When asked how they felt, 93% of high flyers (people either went to very prestigious colleges and/or had very prestigious jobs) who had been out of a job for more than 3 months said they felt like "I have no idea who I am".

Why is this?

Because the systems within which we operate (the college we go and the work we do) have the natural tendency to become our identity. If you do nothing, this WILL happen to you. Your sense of being, and your sense of self-worth will become tied to your job or your college.

And this is BY DESIGN. Your brain is wired to optimize for things it interprets as "rewards" and try to avoid whatever it perceives as "punishment". In behavioral psychology, this phenomenon is referred to as "Reinforcement learning".

Reinforcement learning in itself makes sense, the problem is this: a natural consequence of this wiring is that whatever you're not immediately excellent at (which is most things of any real value), your brain sees as punishment and will actively try to force you to resort to things you're already great at, and build your entire identity around it.

This means that with time, you will go from "THIS IS SOMETHING I'M GOOD AT" to "THIS IS WHO I AM".

There are 2 natural side-effects of this:

1. It stops you from being able or willing to experiment or evolve

2. If that thing that gives you identity (your job or college) is taken away, you will lose your identity.

In this video, I share 3 practical ways to rewire your brain and wean yourself of this problem, so that you can teach yourself to become someone who evolves, who is able to experiment and whose self of identity is independent of the systems within which they exist. Building anything of value involves a lot of experimentation and I want you to be someone who can pull it off

Sounds interesting? Well, dig in!

Chapters

00:00 Why “what do you do?” is a trap

01:10 Reinforcement learning explained simply

03:30 How dopamine shapes identity

05:15 Why success limits experimentation

06:45 The dangerous side of job-based identity

07:20 My banking story: why the fear of starting over can limit you

12:00 Dopamine dependency in real life

14:20 Fix #1: build non-prestige friendships

16:10 Perspective outside elite careers

18:40 Fix #2: be a beginner again

19:09 Podcast failure & ego reality check

21:11 Fix #3: stop introducing yourself by your job title

22:08 Identity vs what you do

23:32 Final framework to expand identity

------------------------------

Connect with Ayo on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/ioyegbadeStream the podcast on Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/2slCYeTCsSW1usBQeXdUJp?si=7152f76cce464b5

#shorts #fyp #explore #podcast #timeindependence