How To Reach Your Full Potential (alter ego effect 👯) | Tina Huang

0:00Do you have something like you just can't overcome no matter how hard you try? Maybe it's procrastinating, quitting everything you start. Fear, failure, or any other limiting beliefs. What have I told you that there is a way to instantly bypass these issues? To become the person that you've always wanted to be? Too good to be true? Well, this is the alter ego effect. But Superman wakes up in the morning? He's Superman. His alter ego is Clark Kent. This is Norma Tina. Norma Tina is introverted and shy and soft-spoken. She also only wears black. She spends a lot of her time alone, reading, thinking, going on bike rides, and going for long walks. She has a very structured lifestyle. Always wakes up at the same time, works for a few hours before lunch, eats, does an administrative work, and then goes for a walk. Day in, day out, hardly any change. She enjoys the company of few friends, but she avoids crowds, noisy places, and new people, like the plague. It's a very peaceful life. A life that encourages thinking and cultivates creativity.

1:04But sometimes in order to level up in both your career and your life, you gotta put yourself out of your comfort zone. And that is very hard for Norma Tina. So often times there's a crowd of people, she's either hiding in the corner, we're sitting there and saying nothing. Like this data and tech live stream, she literally sat there and said nothing. Until somebody directly asked her a question. The comments in the live stream were like, why is Tina saying nothing? But then there is, let's call her, Alt Tina. She does have a name and I will share it later in the video for good reason. But yes, Alt Tina wears a white. She is extroverted and bubbly and confident. She thrives in the limelight. She's able to give speeches confidently, give talks, speak up in conferences, and she's charismatic. She loves meeting new people, learning about new things and making new friends. She is also the one that you normally see. Alt Tina is my alter ego and that is the alter ego effect. So before I dive into exactly what is an alter ego and the really powerful alter ego effect,

2:05first I just want to make a quick plug for my newsletter called Boops Keeport. It's about learning, it's about AI, it's also where I talk more about my life and the things that I create outside of YouTube. Like Lonely Ode to Pits, which is a program for learning AI and data skills to work on real freelance projects. An alter ego is a persona that embodies certain traits, superpowers, beliefs, and behaviors that is different than your normal self. This is something that so many performers and athletes in particular adopt and use in order to push themselves to greater heights. For example, Beyoncé was raised in a pretty conservative Christian family. She started her seeing career and seeing beautifully in church choir every Sunday. So you can imagine how difficult it must have been for a girl with that kind of upbringing to be pushed into limelight of pop culture, where she's expected to portray someone and to behave in a way that probably directly contradicted with a lot of her own values. So in order to cope with these new demands that were thrown on her, she created an alter ego called Sasha Furious.

3:07Sasha Furious is the fun, more central, more aggressive, more outspoken side, and more glamorous side that comes out when I'm working when I'm on the stage. And allegedly, even when she would get hurt or injured on stage, she wouldn't even feel the pain because Sasha Furious pushed through it. Once you put on the wig and when you put on the clothes, you walk different. Kind of this character that I've created over the years. Another example is the late Kobe Bryant, one of the greatest of all times in basketball. His alter ego, Black Mamba, was inspired by the movie Kill Bill. A Black Mamba is a state that is agile and incredibly aggressive. Hence its handle. Death incarnate. He said, I hear everything that crowd is saying, and at that time, the crowd was saying things like chanting stuff like Kobe sucks, Kobe sucks. That got to him, so he had to separate himself, his personal life from his performance in court. And that's when he created his alter ego, Black Mamba. He said Kobe was tasked with dealing with all his personal challenges, and the Black Mamba handled business on court. He embodied that aggressiveness, that cold-hearted approach of not letting emotions affect him,

4:12and performed and executed. Okay, so now that we have an understanding of what an alter ego is, and the amount of power it can have, the natural question that you're probably thinking now is, how do I craft this alter ego and benefit from it then? So I read this book specifically dedicated to the alter ego, and it's called the alter ego effect. And Todd Herman, the author, explains, there is the ordinary world that you live in, where you may naturally be introverted, shy, and have a lot of self-doubt, have a lot of social anxiety. But you're in to be something more, somebody more, somebody that embodies the traits that you wish you had. And that person can take you to the extraordinary world, a world where you're not haunted by your past, your insecurities, deeply in great limiting beliefs, like the fact that people made fun of you when you were little. But instead, in this extraordinary world, you can be someone who doesn't procrastinate, is charismatic, is confident, can go to meet-ups and places where you don't know anybody, just walk up and confidently introduce yourself. Somebody who can be an independent thinker, not a people-pleaser, strong, not afraid to take risks. What I described as now is obviously specific to me,

5:14but in any case, the first step in creating an alter ego and really benefiting from that powerful alter ego effect is to first figure out what I did, detrace that define you in your ordinary world. Then I wanted to trace that you wish you had, things that you wish you could do that would put you in to the extraordinary world. Let me know in the comments what yours are. Todd explains the next step is to breathe life into your alter ego, take some time to think about your inspirations, and it could be a variety of things, it could be nonfiction characters, it can even be animals. There's this one business now who has an alter ego that is a tortoise, a tortoise. Don't know how to say that word. What am I? A tortoise? A land turtle. There's that story about de tortoise and the hare. De tortoise wins because he was slow and steady and calm. A lot of athletes in the NFL apparently actually have an alter ego that are like objects, like trains. Because they feel inspired by the idea that trains can carry a lot of things that they're sturdy. So I thought about it, wrote some stuff down, and Todd says that when you figure it out, we're like relatively figure out you will know.

