"DO THIS Everyday For 30 Days To Find Your PURPOSE!" | Jay Shetty

we confuse inexperience with being unqualified so the best method i can share with someone is hearing about selflessness that word kind of just i don't know what it was it was just one of those moments that just it penetrated through every desire i had no one's ever been taught how to deal with failure or success and the things we're most afraid of are failure and success but the funny thing is those are the two most extreme things that we all experience finding your purpose is one of the most important yet difficult things you can do in your life that's why in this video i've put together some of the best lessons from former monk jay shetty on finding your purpose make sure to subscribe to this channel drop a like and comment your key takeaways below what would you say are the three questions we should ask ourselves every single day that would help us improve our life what a beautiful question yeah i'd say one of the first questions that always comes to my mind is is how can i be of service today how can i be in and this is extended from that first question how can it be an instrument of love compassion and kindness and that's what i count as service in my own definition and so what i would say to anyone listening is define the words yourself because what service means to you me may be different to you and so it's important but for me it's like how can i be of service today and the reason why i love that is we've talked about this before when you're wired for service you're set up right we talked about in the last podcast like service sets you up to feel satisfaction to build bonds and create connections and does so much so being of service is one of the first questions i would ask the second question i was asked myself is what do i love about myself right what do i actually love about myself that is probably the most powerful question anyone could ask because most people never learn to love themselves totally and we always find the things that we don't love about ourselves and we fixate on those things and that's one of the repeating thoughts in our head that keeps us playing small every day all the time all the time and and we talk a lot about today self-love and self-care but i think you know a lot of that starts with self awareness which we know about self knowledge but self knowledge creates self trust and a lot of it's like learning to trust ourselves and it's like if i don't know what i love about myself how am i ever going to trust myself how am i going to trust that i have my best interest at her and so asking yourself what do you love and and then the third and final question i think i would ask myself is is who do i want to be right who do i want who is the person that i need to be that i can love that i want to love that i want to give more love to like what parts of growth are there still available and there's one thing i want to add which isn't a question but it has been a really reaffirming or deepening affirmation for me that i keep reminding myself and i think it's helped a lot of people that i've shared it with is literally some days i'll just put my hand on my heart and i'll just repeat to myself i'm exactly where i need to be and that's so true it's just such a great reminder like if you literally put your hand on your heart you just go i am exactly where i need to be you stop getting lost in the future you stop worrying about the past and you realize that everything you need to learn everything you read right now to make a change it's all right now it's all right here and so that's one of my favorite things to repeat it's not a question but it's more of a mantra saying correct yeah because i think i find it so hard for people today who compare themselves to everyone online yeah about not being where they want to be or not having the the career or the relationship or the body or whatever the following or the attention a lot of people compare themselves to other people in their space yeah friends family and then don't feel enough and so when we say to ourselves i'm exactly where i need to be does that help us eliminate the feeling of not being enough yeah absolutely you're spot on because we're always feeling like we're we either feel like we're ahead we feel like oh i'm doing better than everyone i'm kind of like winning the game or more often we feel behind where we feel like oh they just got promoted ah they just you know they got proposed to whatever it is like we always feel like they have their first child or whenever their first child they uh bought their first house whatever it is and we're always feeling ahead or behind and so when you say to yourself i'm exactly where i need to be you realize you're not a head or behind and the problem is if you always think you're ahead or behind then you're always comparing yourself to others whereas if you're where you need to be you now just need to get to the next place of where you want to be yeah and and also you only get ahead of yourself by first being present with yourself and i think it's really hard to say that when you're in a challenging place in your life i'm exactly where i need to be i'm broke my yeah my dog died my girlfriend broke up with me like yeah it's hard to accept that yeah and i've been there i know you've been there and it's really challenging to say my life is perfect right now when you don't feel that way yeah but i think when you can learn to accept timing of life and know that you know a mentor of mine early on um when i was broke and i was an intern working for free for six months for someone i was living on my sister's couch i remember saying i would do walks with them every day and i was like man i could really use some money like in my life i'm just sick of being broke and he said something i'll never forget he said money comes to you when you're ready for it and i was like i feel pretty ready right now like i feel like i could have some money yeah and i wasn't ready for it mentally emotionally my life wasn't set up i didn't have systems set up in place to really receive the money and be able to do good with it and be able to use it for good in my life and put it to good use and later when i started to make money i realized like oh i probably would have blown that money i would have spent it poorly i would have made the wrong investments whatever it may be yeah it's hard to hear when things aren't going well but i think trusting the timing of your life like if you would have built your empire seven years ago you probably wouldn't have been ready for maybe maybe you would have been but you wouldn't have been ready or social media wasn't the right timing for your message to be out there is that right yeah i i think that if i wouldn't have gone to monk school then i think you can become successful but still feel extremely dissatisfied or misuse the success yes and i don't think that that can be blamed on anyone because no one's ever been taught how to deal with failure or success there's no class on here's how you deal with failure well here's how you deal with success but the funny thing is those are the two most extreme things that we all experience and the things we're most afraid of are failure and success and success so how do we deal with failure if you could give a mini master class right now what would you suggest to people who are afraid to fail and how to deal with it yeah i think one of my first things in failure is don't take it more personally than it actually is and i'll give an example of that when i was applying to 40 companies that all rejected me before an interview yeah all i was getting was an automated response saying your application will not go any further i can't take that personally because they didn't meet me in person they didn't have a interaction with me they just saw my name they saw i'd been a monk for three years that resume is useless i mean what's your transferable skills like sitting in silence and stillness surprise surprise no one wants to hire a monk and so they rejected you but that's not personal because they didn't meet me in person but what if they had me right so that's the first thing the first step is don't take all fear failure i'll give an example me and you we reach out to countless guests to be on our podcast we say no all the time you're saying all the time but if i don't hear a no from the guest directly that's not a no like someone's team can say no someone's assistant can say no someone's pr team can say no but until they say no personally it's not a no okay but when they do say no then that's a no yeah so then let's how do you deal with that type of failure yes so if i deal with a failure where someone meets me in person and gets to know no jay you're horrible you suck like i don't want to deal with a monk ever in my life yeah i would never go on your show i'm never listening to you never yeah then how do you deal with that type so i've heard you say this i've said it a couple of times and i'm sure it's been repeated a bunch of times around how i genuinely believe failure has feedback and and so for me it's like failure has the ability to actually tell you what you need to improve now not to improve to get their attention improving to get the actions that you want to take yeah the results you want the results you want and don't make that result about the person who said no don't try use failure as a way to prove someone else wrong because what happens when we prove others wrong when you prove others wrong you end up trying to get validation and approval for them and now if they're not impressed when you're right you lose again so you end up losing twice and you spend all this time and energy years maybe to prove something wrong i've been there many times and then you're like i felt good for a moment yeah and then i feel empty again totally and and so that's the thing about failure in the second half is you have to see failure as an improvement if if i'm completely honest everyone who rejected me in my life up until now has made me more hungry taught me so much more about myself and made me up my game yeah and i think if failure doesn't make you up your game it's the same as losing in a sport right when you fail and you've lost games and you've won games you know on the big stages you didn't have the skills you didn't have the teamwork you guys weren't hungry enough you were whatever you were communicating there's something you were missing yeah so you go review the game film you check the stats you see what could have done better and you try to improve that for the next game yeah i think a lot of people can do that in life but we're so afraid to like go on the next game of life like i got rejected once and it hurts so bad yeah how do people learn to overcome that pain of rejection yeah keep going yeah you know in sports luckily there's a season which like you might have 30 basketball games after you lose the first two you don't say uh i'm just going to give up the rest of the season yeah you keep playing yes but in life a lot of people stop playing yeah why yeah i think that's great mental training too i think sports is great mental training because you have to show up to the next game even if you lost and you don't feel bad exactly that you don't feel good sorry and and one of the things before i dive