Talk about turning pro and the concept of being a professional. If we accept the idea of resistance with a capital R, that's our own internal tendency to sabotage ourselves when we try to set out to write our book or do our movie or follow our calling, whatever it is, then the question becomes, well, how do you overcome this thing?

And what worked for me was the idea of turning pro. For years when I was struggling and could never get it together, I realized that at one point that I was just thinking like an amateur and that if I could flip a switch in my mind and think like a professional, that I could overcome some of the things.

Like when I think of a great pro, I think of Kobe Bryant or Michael Jordan or Tom Brady or somebody like that. And so like a professional, some of the characteristics of a professional as opposed to an amateur. A professional shows up every day. A professional stays on the job all day or the equivalent of all day.

I mean, a lot of us who have jobs, our professionals in our jobs. But when we come home at night and we try to, you know, start our band or, you know, our fiddle band, we flame out on that because we can't sort of carry over that professional attitude.

A professional, as I said this before, does not take success or failure personally. An amateur will, right? An amateur gets a bad review, bad response of this and they just crap out. I don't want to do this anymore, right? A professional plays hurt. Like if Kobe Bryant, Michael Jordan, you know, if they've tweaked the hamstring, they're out there, you know.

They'll die before they'll be taken off the court, you know. Whereas an amateur, when he or she confronts adversity, will fold. Oh, it's too cold out, you know. I've got a, you know, I've got the flu, that kind of thing. Another thing, an amateur worries about how they feel.

Like, oh, I don't feel like getting out of bed this morning. I don't feel like really doing my work today. A professional doesn't care how they feel, they do it, right? So an amateur has amateur habits and a professional has professional habits. And my book, Turning Pro, is about that, flipping that switch in your head that costs no money.

You don't have to take a course. You don't have to get certified. All you have to do is sort of say to yourself, if you can do it, and it ain't easy, okay, I'm going to attack this thing, whatever it is now, as if I were Kobe Bryant. You know, would he quit, you know, when he didn't feel like doing it?

Absolutely not. So, and, oh, here's another aspect of Turning Pro that worked for me. I had like about a 10-year career as a screenwriter, as we talked about with King Kong Lives. And one of the things you learn is that screenwriters, a lot of times, will have their one-man corporations.

And they will not sign a contract as themselves. You know, it won't be Andrew Huberman on the contract. It'll be your corporation, Huberman Lab, FSO, for services of, Andrew Huberman. And I really love that idea of thinking of yourself as a two-part thing. You're the CEO of this thing, and then you're also the guy that does the work.

And I would find that if I was just thinking of myself as the guy that's doing the work, I have a hard time pitching my ideas. I'm sort of too shy. But if I'm the CEO of my company, of my corporation, I'm a pro. I can go in there and pimp the hell out of it, you know?

So that idea of looking at yourself as a professional kind of takes all judgment out of any failures that we've had. We don't blame ourselves anymore for procrastinating or being perfectionists or giving in to fear or self-doubt or anything. We just say, well, okay, I did that when I was thinking like an amateur.

But now I'm going to think like a pro. And a pro just doesn't yield to that stuff. So that's a mind shift, a mindset shift that really helped me a lot. I love that. I mean, so much of that feels is nested in taking oneself seriously. Yeah. You know, I think when people hear the words taking oneself seriously, they think, oh, well, someone's going to be heavy.

They're never going to joke. No sense of humor. But that's not what I'm referring to. I wish people would take themselves more seriously, including their creative sparks inside of them. You said there's no cost to turning pro. I agree there's no monetary cost. You can decide to flip that switch.

I would argue, and I'm not arguing against, because I don't think that... No, I know what you're going to say. I agree with you. I think there's a huge cost. And the huge cost I'm referring to is the one of how people around you react when you start taking yourself seriously.

I mean, I don't need to go into the story. I've done it elsewhere. But I was an unimpressive high school student. Thank God for my high school girlfriend going off to college and discovering that. And then thank God for the biology teacher that turned me on to biology. Thank God for Harry Carlyle.

But I had the drive, but certainly it wasn't organized in the right ways. But when I switched from being a fun guy to be around in a lot of context to the guy that is absolutely going to ace the exam, no matter how much work I have to put into it, that's absolutely going to be in the gym three days a week, that's absolutely going to get my sleep.

And, you know, you get a lot of flack, especially in your early 20s, late teens, early 20s. Now, I did go out and party then. I was, I didn't, never drank a lot, but I went to parties. But across the years, I did fewer and fewer social things. Even as a, as a graduate student, postdoc and junior professor, you know, at meetings, everyone go to happy hour.

I would go work out if I hadn't done it that morning. And I would go to sleep at night instead of staying up late talking in the bar because great interactions would happen in those bars, scientific discussions and so forth. But the next morning, I wanted to be on point during the seminar and be able to learn and be able to contribute.

And so the big cost is not everybody likes that because they feel it as pressure. It's sort of like if you're eating well, you're eating healthy, people pay more attention to the ways they are not eating healthy. And they will do everything they can to try and make you feel bad about that.

We see this in mass. We see this in culture. You know, it, you know, even there are extremes of, you know, body dysmorphia and people taking fitness to extremes that aren't healthy or anything. But we see people being basically not shamed, but ridiculed for being serious about their health.

It's nuts, but it's all about them. It's very clear. It's all about their own unwillingness to give up the second chocolate croissant. Yeah. You know, or to feel like maybe they're not as fit as the people around them. I mean, when standards around you are at risk of rising, that can be really scary to people.

Yeah. We were talking about that earlier, Andrew, when I was saying that, like, it becomes when you start eating healthy and sleeping and getting up early and stuff, it becomes a reproach to your friends who know that they're not doing that, know they should be doing that. And they say, who is this guy to do that?

You know, and then they will try to sabotage you and undermine you and ridicule you. And so you're right. Turning pro does have a cost. A lot of times, you know, if you take that course, you have to leave people behind. You know, people who were your friends, you can't be friends with them anymore, you know, because a lot of times groups of friends will have an unspoken kind of compact among them that we're all going to stay mediocre.

That's the deal. Right. And in fact, Good Will Hunting, that was what that movie was about. That the Matt Damon character was this mathematical genius, right? And his buddies, all of his, you know, fist fighting Boston Southie guys were had this compact. They were all going to stay, you know, kind of blue collar guys and we're all going to be buddies and we're going to have a wonderful time, you know.

And then there's that great scene at the end of the movie where Ben Affleck, his best friend, says to him, you know, if I come back 20 years from now and you're still here, I'm going to kill you because you won the lottery. You got this thing and this gift and you got to use it.

So there are those kind of pacts that people make. We're all going to stay mediocre right here where we are. And if you, Andrew, try to rise above, you be the tall poppy, somebody's going to, you know, cut you off. So sometimes we do have to leave people behind.

We'll see you next time. Music by Ben Thede