How to let go of being a "good" person (with Dolly Chugh)
How to Be a Better Human
TED
4.1 • 1.4K Ratings
🗓️ 22 August 2022
⏱️ 35 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Most of us want to be good people–but what even makes a person “good?” And is our fixation on whether or not we ARE good holding us back from becoming even better? Dolly Chugh is an author and social psychologist who studies the psychology of good people. In this episode, she explains how ethical behavior is full of complexity and paradox, and shares insights on why even striving to be a “good-ish” person can actually help us grow into the better, nicer person we want to become.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Ted Audio Collective. |
| 0:02.0 | Audio Collective. |
| 0:04.0 | I'm your host Chris Duffy, and this is how to be a better human. |
| 0:12.0 | In today's episode, we're going to dive a little bit deeper |
| 0:15.0 | into the whole premise of this show. |
| 0:18.0 | If you've been listening for a while, |
| 0:19.0 | you have probably heard me say before that |
| 0:21.0 | I am not the better human of the title. |
| 0:22.0 | Very clearly, I am not. I am not the better human of the title very clearly I am not I am |
| 0:24.3 | just a guy who is talking to some people who seem to have it figured out so hopefully |
| 0:29.3 | you and I can learn together and over the course of so many episodes I have heard about a |
| 0:33.7 | plethora of ways that we can try and be better. And hopefully some of those topics |
| 0:37.9 | that we've covered have resonated with your own efforts to be a little less |
| 0:41.1 | terrible. But how do we know when we've achieved our target? How do we |
| 0:44.5 | know when we are officially a good person? It seems like at some point we've got to be done, right? At some point, |
| 0:51.5 | we have to hit the finish line. Well, today's guest, |
| 0:54.3 | psychologist Dolly Chug, she thinks that not only are we never done, she thinks |
| 0:59.1 | that the goal of being a good person is actually something we shouldn't be striving for at all. |
| 1:04.0 | Here is a clip from her TED Talk where she talks all about it. |
| 1:07.0 | If you needed to learn accounting, you would take an accounting class or if you become a parent we pick up a book and we read about it. |
| 1:17.2 | We talk to experts, we learn from our mistakes, we update our knowledge, we just keep getting better. We just keep getting better. |
| 1:25.0 | But when it comes to being a good person, |
... |
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