into that question one of the things that you reminded me of was that the last dance documentary so there's that season that michael jordan everyone is agreement in an agreement that he is one of the best players to be playing and they keep losing they didn't make the fight right they didn't make the finals they lost and then they realized they need to get the team and they need to find i think they bring in dennis rodman and then start bringing in all these other players that strengthen whereas if they would have just said oh we got the best player in the world we just keep doing this i'm not sure they would have got there right but the coach phil jackson and the team they had to adapt and so you're saying why do we feel that pain in rejection and how do we deal with that i think we feel that pain because we look at a failure right we look at it as a complete definition of us right we're looking at as as there's that famous statement of like you know failure is an event not a person right i don't know who said it but it's one of those statements that that really clicks like failure is uh an event not a person whereas we start thinking we are the failure like we say i am a very exactly right like i those are the words i am a failure i got rejected and it's like no your application got rejected okay your efforts your effort your specific effort at this moment in time got rejected your specific exam at this point got failed you didn't you are not a failure and so you have to disconnect and distance yourself from the event you know what's interesting is like no one who was successful at everything they did ever told a good story like the greatest stories are the ones who overcame failure and adversity it's not the ones who were like everything was easy for me everyone loved me everyone accepted my actions i didn't have to work hard and it just came to me effortlessly like people don't care about that that's not a good story that's not an inspirational human being yeah it's the human that had to deal with adversity that we really admire and we look up to yeah even if they had some low moments it's a much better story of hearing about someone's failure than hearing how they succeeded totally and you've that's a beautiful lesson that one of the biggest mistakes we make is we don't study the stories of the greats so how many people's lives have you studied from start to finish yeah if you've studied someone's life from start to finish i genuinely believe this is like the core skill that's needed i would say that the people i admire i have studied their lives from start to finish i know why they made bad decisions what they consider to be good decisions like there's autobiographies and biographies out there there's podcasts like hours where people come and listen to people's stories if you've not studied someone's story then you can't follow that path because every time you hit a rejection so every time i get rejected i think of steve jobs getting kicked out of his own company crazy every time i fail i think about michael jordan losing a game every time i get tired of training i think about cristiano ronaldo putting in that extra rep those are the visual cues that we need but you only get those visual cues if you've done the research and the study and then you go oh if steve jobs was kicked out of his own company but then still had the audacity at one point to go and build pixar then i think i'm all right if i just didn't get this job yeah and he would and apple wouldn't be where it is today without him getting kicked out learning the lessons having humility like gaining some compassion all the things that people said he didn't have fully at that time he learned by having to be kicked out start something else bring a new perspective yeah what did you call it the um association yeah associating yeah like he was able to then go somewhere else and spot different trends and then he came back to apple and built it to where it is today or help build it to where it is today and he probably apple wouldn't be where it is yeah today without him being a rejection which is crazy to just think of that yeah exactly so if he would have kept saying i'm gonna keep doing it my way and this is the way it is it probably would have had some challenges yeah absolutely and and i think that's the the more you study the lives of inspirational people and that's what i'd say is everyone should pick their top three inspirational people and go and study their life before life their full life yeah and read the biography the autobiography listen to every podcast i mean like seriously get immersed in that person all the journey in the industry you're trying to make it in and when you do that you'll realize that your journey actually doesn't look that different from theirs yeah it actually probably looks similar so how do we go inside our minds and say okay i'm getting rejected over and over again i'm trying really hard it's not working how do we still deal with that emotional pain is it just the self-awareness that every great person had to go through this and this is just a timing thing like how do we eventually just ease that or should we not try to use that pain i don't think it's about easing it i think it's about engaging it you know it's and i i believe that the engaging does the easing in my opinion at least so what i mean by that is behind that pain is a understanding that i don't have this skill or is an understanding of i didn't try hard enough or is an understanding of oh maybe there's just another option because guess what sometimes you may have done the best pitch in the world and you just had an executive that didn't like your vibe keep going yeah keep going like you you know you've just got to realize that there's one there's a there's a you have to engage that pain in discovery and that eases it because when you discover like oh that like for example let's take my podcast my podcast producer the team that was meant to produce my podcast pulled out two weeks before we launched my podcast and i thought i had this big deal lined up i was really excited i'd never launched a podcast before and i thought oh yeah this can be amazing and i was in india meditating for my annual trip that i take i come back and the first news i remember receiving is by the way this isn't happening anymore and i'd say that i was going to launch my podcast on valentine's day 2019 and i had my episodes recorded with my wife and i'd already gone out and made the content so just to tee up how bad that two-week notice was i'd already gone to monaco interviewed novak i'd already interviewed lily i'd interviewed russell brandon london i'd interviewed my wife and obviously those people are all close friends and people i know so they were very happy to be on the podcast even when uh it was new so i'd already done all that effort i'd already created all the content myself all this podcast company was gonna do was put it out there and help me market it a bit and then they pull out two weeks before it comes out and i'm going to myself wow okay like i can either sit here and be really sad or i can scrap together and figure it out and so the only thing i realized was it actually turned out perfectly because now i own my podcast video and i'm completely aware of every part of the journey and it gave me more confidence in myself that i could scrap together when i had to yeah and i think that's what it is that we lack confidence we're waiting for someone else to tell us how we should feel about ourselves how do we deal with success because this is actually when i ask most people 50 50 of people are failure and success is their biggest fear and some people say why would you be afraid of success but a lot of people are afraid to succeed because of the weight the pressure can i maintain it my family and friends aren't going to support me and they're going to try to pull me back down all this stuff how do we deal with success because we're not taught this growing up yeah how do you think we should deal with it one of my favorite ways to deal with success is continue trying to be the least successful person in the room that you're in i think there's those statements of like you know that would be the dumbest person yeah that would be the smartest person in the room etc and i think it's the same with if you become successful don't just stand at the top of the mountain don't just stand at the top of the building go back down the stairs and and keep building and keep living as that person that got you there because you only got there because you started from the bottom right no one starts at the top and so you started at the bottom and you built it up and it was that mindset that you started with that got you there and so you want to keep rediscovering that mindset and new parts of it then new parts of that mindset too where you're always trying to challenge yourself and so for me one of the best ways of dealing with success is keep expanding the goal posts right keep widening the goal post keep making them harder to reach and challenging yourself because when you challenge yourself and you push yourself out of your comfort zone you're naturally humbled because you're naturally humbled when you're walking into space i'm sure you feel this sometimes like sometimes i walk into a room and i'm like how did i even get here yeah right like sitting on a table like i'm the why should i be here yeah like and and there's part of it that's impostor syndrome and that can have its own negativity but part of that just lets me feel like a beginner again and i appreciate that feeling and i go this is amazing because learning to be grateful and stop just thinking that oh i earned all of this and i did it all myself and i'm self-made you start recognizing gratitude for all the people that got you there so for me in success first thing is be grateful for all your teachers mentors guides people that got you there the second thing is always keep challenging yourself because the more you're out of your comfort zone the more naturally you stay humble you don't stay humble by trying to be humble you become humbled constantly right by trying to do stuff that's out of your league which constantly makes you prepare work deepen all that stuff all of that stuff that makes you go there again and then the third thing you do with success is i think you try and share it with others you try and use your platforms as an opportunity to give other people a platform yeah so that they can come up as well because you're reminded of what a beautiful gift you have yeah and how the people supported you or gave you an opportunity or gave you an interview or something yeah there was someone successful who had to give you something yeah a wisdom uh coming on your podcast uh uh yeah giving you an insight to whatever yeah or even rejecting you like even indirectly someone had to do something that's true you know it's funny because i love this approach to having humility when you succeed and i also think let me know if you think i'm you know off here i also feel like sometimes we get into a place where we're always putting it on other people like you know it's not about me it's about the team it's about this like i see that a lot as well where some people are more extreme like i'm the man and then other people are like you know what it