Where do I get my dopamine?
I treat external validation almost as a drug: I constantly need to consume it in order to function, and when I lack it in my life I enter a cycle where I overthink and overreact to challenging scenarios. This has manifested myself in my work, interests and goals; for instance, I have defined career paths for myself not based on my actual interests, but on the prestige of the company that I work for and how much compensation I would receive as I was under the impression that these two things were the sole determinators of intelligence and popularity.
I would say that my desire for External Validation dates back to when I was young. One of the things I remember throughout my childhood is my parents constantly telling me to not worry about those around me, but rather focus on self improvement and comparing only to previous versions of myself. However, their actions were not consistent with their words: whenever I was not doing something very well, they would compare me to one of my peers — “Vincent is hard at work grinding math competitions while you’re outside hanging out with your friends,” or “Alex spends every moment of his free time practicing the piano, why can’t you be as self-disciplined or consistent at him?” I strongly believe that the inconsistency here is one of the reasons why I have been conditioned to benchmark my achievements relative to others’ success, as opposed to achievements that I had previously unlocked for myself.
Another cause for my desire of external validation stems from High School. One defining characteristic of this time was that while my parents had always said that “we support whatever interests you have and we will be happy no matter what college you attend,” there was a subtle expectation that I would have to attend a top school for college. From when I was in elementary school, my mom would obsess over the list in the Newspaper that gets published every June of where all of the local high school students would be attending college; part of the reason why I moved to attend high school in New York City is that my parents believed that this would strongly increase my chance of being able to break out of the bubble that I had lived in since I was a child and to expand the range of opportunities that I would be able to receive. In many ways, I did accomplish this dream, but I don’t want to imagine how my parents must have felt if I was not able to achieve their expectations in this realm.
Again, while my parents have stated that they would have supported me no matter where I would have went for college and that high school was still only a time to compare one against the self, I can’t help but feel like they have treated my high school experience as a zero-sum game. My mom especially strongly believes in something that one of her friends have told her, which is that “as Asians in America, you are going to have to put in more effort than other minorities in order to achieve the same level of success — there is no way around that.” This perhaps served as the foundation of the zero-sum game, and everything was a competition. Instead of the parties and social life that is expected out of most high school students (as entertainment/media like High School Musical shows), I spent my entire high school working in a research lab in Florida, expanding my technical skills and also preparing for the scientific research competitions that defined much of my experience throughout this time frame. To the same end, my parents would subtly nudge me to find out what the relative GPAs of my classmates were at this time such that I could better benchmark myself for what schools I should be applying for during the college application process. I became under the impression that high school was just another zero sum competition: only those who were able to come out on top were able to reap the benefits, and the only way to do so was to beat everyone else instead of working together.
I believe that these two experiences in my life serve as the foundation for why I rely on external validation as opposed to internal validation. Through being compared with my peers at a young age, I became conditioned on being better than those peers that I was compared to. The zero-sum games I played in high school only furthered this; I started to see other people’s successes as a threat - something that I am actively working to unlearn right now. I believed that I needed the validation and respect from my peers in order for me to demonstrated that I am above them — which is the direct contributor to external validation for me.
However, relying constantly on external validation is also one of my greatest roadblocks to date. I think that one of the main frustrations I experience are that when I entered Stanford, I considered myself technically stronger than many of my peers. However, throughout my Stanford experience I’ve explored many different areas, ranging from Physics to Aerospace Engineering, and spent most of my time outside of classes dabbling in startups and the world of technology. I’ve started to realize that most of my peers have either caught up to me or exceeded my ability technical-wise, and I believe the root cause for this is that my desire for external validation makes me oblivious to the fact that I need to improve my foundations in order to further my skills at a higher level, too. Instead of playing with the most innovative technologies, many of my peers were focused on getting the basics — the foundations — right, and now they are at a better place to understand and implement these ideas than I am. What I need to do right now is to completely let go of then notion of external validation such that I will never let this happen again.