Well, I just had a call with a young fellow, and I think there were enough principles at play here that it was worth telling you what happened in the call.

Unfortunately, we couldn't complete the call because he decided to do a call in with me

on a speaker phone by a gas station in his car and that you know if you're going to do a call in

in general I would prefer if you had

reasonably decent audio because otherwise the post-processing is quite quite a challenge but anyway so

the issue was he's a young man in his early to mid-20s and he is unmotivated. He wants to go to the gym. He doesn't go to the gym. He wants to stop buying coffees at a convenience store. He keeps buying coffees at a convenience store, he's frustrated and down on himself, angry with himself, calls himself lazy and so on.

And of course I asked him if it was a fair way to characterize it and what we do we do all

of this to some degree what we do is we give ourselves rewards and punishments for good or bad behavior.

I was just talking about this with regards to the John Fowle's classic novel called

the Magus or the Magus. We give ourselves points for good or bad behavior. Oh, I did well this week. I deserve a treat.

O, I didn't do what I said I was going to do. I didn't do what I was supposed to do. I'm a bad person.

The bribe and punishment paradigm of human motivation. And so I asked the young man, where do you think this came from? Or where do you think this mindset comes from? He did kind of fog out quite a bit, but it turns out that what happened was, or at least the central thing that came to his mind was that his father when he was young would tell him that he had to do, he had to be the best in school, he had to do well in school school and if he didn't do well in school

then his father would yell at him with apparently some odd humor but would be

quite aggressive towards him and would say it's bad you need to do better you need to be the best.

You need to be the best. Now I'm all down for obviously big ambitions that's all kinds of fine with me they want to be the best yeah

aim for the aim to be the best why not if you're gonna do something why don't aim to be

the best at what you do but the problem is I said so your father was really focused on excellence right yes to be the best okay

But you in your 20s are unmotivated, a huge underachiever, constantly rewarding and punishing

yourself and getting nowhere in life.

He said, is that an accurate representation of your situation and he said yes.

And I said, so was your father who was all about being the best and excellence?

Was your father an excellent father.

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