wasn't me at all it was god it was the team like i just showed up you know so i think there's a balance of i love this speech that snoop dogg gave where he's i think it was like on the hollywood walk of fame and he says like i want to thank me for me i want to thank me for all those late nights i put in for all the hard work for like overcoming the rejection like he went on this thing and i want to thank me for like showing up yeah and i think we also should acknowledge ourselves for yes people helped us we got guidance we had all this this this access but snoop dogg still had to show up yeah he's still to put in the hours and the time to make the results and i think it's correct me if i'm wrong is it is it good to also acknowledge ourselves for the the work we put in the wins the things we do yeah or is it all about being humble and acknowledging everything else i think it's about being honest yeah it's honesty right like humility means to be honest it's like the ability to say this is what this person deserves credit for and this is what i deserve credit for and this is what this person it's like it's kind of like when you write the acknowledgements of your book right you you right yeah i mean you and i and i remember doing that process and really thinking about like who's helped this book in different ways and everyone gets their line in the acknowledgement who's made a difference now your name goes on the front cover because you wrote the book like you want everyone to receive the credit to the degree they merit it yes and so you never want someone to feel like they didn't receive as much credit as they deserve and at the same time you don't want to give someone more credit than they deserve the point of credit is to give it where credit's due right and so for me that's honesty that's humility arrogance and pride is when you start to feel like only you did it on your own and we all know that's just not true like i can't say i did it all on my own i i just i can't anyway i definitely can't say that and i can't say it was all other people and so that is the that's where honesty and humility i think live together yeah acknowledging everything about it yeah i'm curious about you know a lot of people haven't learned about how to deal with failure or success and i don't think people have been trained how to believe in themselves and for me self-doubt is a big thing i think it keeps people back from their dreams and i'm curious i'm gonna share five uh words with your beliefs thoughts words actions and intentions how should we be thinking about beliefs thoughts words actions and intentions within our life because i think those five things dictate the results the outcome our feelings all of this in our life based on beliefs thoughts words actions intentions how should we be thinking about these things how should we be speaking to help us build our self-confidence what's your thoughts i'm throwing a lot of you here but no let's go down each of them so let's start with beliefs so i think the first thing we have to do with beliefs is you have to realize everyone has them it's not like you don't have beliefs just because you don't know what they are everyone has beliefs that they're currently living with and i think life is about unlearning the beliefs you have and questioning the beliefs you have and then creating new ones so the first thing i do with learning yeah from the beginning from the beginning what if your parents had their answers and the way and the religion and this should we be questioning it i think we should question it because questioning the okay questions are the most powerful invention in the world because questions either strengthen or weaken a belief based on the information so questions aren't always from a place of doubt and cynicism and trying to find a weakness questions are a sincere request to figure out something like when we're sitting in these interviews you're not sitting there trying to like be cynical or be you want to help yourself and people who are listening and watching and so that's a question first of all a question is not to catch someone off guard a question is not to put someone down a question is not to mislead people a question is to uplift yourself and others and when you ask a question in that way the answer can either strengthen a belief you already have or weaken it or introduce you to a new one why do we get so frustrated when our beliefs get questioned when we have a belief that we put out in the world or we question someone's belief why do people when they get shaken in their beliefs they attack they they break down they yeah whatever why why is that why don't people just say okay that's interesting let me look at that more yeah because we've defined our identity by our belief so imagine you're on one of these assault courses and you're on this rope and you're being told to swing to the next rope but in order to catch the next rope you need to let go of this rope but you're scared because this rope is currently your safety so your current belief is your safety and when you have to consider holding on to another belief and to entertain both together you're scared that if that one doesn't hold i'm basically going to fall so people are scared that their belief is currently their safety net and so even if it's wrong it still makes them feel safe and they feel comfortable and we don't want to feel uncomfortable so we'd rather hold on to that safety net right so the only way to do it how do we get comfortable with questioning our beliefs but not being like holding on to nothing well realizing that you don't have to change your mind or you don't have to leave what you think in order to entertain or be curious about anything and explore like exploring experimenting and experiencing can either strengthen the belief you have or help you find a new one but you have to do that middle three ease of exploring exploring experimenting and experiencing yeah and the problem is that we are just theoretically thinking we're not experiencing the benefit and this is what i love about what you've done in your past we've talked about this how you know you grew up in a certain religion and then you started studying different religions to see okay let me just try this on and let me see what i like about this religion and does that apply to you know can i let something go and what i grew up in not making anything right or wrong but just saying what works for you correct right yeah and i think taking that experiential journey of asking questions from different beliefs allows you to just say okay yeah this is working for me already i don't need to change exactly and i like this and i'm going to keep growing yeah and go from there right yeah definitely i desire for safety and security so what you're speaking about was when i was around 16 maybe 15 i we used to celebrate christmas every year and christmas is probably my favorite time of year we were talking about it like i love uh listening to christmas songs and i love christmas decoration and for me christmas is presents presents and and so i grew up in a culture where we celebrated christmas but christmas was presents and a family dinner and because i went to my school in england we'd celebrate all the religious holidays so we knew about all the uh main stories behind every major world religion and so i remember celebrating christmas at home but thinking i don't know that much about jesus and should i not be connecting with jesus because that's why we even have this day and so i started going to church in my local area just out of curiosity i wasn't trying to be a christian or trying to be a hindu or trying to be anything i was just interested and curious to be like what is it about christ that created a day that has lasted thousands of years that people all over the world celebrate there must be something here and so i feel like we get so scared because we want clear designations we want like a clear title of i am this or i am that and that gives us a sense of safety and security but really answers come into curiosity not in the security yeah right what does that identity do to us in a good way or in a negative way in a good way it creates a and this isn't just about religious identity it's any identity but whatever yeah it's not about holding on to this identity of yourself yeah so in the good sense it surrounds you with more people like that so if i'm a podcaster i hang out with more podcasters we learn more about podcasting and that's a great thing because we all become better podcasters the mistake is i go oh i can only be a podcaster but i can't write a book i can't make a video i can't do that now and that's the mistake that it makes so it should be evolving these titles that we give ourselves these communities should help us evolve not devolve yeah and and not stop us from expanding and growing okay and and so you want to be around people that are always curious and insightful why did you decide that you wanted to be a monk in the first place and how old were you when you did that absolutely so the story starts it's something i've been saying a lot called you can't be what you can't see so i didn't grow up wanting to be a monk like what did you grow up wanting to be yeah i grew up wanting to be a mix of an art director like for a big magazine or online company because i loved design i loved graphics i loved video and art when i was growing up i loved philosophy and i loved economics those were like my three favorite subjects art design philosophy and economics and i always thought i'd be something boring like an investment banker because i often say when you when you grow up in a asian or indian family and if you have any asian or indian followers they'll agree i had three options i could either be a doctor a lawyer or a failure right those were like my three options and so that's what i was going to be i couldn't be any of those so i was going to be an investment banker or a strategy consultant because i was like i'm rubbish at medicine you know i'm not very good at law so i was kind of going down that route because you can't be what you can't see and growing up as a young asian person in london you don't see many people in the media you don't see many asians in sport you don't see many asians in anything apart from accountancy business medicine and law that's literally what you see and then i was 18 i'm at university i'm studying my undergraduate which is in behavioral science in london in london so i've always been fascinated by why people do what they do always fascinated by why we make decisions why we lie why people cheat why people pretend to be someone they're not like all those questions always fascinated me but just from an intellectual point of view rather than helping people unpackage it so i was studying that and then at my university we'd have some of the best entrepreneurs coming to speak every week in london in london in london at cass business school so there's people coming in every single week and then i found out that the week later after we've been watching entrepreneur after entrepreneur loved hearing from ceos their success stories i was a huge fan of rags to riches stories like not the riches because of wealth but just that whole thing of like people going from nothing to something like that fascinated me so i used to