up that way they've they've set this bar artificially high in order to make this very exclusive so that you can make big dough our attitude about this can be like good fair enough okay so once we talk this thing through one of the things you've got a little circulating countervailing pressure against you doing this is because you're not sure you can do it okay so there's a this is what I call the ego trap and that is that your mind is running a cost-benefit analysis on whether or not it's worth you know because some of the people out there in the world who know you and know what you've accomplished or if they ever met you and cross-examined you about what you were doing and you said oh well I'm you know going to try to be a CPA they would accuse should be able to be a CPA if you wanted to be a CPA okay that would be the default judgment of people and so you are walking in with the expectation if you got off your ass and we're reasonably hardworking you would be rewarded with the CPA now you are sitting on knowledge that says that might not be true because you all people don't know how how hard it is okay so what this does is it causes you to pause and and realize you know what I might be better off not trying because if I don't try then I haven't failed and that that is the procrastination dynamic that leads to people not reaching their potential okay this is akin to a young hunter in the Stone Age who is you know is seen as average by the village and then when he goes out on his own for one of his first hunts he comes across the wildebeests wouldn't put a snake hole and bludgeons it and then throws the spear into it and drags home and they have a big feast and now all the prettier girls are starting to flirt with them okay so now he's got extra status more than he deserves and now he's not so motivated to go on the next hunt cage is he's running the cost benefit and the cost benefit says you know what sprained your ankle right before the next time let's find a way to not go because I don't want to give this status back because it's I'm about to turn this into reproductive currency okay so this is the the mind will run a cost benefit on whether or not it's worth making effort not just the perceived probability of success and relative to the payoff but also the cost of failure okay and so in this case the cost of failure could be pretty high because people would expect that if you put your mind to it and worked out it you should be able to pass they don't understand this okay we I do I understand it so we have to face this squarely that the world just flat-out doesn't understand the nature of this problem and we have to understand also that you know what what the hell what are what else are we going to do we're not going to let the ego trap get us and stop us from get it's a hell of a shot okay there's a big upside here it's a lot of work to do we've got to analyze you know we've got probably 2,000 hours of studying ahead of us it's a lot we're going to have to cut back other things cut back at your work if you can take vacation days take less pay you know we're going to have to do a lot of stuff hire somebody to do your cooking you know whatever this is you're going to war and the way that I look at problems like this is I think about okay what would I have done to get out of Nazi Germany what would I had done okay you know what every damn creative neuron in my head would have been figuring out how they held to get out of there I'm saying I would have schemed I would lie die would have cheated I would coalition build I would have bribe anything possible to get out you see I'm saying so I Hey yeah you're on a desert island you're like yeah there's no whining and taking second place it's like hey you got to survive so if we actually take the mint dis mentality to this problem and you're like you know what win or lose I am going to give this thing a hell of a shot I'm going to go in there with 1.7 of these exams under my fingers okay maybe two years from now before we do this do you have any clock on when you have to start it no you don't have a I don't have a clock on when to start it but the thing is my basically they test me on everything that was in my degree except more expansive so the longer I wait to cover a subject the more you the more I'd forget you know what yeah I do want very seriously yeah that will believe me you're going to be studying harder now than you studied to get your degree okay so you'll you'll recover that stuff just fine and through repetition repetition and organization you will integrate integrate integrate integrate this information okay so if you study very hard for the next you know 18 months 18 months from today you'll know a hell of a lot more than you did the day you graduated with your degree okay yeah so so we'll talk we'll talk another time about how to organize that information vision so that you retain it very well so I can all have a short conversation with you offline there about how we're going to do that and also we may look into some other people's schemes and make sure I'm not missing something important the however the but the idea is motivationally the idea is hey you know this is like cortez burning the ships when he got to the new world like hey we're taking this territory ok our attitude is we're going to give this thing a hell of a shot we're going to invest 2,000 hours and the payoff could be a lot of money and a lot of a lot of chips ok over the course of your career what could it be 50,000 a year for for 25 years it could be a net net worth of a million five and so to two thousand hours hmm pretty good payback for that if we lose we lose you know if it turns out that somehow despite really good organization of effort that you don't quite have the chops to do it then we can live with that and we can always your psychology will always adjust to the process of you giving something your very best shot and then falling short fair enough ok but let's not let's not not give it your best shot now it may turn out that in the middle of given your best shot you look at the whole thing and say you know what too much trouble that's fine your mind is going to keep swirling around the cost-benefit analysis on a day to day basis of whether or not it's worth it ok so that that's in there but what I don't want to have you do is to have the ego trap be quietly dissuading you from this because that's a that's a distortion as to what the real costs are because the village is not watching that carefully and it doesn't have that high of expectations the ego trap is mostly a fiction inside your own head and and yet it will pull you towards giving up in a situation like this in a way this is really not in your best interest okay so the attitude is what the hell we only live once and if you can do it if you can if you can achieve a position where you are highly respected highly skilled and and well-paid IT accounting you know amalgam person where you your you know your this is a fancy new kind of territory that's going to be expanding and there's going to be a need for the rest of your life for such individuals what the heck you've got gone to a lot of trouble to put these pieces in place you know let's give it a hell of a shot that makes sense okay yeah that makes sense how does that feel yeah I mean it feels good you know there's always there's just always that doubt of whether I can actually do it but I guess the only way to to really find out like you said I you know just like psychologically be in the mindset of that you're actually in a war and just you know see what happens I would say this also that when I described some of the techniques study techniques hopefully you will get a increased feeling of confidence that it's possible and so the that's an important part of this so let's not forget this okay Oh deputed I did this before the the change in the person's feeling of control over the situation was very market okay I press Cal it clearly had not known how to master this material in a way that she could retain it well and and she was she was doing a conventional studying method and she was overwhelmed okay and once once she once she did it the way I told her to do it she was good to go and she she went four for four and got it done Nora that's impressive yes it is it's possible okay so we'll get a shot alright thanks thanks for the call Brian and you can email me at dr. Doug Lyall at yahoo.com email me and then we'll set up a time when we'll chat our way through that okay all right sounds good gotcha very good
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