6:14So I was like, okay, trust the process. Trust the process? And he was right. The inspiration that forms the alter ego tina is a combination of my mom who doesn't want to be exposed on the internet. But let me just say that she is one of the strongest and smartest and most charismatic women I have ever met. I've just kind of viewed her as my superhero for a very long time. But to my surprise, I realize another big inspiration is the Greek goddess Artemis. Artemis is the goddess of the hunt. She's the daughter of Zeus, the god of the sky, and also the chief Greek deity, and Lito, her mom, which who is a titan. She's also the twin of Apollo, the god of music, dance, truth, and prophecy. Apollo represents the sun, and Artemis represents the moon. She's an inspiration to my alter ego because I see her as someone who is strong with her bow and arrow that is unmatched by anyone except for Apollo. She's kind, but also doesn't take people's shit. As the goddess of the hunt, she also embodies wilderness and freedom, including a freedom of expression that is charismatic and alluring, and also clearly feminine. She shines like the moon in a dark and offers a way of life and thinking

7:16that was very different from what was traditionally accepted at that time. I feel a very deep sense of connection with Artemis. And while doing this exercise, I suddenly realized that one of my favorite songs by the band, The World Is A Beautiful Place, and I am no longer afraid to die. The songs called January 10, 2014, and I didn't realize it was about Artemis. Her Roman name is called Diana, and the lines go, so yeah, that was really cool, and I immediately knew that I was starting to craft and breathe life into my alter ego. Now, the next step is to name your alter ego. Mine was easy, so the first thing that jumped out was Artemis. You can name your alter ego absolutely anything. There's just two key criteria. The first one is that you have to feel some sort of emotional connection and emotional resonance to that name and to that character. And the second one is that the name has the invoke the superpowers that you want your alter ego to have. But an example that he gave in the book is his businessman, Alanto, immigrated to the US when he was 12. He was of Filipino descent and a Pacific Islander.

8:16So one of the dreams that he always wanted to do was to do public speaking. To do this, he adopted an alter ego of the big wave. And this name is really good because it pulls from his heritage of being a Pacific Islander, wanting to become an island explorer. It was also inspired by the rock's character in the movie Moana, where he was a demigod called Maui who helped Moana in the movie. It's actually Maui shapeshifter demigod of the Wynency hero of men. I interrupt it. So if you have a name great, if you don't have a name, don't worry too much about it, it's something that will evolve over time. All right, so the final step is to activate your alter ego with a totem or an artifact. There's a study done by the Kulak School of Management where researchers were interested in the effect of a white coat on accuracy and attention when taking a test. They found that when participants wore a white coat that was associated with the painter's smock, there was no increase in attention in accuracy. But when participants wore that white coat and it was associated with being a doctor, then there was an increase in both attention and accuracy. This study showcases the importance of clothing and the psychological symbolic meaning that is derived from that article of clothing.

9:18For example, when you imagine a doctor dawning that white coat, then you think of someone who is probably calm, smart, collected, attentive. So no wonder attention and accuracy improved on tests. They named this phenomenon in closed cognition, which is the effect that closed effect human cognition based on both symbolic meaning of it and a psychological experience of wearing it. So yes, the power of symbols. So now you have this alter ego, right? But the key is you have to be able to step into your alter ego when you want to. And the way that you can do this is to have some sort of totem or artifact, something that has symbolic meaning that is able to activate yourself into your alter ego. Fun fact, Martin Luther King didn't actually need glasses. He wore glasses as a way for him to become somewhat more distinguished and dignified. It can be something like glasses, article of clothing, jewelry. For me, it's the color white, because first of all, I normally wear all black. So by wearing all white, it's like the opposite of my normal self. And my alter ego is in a lot of ways the opposite of how I normally behave. It is also inspired by Artemis,

10:18because you see the pictures of her. She's usually represented by the moon, so like silver and white. And that is how you craft your alter ego and really benefit from the alter ego effect. So before I end this video, I do want to make a final point. Often the person that your alter ego is represents someone who you want to be and someone who you probably already are. You just haven't been able to express those characteristics. For example, Beyoncé has Sasha Furious for many years. In 2008, she released an album called I Am Sasha Furious. At that time, she retired that alter ego Sasha Furious because she didn't need her anymore. She was able to exemplify all of the traits that Sasha Furious had, but as herself. Okay, so one more thing. I was hanging out with my friend, Jeff, who came to visit San Francisco. He's normally in New York. I had just watched Barbie at that time. I was thinking about the alter ego effect. We thought it would be fun to dress up as Ken. For those of you who watched the movie, the end of it, it's like he became Ken of. He's gonna get over Barbie and he's actually going to like, you know, be his own person, not just Barbie's boyfriend. We suddenly came up with the idea that he would dress as Ken

11:20and he would go out and interact with people and do these things as Ken. And we filmed it. So Jeff is a senior machine learning engineer, but he also runs a startup called your move.ai. And this is an AI power tool that helps you create better dating profiles. It had better conversations on dating apps. So we decided to create a dating profile for Ken. We walked around and he was very confident as Ken. And he just, you just like took photos of Ken doing different activities. Anyway, so this video is not sponsored and Jeff didn't tell me to talk about this. But I thought it was kind of fitting because I was thinking about the alter ego effect at that time. So if you're interested in a dating scene, I would highly recommend checking out Jeff's app, your move.ai. I'll link in the description. All right, everyone. So that is the end of today's video. And please, in the comments, tell me about your ordinary world and who your alter ego is. What's your alter ego's name? I'm so curious to know from you guys. And I will see you guys in the next video with livestream.