read all the biographies i thought i hated reading until i was 14 until someone handed me an autobiography i i think i remembered reading the rocks or autography back then too because i used to watch wrestling but anyway so i'm fascinated by people who go from nothing to something and then a monks invited to speak at my university and i actually get forced along i'm actually not that interested i'm like what's a monk going to teach me who cares like never seen a monk in my life don't really know what they do get forced by one of my mates to come along i basically have nothing better to do that night i turn up i'm hearing this monk speak and he captivated me like the most beautiful woman in the world right i was just completely enthralled and addicted to everything he said i was hanging off every word and there was a voice in my head that was just like who is this guy and then i find out that he'd given up jobs at google and microsoft to become a monk and i'm thinking wait a minute who does that you know everyone that i've ever met that's all they've been chasing and all the stories that i'd followed in life were people who went from nothing to something and here was a guy who had something but had traded it to have nothing but looked like the happiest person i'd ever met so it was like the most paradoxical moment of my life like the most ironic thing that could have happened anyway so i go and speak to him afterwards i loved networking with speakers i'd always approach people after their speech if i was moved i went up to him and i just said you know what everything you said just resonated with me and there was one thing that he said that that stood above everything and he spoke about this principle about plant trees under whose shade you do not plan to sit all right plant trees under whose shade you do not plan to sit what he meant was selfless service giving without expecting using everything you have doing something for nothing just being able to give and for some reason that 18 year old me hearing about selflessness that word kind of just i don't know what it was it was just one of those moments that just it penetrated through every desire i had and service and selflessness became like my biggest aspiration in like a moment and i started talking to him so i started interning with him in india as a monk every summer holidays so i finished my freshman this year yeah yeah basically 18 i i guess yeah i guess that's what you call it when you just started out yeah i got it yeah so after the first year you had a summer break correct you go to india to be with him for a month two months yeah a month or two months however so i'd get a summer holiday i'd spend half of it working at a big corporate firm because i thought that's what i was going to do and i'd spend the rest of it and christmas holidays that we get in london i'd spend it in india just kind of shadowing him and i described it like that i was literally interning to be a monk where you live like a monk you practice monk principles you follow what they do on a daily basis and you get to experience what it's like and i'd work it like the big i'd work with some of these biggest companies in the world and then i'd go to livings monk like polar opposites we'd be out at night drinking networking after this right the stuff you do bars clubs etc and then like for the rest of the months i'm like meditating and spending time with these enlightened beings and and i can honestly say having tested and experimented both i fell in love with that lifestyle more so having everything on that side versus having nothing on that side i i fell in love with having nothing and so it was like a perfect a and b test you know it was like the perfect process which yeah yeah so i always say you can't be what you can't see i wouldn't have become a monk if i didn't see a monk that that's that's my journey to why it started why did i start to become a monk because i got to meet a monk which exploded the horizons and possibilities of what i could be first of all i became a monk because i got fascinated by giving everything you have in the service of others at a very early age i just got fascinated by that principle and the third thing was i fell in love with the lifestyle of a monk more than i did of a modern person why did you fall in love with that i fell in love with it because i got so fixated on the fact that what if you could spend your whole life just helping people like what if that's all you did what if you had to learn grow create just to make a difference in people's lives yeah and you didn't need anything back and you didn't want anything back and the only example i'd seen of that at that age was the monk so that was the only kind of test i had right that's the only person i'd experience you haven't met someone who started a non-profit or something like that i had i had but i i had met people who'd done ngos and not for profits but i always found that they were still looking for funding oh yeah sure and and i didn't necessarily fall in love with their character and i think that's a big part of it yeah when i was with the monks i felt completely in love with their character the way they behaved the purity the way they spoke their purity their their whole demeanor was just so attractive and i was like that's what i want to be when i grow up you know so while everyone else wanted to be other stuff when i was 18 i wanted to be a monk wow so yeah but i still yeah anyway how many summers did you spend with him before you said okay three so throughout the whole of university i spent three so every break i spent with him and then after college then after college that was it i didn't even go so i graduated but i didn't turn up to my graduation ceremony so my mom's still upset that she doesn't have a picture of me holding the scroll wearing the hat and i i left for india straight away why didn't you complete it then i i finished as i graduated in the sense of i had my degree but why don't you go all the way see it all the way because i had to i remember it being delayed till december and we finished in may and i was just like i'm going i'm not waiting till december i'm not coming back for that it's meaningless yeah what does it even mean and and i left so i literally said i don't care i want nothing in my life yeah yeah yeah and then i went wow yeah so i left and i was 22 years old and and i just left i just wanted to be there and be with him and be with the other monks and i saw them doing all this incredible work it's not like they were just being monks in the way people think i always talk about how half the day was silence and a half today is service so the service side is building sustainable villages building food distribution programs teaching you know helping communities it wasn't just being it was doing as well so i loved that aspect of half the day to grow myself and then half the day to give yeah and i was just like when am i gonna have time to do this if i work a job right right what's a typical day like then what time did you wake up yeah and you wake up on like a concrete floor with like a little yoga mat type of thing literally yeah so it's like on the floor the floor was wood it was it was like this this this nice wood that you have it was decent wood so here's wood you have it thin yoga max so anyone who does yoga knows those thin yoga mats not the posh ones and then your sleeping bag literally you have a sleeping bag yeah you get a sleeping bag right pillow or no pillow uh most people didn't use their pillows but my sleeping i had a nice sleeping bag you know i was still i was still that mung from london like everyone could tell right it was like a real bag looks a bit too premium but i was like you know this is this is the least i can of course so i still had the premium sleeping bag we'd wake up at about 4 00 a.m every day every single day 4 a.m so the first week must have been a little rough to like get into that well you know what the way i remember is that i was so pumped that i talked myself into it plus i've been doing it every summer so it wasn't new it wasn't like i just threw myself in i'd lived like that for three summers yeah so i was kind of aware of what it was like but i pumped myself so much i was gonna i'm gonna be there at 3 30. you know i'm going to wake up earlier than everyone you know i was in that and i've always been like that i've always been someone who wanted to push it i want to do a workout before everyone literally like i was like i'm gonna meditate two hours before everyone's awake and so i'm pushing myself to limits that that i didn't know and i wanted to test it i'm gonna be it for the rest of my life so wow so i'm going to be here for the rest of my life so i'm just going to do this properly you know so i ended up yeah waking up at 4 a.m from 4 to 5 15 you have collective meditation collective prayers collective chant yeah group chanting yeah healing almost at the same time just like chanting together yes the the symphony that you create with the melodies and we we underestimate what it feels like to be in a place where people have meditated for hundreds of thousands of years like places take on energies and that place was a place where people have meditated those two monasteries people have meditated for like 40 years in that space right for over four hours a day so you're like walking into like the most spiritual sacred atmosphere in the world you only tap into that more you know when we go to a place we know what it feels like when you've been on a stage that michael jackson performed at or when you've been in an arena where you know your favorite artist whatever it is the analogy that works for you it was like walking into the arena of the monks wow like that that little legendary monkey yeah the legend of meditate like everything you expect a spiritual atmosphere to contain you're getting that because it's it's amazing so yeah this four to five fifteen is group meditation then five fifteen to seven is private meditation so that's your personal practice so that's already three hours since you've been awake right seven o'clock till 7 30 is group meditation you're a group charting again and then 7 30 to 8 30 is a wisdom class on the vedas so the vaders are five thousand years old linguistically and philosophically the oldest books on the planet and so you're trained in the vedas for an hour seven thirty to eight thirty and that's a ten year old book yeah wow it's the oldest book like yeah oldest dated book i've heard of so yeah wow over 5000 years old holy cow yeah it's crazy it's absolutely crazy it was funny actually i i was showing this and i share this all the time but then i'm going to throw this in there but i was when i was at ty's house he said this to me he said that i was telling him about the bhagavad-gita which is five thousand years old and he said to me five thousand years just like you did i was just like yeah five thousand years he goes if it lasted five thousand years that must be a really good book and it's true if you think about it how many people using it yeah yeah how many things still matter and change lives today that i did 5 000 years ago will the beatles be around in 5 000 years will elvis will me will you you know will any of this but the fact that a book has withstood 5 000 years very impressive that's pretty impressive anyway so we do that from 7 30 to 8 30. and then 8 30 you get breakfast right you finally get breakfast and from 8 30 to 9 whenever you eat breakfast and then for the rest of the day you'd spend the morning studying the books again on a personal level you do basic things like cleaning you'd wash your clothes you'd you know all the domestic stuff that you have to do clean the space you live in and then usually by lunchtime everything changed i'd either be out teaching local communities or we'd be helping build these sustainable villages food distribution programs etc so the rest of the day was not as planned as the morning so it when we now talk about morning routines when i hear about that i'm just like yeah that's like a monk thing like as a monk you're trained to have an incredible morning routine and then whatever you do in your day will be incredible because you've started off correctly so it's it's interesting to see the rise of the morning routine right as habits and success because as a monk that's what you're trained in wow so yeah that's that's roughly the shadow and then it changes after 9 30 a.m and where in india was this so this is in mumbai and four hours south of mumbai okay wow so but when you go outside of mumbai i'm looking at these beautiful plant things you have here it's kind of like that you know it's just like woodlands like green yeah like no no cars no traffic no noise fresh air how would you guys commute then or travel to speak or teach or build homes so we would we would have cars that that we would either drive ourselves i never drove in india i never would drive in india it's the scariest experience in the world people get scared about new york india is just a different level yeah so i never drove but they would have drivers etc who would drive us around monks that drive it so the uh what's it called the place you're at ashram yeah so monastery is an ashram ashram is just a sanskrit word for a monster so it had like some funding so you guys could rent cars or whatever yeah so so the funding comes from donors that really believe in the work you're doing and then that money is used effectively again people say oh how do monk drive how do monks use money well we'd never use it for ourselves we had two sets of clothes we didn't have any possessions but we were using the cars and what we had to create these communities to create sustainable villages to create change in the world so again everything's being utilized for a higher purpose rather than the mentality of oh you can't use that so if we didn't use that we might be happy but how are you going to help the rest of the world right you know so that's how we were trained were you in contact with your family as well during this time or yeah i used to connect with my family because the tradition was taught of like that again that balance between detachment and attachment so it said that detachment and attachment are two sides of the same coin attachment and aversion so some people just want to be monks or want to have isolation because they want to get away from reality which is no better than being fully attached so the bhagavad-gita says that attachment and aversion are two sides of the same coin so actually the ideal is the central balance where you're able to talk to your parents you're able to give them love you're able to be grateful but then again you're still realizing that there's more impact you can have in the world than just making your parents happy so it's that perfect dynamic balance between the two so i'd keep i'd speak to my mom and dad every month probably catch up with them on the phone if i was in europe and traveling for what we were trying to do as monks and i'd come and see them etc say hello to them so i wasn't completely detached but it was always making sure that balance you know not not like oh i'm not that much life should the way we're trained is monk life should never be an escape from reality it shouldn't be that you can't do anything else in life and you don't want responsibilities that's why you become a monk right so it was very it was very much ingrained in us that you're not here because you can't do anything else you do you're here because you know this is higher and you can have more of an impact in your life in the world so but you're not supposed to be in a relationship or have sex as a monk no you're a celibate monk so why do you detach from that then yeah people escape from that so that's to be able to give yourself all the time focus and energy on personal growth and development so we all know this right anyone who's been and i've been in multiple relationships before i became a monk we all know this when you're in a relationship things slow down because now you're managing two minds you're now having to give energy to another person you have to give time to another person you lose time energy and moments to invest in your own growth so monks traditionally have lived celibate lives so that they can focus on their own growth so that they're not distracted they're not falling prey to any any lust or engaging in any flirtatious conversations that again brings down the consciousness and distracts the mind you're learning to train your mind like an athlete like so many athletes i mean maybe maybe you had this experience too but i remember reading david beckham's autobiography many years ago and he was talking about that how they were trained not to have sex before big games right no alcohol in the weeks leading up to big games i remember him talking about how when all his friends were out partying he'd have to get to bed on time so it's like you see athletes go to very similar training as monks sure so it's not abnormal we see it in modern life where people who have to be peak performance they also use the same measures yeah very similar measures to monk like this and personal growth also come from experiencing life and not detaching from it only isolating yourself but also experiencing all the things that could happen in life and growing in that yeah absolutely and i think the whole thing there is that most of us just throw ourselves into the deep end and then try swim and figure it out right monk life actually begins at like five years old like the training of monk life is ultimately training in self-actualization and self-awareness it's meant to start when you're five the problem is we all went to normal schools that try to put stuff in us rather than take stuff out of us it's crazy you talk about this right right like you know you were told at school that you weren't very good and you weren't going to english and now you have a new york times bestseller right yeah and it and it's like but no one noticed that potential inside you no one noticed that oh lewis was really creative right and you're not the only person there's so many people who feel like that so the modern schooling system didn't extrapolate your self-actualization your element and just try to put maths english science inside so the point is that you're trying to get to such a strong foundation that when you interact in the world you're going with a sense of strength fuel energy to make a difference rather than going into the world and then going oh my god where am i trying to figure it out and i find what happens today is that when you don't we all know this we i mean self-love has become such a big thing now that when people don't figure out yeah it's like a huge trend now but but my point is that if you don't start at a place where you have self-awareness self-actualization you have figured out what works for you what your strengths are how you want to be in an environment when you walk out there most of us just pretend to be someone else most of us get lost most of us get carried away yeah so my point is strengthen yourself grow yourself and then of course interact with the world so we had that we were going out to pitch to forbes ritualist members to fund our philanthropy work wow right we'd be in these pitch meetings dressed as monks and then be laying bricks the next moment so you get the perfect balance at one point you're in this fancy office and the next morning you're laying bricks you're like digging you know so so it's not that you're not getting both you are getting both just the relationship aspect of a of a female partner or a male partner if you're a female monk is is limited because the whole aim is to allow you to just focus on first finding yourself before you try and find the checklist you've been following your whole life right you talked about the fear of fear and how you had to learn to let go of your fear of fear what does actually mean letting go of the fear of fear yeah so i talk about how we fear the wrong things how do we fear so most of us are fearful of how our friends are reacting what's happening on social media and what's the random bit of news that we heard none of it is fact based that's one of the biggest issues worry-based it's worry-based and it's also imagination-based so we become fiction writers we've all watched too many movies now we start writing these beautiful movies in our head we're not beautiful scary movies in our head of what may happen so our imagination and seneca said it best we suffer twice one in reality and one in imagination right we suffer twice and this is the way what actually happens to us in the story we continue to tell totally now there's this incredible study in the book that i have to talk about so they took monks and they took non-monks and they competed against each other competing so they put this plate where you experience heat and so what happens is the non-monks touch this plate now this plate heats up gradually softly and then at one point it gets really hot for 10 seconds and it cools down and so what happened is that when the non-monks touched it the anxiety and pressure and stress in their brain just triggered straight away even though it wasn't that hot it wasn't hard it was heating but it wasn't hard to do anything major to you but the anxiety and stress in imagination or in anticipation went through the roof in the non-monks now this is what's fascinating when the monks touched it they showed that it didn't feel anything as it rose but as it got to its highest they felt physical pain but they showed no trigger of emotional pain because they did not assign any emotional element to that pain so my point with that is you can look at the news right now and you can get scared straight away and get incomplete freeze mode feeling stuck paralyzed whatever it is because what you're now doing is you're creating a story of what's going to happen and that story and you can cause sickness in yourself you can question this by the story so not actually the reality that the facts of the disease hitting you or something happening physically to you totally and that story again can be used positively so your story may actually be true but if it's going to be true now you can prepare and that shifts you away from being scared because now you're preparing and so the real you can be confident because you're prepared exactly and so we should be shifting our fear energy into preparation energy because what fear does is it keeps you locked there right we just feel stuck i'll give you an example when you were preparing for big games when you used to play in the nfl right and you're playing american football against some of the biggest athletes in the world it's like you can either sit there and be scared that you're going to play this game on the weekend or you can prepare and your confidence is in the preparation so when people go how do i feel confident right now are you preparing are you putting the reps are you putting the wraps are you building your immunity are you taking your vitamins are you drinking lots of water are you drinking lots of water are you taking the steps that are needed to prepare for whatever's coming you will feel more confident that way yeah so how do we learn to let go of the fear of fear though like how do we say okay we're only going to allow it to hurt us when it actually hurts us and not the fear of it is there a process is there just an awareness of this that when you're in anxiety worry stress fear you you just breathe and meditate then what's the process of letting go of the fear of fear yeah so meditation mindfulness powerful tools but i'd say the process and i want to be as tactical and strategic as we can the thing is to get really close to that fear so what we usually do is raise it embrace it get close to get intimate with it we've become the bat we give it the bad literally yeah embrace the fear totally we run away from fear we like to run away and go oh it's not coming with me and or what we do is we hear one thing and we define the whole understanding of our fear based on that one thing so it's like someone and i'll give you a normal example in a normal life scenario someone says to you in the office you know that you know that they're going to cut a few people and you don't even check you don't even know and now you just made it real and now you're running with it and you're trying to run away from it so you're trying to avoid conversations with your boss you're trying to avoid any conflict you're trying to you know you're just crazy you're just trying to avoid it and so actually what you need to do is go okay let me actually discover that fear let me go intimate with that fear let me ask myself where's that fear coming from what am i really scared of what am i really scared of am i really scared of losing my job am i scared of not having any money what am i really scared of and when you get to the root and i call it the y ladder in the book so it's asking yourself what am i scared of and then go why am i scared of this why am i scared of this why am i scared of this and when you can't ask why any longer you've got to the answer and that's what you have to deal with most of us are not dealing with what we're actually scared of so that's how you let go you let go by keep asking yourself so i'll give an example of mine like if i heard that or if you hear that in your office that people are getting cut it's like you just get scared and panicked but the question is why am i scared of that am i scared of that because i haven't been working hard for six months am i scared of that because i've been skipping meetings am i scared of that because i know my boss will probably fire me first or am i scared because i've been performing really well and i'm expecting a promotion knowing which one it is sets you up to build the path forward not knowing that just puts you in this panic frenzy i think also like doing all the things you talked about which is discovering within yourself being aware of it but then also just have the conversation run it with your manager your boss and say hey listen i heard some rumors that there might be some cuts and i want to let you know that i'm 100 committed to doing whatever it takes to help this company grow yes i believe in this mission more than anything here's what i've been doing the last three months and here's what i want to continue to do is there anything else i can do totally like show them to like why you shouldn't get cut exactly and that's you know how to approach that discussion when you know which side you're on yeah what your fear is i remember as a freshman playing football i was playing division two football minnesota they usually redshirt all the freshmen and i went into this with a big ego thinking like i'm gonna start or at least i want to play right so i went into it with an ego in the first place but i also which wasn't good but i also went into with some things that were good from this conversation i told the coach straight up like i know you don't play freshman but my intention is to play what is it going to take for me in order to get on the field you know do i need to get her early do i need to stay late can i sit here in the office with you after the uh uh before practice and go over game film whatever it was and he was he told me yeah i need you to come in the office every single day and watch game film with me i need to be with your receiver coach every single day beforehand and doing reps and i just did it and i eventually started to play my freshman year i didn't start in the beginning but i started to start at the ends and that for me was powerful was like i dressed it because i wanted to play and i was afraid i wasn't going to play at all and just waste a year of practicing like every other freshman would do there that was my ego going like i need to play but i was also like i'll do whatever it takes and i'll practice and i'll confront it with conversation and say this is my intention this is my vision and i'm going to do whatever it takes for you and so i think that that's a perfect example yeah you're in a workplace you've got to be confronting it and be proactive in your country correct and that's a perfect example of getting close to fear rather than running away from it spot on man for me my whole mission in the last year in moving forward the next projects i'm working on are all about belief in yourself i believe self-doubt is the killer of dreams and i believe that and you have this amazing graph in here it's about ego versus self-esteem how do we build self-belief self-esteem self-confidence while also not allowing our ego to be so big and think we can just do anything how do we balance ego and self-confidence so they don't hurt each other yeah absolutely and what we experience most of the time is extremes yeah so the two extremes that most of us experience are either i have to think i'm the best i'm the best in the world i can crush anyone like i'm like gonna show everyone what i'm like or most of us experience the other extreme which is i'm the worst i'm the stupidest i'm the dumbest i'm the most worthless i'm the biggest loser notice how that's both ego really yes why is the negative so the ego wants to be the best of the best or the ego wants to be the worst of the worst the ego won't accept being in the middle really the ego wants to feel the deepest sense of being the lowest and that's why victim mentality is actually a subsequence of ego really yeah that's how it's explained in the bhagavad-gita because the point is that you can't deal with just being bad you have to be the worst worst i think um jada talked about this on your podcast where she was like you know i had to tell people why my hurt was more painful than their hurt and they could never understand how bad it was exactly exactly yeah that's ego as well so you see these two sides of ego keeping us locked away and so the only way to get with that and the only way to balance it and bring it all into one is genuine self-honesty honesty is the best place to be the best thing about honesty is i'm really good at this i'm really average of that and i'm really bad at that and the challenge we have with that is most of us have no idea we just have zero self-awareness about what we are good at what we are better than what we're average at so we think i'm pretty average at everything i'm pretty good at everything and when i hear those answers i'm like simple things just go and talk to people that know you yeah what am i great at awesome what's my superpower what do i do differently what do you think i do that is different than no one else does and guess what i guarantee you if you ask a colleague if you ask a friend if you ask a family member if you ask people they'll say different things but you get to learn about yourself so real confidence comes from knowing your strengths and going all in on them your confidence does not come from just standing up the right way or just saying the right stuff to yourself yeah that's and that's important i'm a big believer in all of that but what i'm saying is that that doesn't build real confidence real confidence comes from thinking i'm really good at this i know i can do this and i love doing it and it and really this is the most important bit confidence comes from serving other people when you see the impact you have on others and this is the biggest issue the reason why we have such low self-esteem today in the world is because people are not serving others so they don't see the profound impact they have on others when you put out a video or a podcast and people tag you on instagram and they say louis you stop me from depression or you help me out of a divorce or people when they watch my content they'll be like that stopped me from committing suicide or whatever it is when you see that you get such a deep sense of self-worth that you matter and guess what everyone matters whether you matter to one people or one million people everyone matters but if you see your impact on someone's life you will feel such a deep sense of self-worth and so whether you're serving at a uh giving out free food or whether you're serving at a local charity place or whether you're serving through your work serve serve serve because when you take that step you you get a boost of self-esteem but why do so many of us live in fear and desire mode as opposed to duty and love mode why is that like why we still focus on self as opposed to service it's conditioned it's conditioned right i've said this before that we're wired for generosity but we're educated for greed i think i just said it to you two years ago when i was on the podcast it's like and when i said that and the statement it was yeah and it's so true we're wired for generosity but we're educated for greed because what happens is when we're kids you see kids you want to share go out their way they want to share part of my candy bar whatever right yeah and then as we get older we're told that there's less and this is what the key is as we get older we're told there are finite numbers of how many kids get made on the basketball baseball team we're told there's a finite number of college spaces we're told there's a finite number of how many tickets there are we're told there's a finite number of people that are successful guess what in the theater of happiness there are infinite and unlimited seats and there is a seat with your name on it there is a seat with your name on it in the theater of dreams in the theater of happiness but you think that because you think that there are only 100 people allowed in that if someone else makes it before you that you don't get in and guess what is there a cap on how many billionaires there are in the world no no is there a cap on how many millionaires around the world no is there a cap on how many happy people there are in the world no and that's why i really am encouraging forms i want forbes forget printing on rich let's print that happy list put your service yeah sure i gave more than you get and that's why it should be serviced based on time energy and money because we should start showing how much time people give how much energy people give mother teresa i don't think she gave any money to her charities right but you get a lot of time and energy yeah you know you look at all the people who made a change in the world martin luther king gandhi like they may not have given a lot of money to stuff they gave time and energy you don't have to give resources but your resourcefulness your love your time your focus your attention your compassion love that uh you know resourcefulness of the of the heart not of the wallet i think you love that and you don't need to have a lot of money to make a big impact you don't there's and and this is the training see we've been educated for greed because we've been told everything's limited there's limited number of this limited number of this number and every time you play in numbers and i think it was bob marley who said it but every time you play numbers you'd always be dissatisfied because guess what someone's always saying someone's always gonna have more i was speaking to a friend recently and and it's me and and this friend was telling me that he uh you know bought a home which is very expensive very very expensive and he went to a party at someone else's house and he told me that when he was getting a tour of this party he found out that this person had a painting on his wall which cost the amount his house and so he was joking he was like that that guy's painting in the house he's got my house on his wall wow and and that just puts things into perspective and you think about that like and then you look at something like jeff bezos and you think oh well he's the richest man in the world but does he have the most fame no he doesn't does he have the most beauty subjective decision does he have the most strength or power maybe not and so no one has the most of everything so when you measure yourself by numbers you'll always be second third fourth fifth in something and i think by measuring yourself by needing to have the most of anything is probably a recipe for unhappiness i'm like well okay i'm not gonna have the most of anything but i'm gonna have the most money you're still gonna be unhappy even if you have the most of something doesn't mean you're gonna be happy totally i think it was albert einstein who said it best that not everything that can be counted counts and not everything that counts can be counted and and i love that because it removes this belief that things are finite and limited and they're not if you want to be happy and successful if no matter that there are 700 000 podcasts if that is your dharma if that's your calling if that's your purpose like you can do that there's there's no cap on on how many successful soccer players that can exist at the same time or how many books are out in the world there's no cap there's no one stopping you and that's the mindset that we're educated so can you share what that means to hear in between the lines through prayer meditation mindfulness and kind of what this all means how can we understand this there's a lot of noise about it but what does it really mean yeah beautiful first of all i'm glad to be back man the school of greatness is exciting man a special place and the fact that this so everyone everyone's listening or watching this is how you test whether your friend really knows you lewis just told my life story in 30 seconds which means that we're real friends uh lewis was able to summarize everything that i've been through in the last 10 years in in 30 seconds i appreciate you guys and i'm really happy to be back and yeah i think yeah let's talk about the term and let's talk about that specific answer so when i hear the word mindfulness to me what it really means is intentionality what i mean by that is are you crafting designing and intentionally creating your life or are you just coasting in the passenger sea of your life which is just dragging you and driving you wherever it's taking you and so it's the difference between being the driver or being in the passenger seat and so to me living intentionally is what allows you to live a life of by design and so i'll give an example of what mindfulness can look like there's something in the book that i talk about called the three s's which are sights sense and sounds now if you think about that we're exposed to sights sense and sounds every single day yeah every single day but how many of us have crafted those to be sight sensing sounds that we want in our life so this is what i realized when we were monks one of the most important things was what was the first thing you saw the site when you woke up and right now most people are probably seeing their screen yeah i think 80 of people look at their screens first thing in the morning and the last thing of the night so you're seeing your screen first thing in the morning but what are you really seeing you're seeing everyone else's priorities you're seeing everyone else's issues and challenges you're seeing everyone else's messages to you which means you're already starting your day off reactively but what if you started your morning looking at a painting that inspired you or a picture of a loved one that brought joy in your heart or your favorite quote by lewis or by anyone else that when you read that in the morning you were like oh yeah i feel in charge today to to make a difference in the world so imagine the first thing you saw in the morning was something inspiring how much would your day change that's mindfulness mindfulness is being intentional and mindful about what you are exposing yourself to let's talk about sounds next so sounds were something that i started to study actually much later from a modern life perspective but when we were monks we would wake up to birds we would wake up to water we'd wake up to gongs or cymbals chants exactly which are all beautiful sounds now the crazy thing is all of us wake up to something called an alarm right this like literally i don't know why anyone would want to wake up to an alarm why would you want to wake up alarmed it means now your system is alarming like why would you want to do that why would you want to wake up in shock in a state of like a jolt i don't think that's a positive way to wake up so changing the sound that you wake up to now i'm not saying that everyone can wake up to nature sounds maybe you're one of those people who just hit the snooze button again but what if you woke up to a sound or a song that brought you joy now when i lived in new york for two years between 2016 and 2018 i started to feel quite exhausted by the end of the day and i was really looking into like why is it that i feel tired and i started to realize i came across this term called cognitive load and what it means is that a lot of the sounds that you hear in new york city are sounds that are insignificant for your mind to process drilling construction work taxis honking driving cars screeching scratching people yelling at each other people yelling at each other on the street saying all of that sound is called cognitive load where your brain is now trying to make sense of meaningless sound well it's also just like should i be afraid this is a loud sound does my brain go into fight or flight like i need to protect myself so you're always being alarmed yeah exactly and you hear sirens the amount of sirens that i remember hearing on the streets now when you hear sirens sirens have an emotional trigger and they have an emotional response to them so think about your day think about when you come home from work well now you're working from home right what sound do you want to hear when you're working what sound do you want to hear at the end of the day when you sound design your life that's called mindfulness that's being intentional and then finally sent scent is such a powerful sense that we're not even aware how many of you when you smell your favorite food can't already wait to eat it like you can almost taste it yeah you can taste it already without just through scent why is it that every time you walk into [Laughter] my yeah my favorite yeah i think pizza has one of the best well your wife rowdy's got some amazing food that was amazing so when i walked in the kitchen last week i was like this is amazing that was for you that was special that was for you that was for you that was a good meal that's a really good meal uh she really appreciated that you love to eat too like she was happy her heart was full exactly bring a former jock into your house and you'll clear all the food out she was like i've never seen someone eat that much you know just like big american dude you know you can eat and so no it was great she was so happy that you appreciated it so much she really appreciated that but the sense is important in your life when you walk into a massage spa it's the scent the eucalyptus the lavender the sandalwood it could be a peaceful state dude scent puts you in zen without trying and so mindfulness is intentionally creating a life that makes you feel what you want to feel without having to just create the feeling from inside you may say jay you know i really struggle trying to be positive i struggle trying to deal with anxiety i struggle trying to be focused your sight sense and sounds can help you do that yeah and you start creating an environment where you naturally feel that like today when i walked into your studio i saw your books i saw these motivational quotes i saw a boxing glove and it's like all of a sudden you're like oh i'm in a uplifting environment right so you already get triggered exactly yeah i think uh a friend of mine mentioned one time on the podcast chris lee said you want to create an environment like a rain forest where things can thrive and grow as opposed to having an environment like a desert where things go to die that's beautiful and if you have sights scents and sounds that are like a desert for your life or your heart and it's going to be hard to grow those things from your heart but if you create an environment of a rain forest where things can grow water nature you know cool air things like that then you can really start to cultivate that growth you mentioned about creating and designing your life how much of the world do you think we receive by being here and how much of the world do we create ourselves yeah that's a beautiful question it's it's a complete dynamic dance between what the vedic tradition would call fate and free will so fate is what is already created for you and a good example would be the place you were born the type of family you grew up in the socio-economic background you had it was already there when you walked in to the world but within that you had choices where your free will came about you had the choice to either do what everyone in your neighborhood did or to do something different you had the choice to have a relationship with a particular person or not so what happens is that we're constantly creating new spaces from which we have another choice right and so you kind of see as this dynamic dance between okay now i'm in this situation and now what is my choice in this situation so i would say i'm not saying it's equal i'm saying it's a dynamic balance and a switching process where you're constantly creating a new level and then now in that level you have a next choice because we we didn't have the choice to be created here we didn't we were here and that wasn't our choice now everything after that is our choice right yeah and there are some there obviously there are some traditions and i'm a big diver into like reincarnation and past life so according to the beliefs of reincarnation of past lives you have at some point made a choice to be here but taking it more simplistically the truth is that when you're brought into a situation it's the best analogy that i've heard and and it's been told for years is of a father is an alcoholic one of the sons that he has decides to become an alcoholic because his father's an alcoholic the other son decides to never drink alcohol because his father is an alcoholic right right so they were exposed to the same situation and same scenario same environment same environment but they both made different choices based on their experience and that's the choice element that's the element that we should be trying to empower in our lives because we can constantly say i'm limited by my environment or i've been restricted by my environment and hey it's true there are so many of us that have been limited and restricted but by now you repeating that you are going to repeat that restriction in your life how much of a positive environment supports us in our growth or holds us back there are some people who have the perfect family situation resources beautiful backyards and nature who are lazy and there are others who have you know divorced parents abusive parents abusive friends an environment of a desert yeah and they figure out a way to thrive totally how much importance does our environment play in our overall success if you look at the examples that you just shared and you really analyzed life you'd see very little because you see people craft their own life so a good example for me is that when i came back from living in the ashram and there were other people who may have been monks who'd also left the path and i came back to a not financially successful or supportive family so my family doesn't have abundant wealth and couldn't necessarily have taken care of me or paid for me forever and i had to figure out my own life and that to me was a great sense of impetus and incentive to go and figure it out and learn new skills and network and meet people and i saw other friends who parents had like a property portfolio with like 10 properties ready to hand them over they had a bmw the second that they came out whatever you know from their own life or i even have friends that had all of that and didn't become monks and didn't even find careers so i've also got friends that i went to school with that today don't even have careers even though their parents were really well established right which has all of these examples have continued me to believe that we truly have influence in our more than our environment our environment affects us for sure it plants seeds and weeds into our life but there is still a choice and and i think even if you feel there isn't a choice simply by accepting that there is it means you have a chance to get out of there and i think that's what because if you don't accept that there is then you're just going to stay stuck correct like there's been so many times in my life and there's a beautiful uh quote from edison i don't think i said this last time but if i did it's worth repeating he said that when you believe you've exhausted all options remember this you haven't and the reason why i love that is your mind continuously feels stuck when it's tried the obvious and that's why a lot of creativity and focus studies say that the first 10 ideas that come to your mind are never the most interesting it's when you get into the 11th idea that you start breaking the pattern and so if someone asks you oh what's your best business idea your first 10 ideas are probably not that innovative and so the mind constantly gets stuck on that train and you've got to keep reminding yourself that there is another door there could be another pathway i was thinking about a piece of advice that so one of my closest spiritual mentors who was in london i knew him since i was probably like 12 and probably went since i was 18. he passed away this year from stage four brain cancer and he had brain cancer for about i think like three three four years now and so i hadn't really had a real interaction with him for the past few years because every time i saw him he wasn't fully functioning in his short-term memory his long-term memory was there but his short-term memory wasn't and i remember speaking to him probably about seven eight years ago and asking him the question i said to him you know i've got so many ideas there's so many things i could do where do i start and he said this beautiful thing to me he said you know what your role should be to open up every door possible and he said let the world close the doors you're not meant to walk through and walk through the ones that remain open and what i realized is most of us just not opening up enough doors because we think we only have the option of two doors we look at life as binary zero and one zero and one right it's just this this or that and i mean i i think you'd say this too about you and every guest you've ever had on i don't think life is ever this or that it's like this that and that and maybe that and that and there's always a gap of course the challenge that people have is that i've sensed a lot is the fear of criticism when you go after something that you weren't supposed to do or that people don't think you're supposed to do why do so many people fear criticism from peers family friends the media why is that such a big fear and how do we overcome criticism from others psychologically we feel a sense of safety and security when we think people agree with us right that that is just psychologically true that i we would rather avoid conflict and sit in a space where we agree and therefore we have something called confirmation bias and the echo chamber where we keep surrounding ourselves with thoughts and ideas that are similar and reaffirm our beliefs now i think that you can have that and at the same time entertain ideas that you're not sure about yet and so one of my favorite examples was mit did this study where they asked people which person was more creative and innovative and they showed two charts one chart was employee a and the other chart was employee b the chart for employee a all of the people they knew knew each other and knew them back so it was almost like a closed loop and employee b they knew lots of people who didn't know each other and they found that people who have more people in their network who don't know each other are more likely to be creative and productive really why yeah because they expose you to opposing ideas and they may counteract how you think so one of my favorite examples of this is a conversation between mark zuckerberg and one of his mentors so mark zuckerberg told this story at the facebook headquarters a few years back i wasn't there i've seen it on video i'm sure it's available and he talks about how when he was struggling with the direction of facebook in 2009 he approached his mentor and his mentor happened to be steve jobs wow pretty cool wow pretty cool i wish really yeah it's so cool man and so anyway so mark zuckerberg goes to steve jobs and he says i'm struggling with the direction of facebook remember at that time facebook was five years old there was no fan pages i don't think i don't i don't think it was there was no creators there was i don't think there were fan pages it was very much used by university students at that stage like i think it was mainly like ivy leagues college kids and i don't even think it was international in a massive way very early days and now we can't even think of that but 2009 i mean you know you just about had the iphone and just about had instagram on youtube so he went up to steve jobs and he said you know i'm struggling with the direction of facebook what do i do now steve jobs at that time obviously was already the founder of one of the biggest brands on the planet and obviously the brand still is he had access to investors he had access to business coaches i'm sure he had access to life coaches he had access to health experts everything he had access to anything like i don't think there was scientists whatever scientists phds i don't think there's anyone in the world who steve jobs couldn't have called up at the time and steve jobs said something amazing he said you know what mark i think you should go and live in an ashram in india he did not he did oh he goes when you go to live in the ashram in india that's where if you spend some time there that's where you'll find your answer shut up and mark did it no way went to the ashram there's a true story a lot i i believe he was there for i believe i've seen two online i've seen two versions of the exact time he was there i've seen some people said it was a couple of days or a week or some people said it's a month so i think it's it's hazy how much time he actually spent there but but he went and he says that based on that experience that's where he found the direction of facebook to be connecting people now the reason why i love that story is because it's the unobvious alternative random connection and when harvard did a study of 3 000 executives they looked at and asked them what's the number one skill for being a good leader and a lot of people would say communication a lot of people would say vision strategy humility and the number one answer that they got from 3 000 executives was the one word which is called associating and what that means is the ability to spot patterns where everyone else doesn't see them and that's the connect that real leaders can spot patterns and connections in anomalies so most people be like what is an ashram got to do with a tech platform right but that is where you expand your mind to find answers that you never expected how important is creating alone time um with noises people busy work to allow your mind to expand is that the only time in that silence i think you mentioned it silence to hear in between the lines yeah is that where we start to hear what we're supposed to be creating where we're supposed to be heading our mission that's yeah i'm really glad you brought that back i wanted to get back to that so when we talk about there's a beautiful statement by david lynch who's movie producer and a deep meditator and he says that prayer is how you talk to god and meditation is how god talks to you and whether you believe in god or the universe or spirit or divine whatever it means the point is that there is a dialogue and a conversation prayer is like you're speaking you're saying here's what i want you that's how i feel yeah and meditation is more receiving receiving yeah and so i love that statement because i think it makes it very clear that we have to have a dialogue with the universe we have to have a dialogue with people in our lives we have to have a dialogue and there's both giving and receiving so when i talk about hearing in between the lines the best example i can give you lewis is let's take a look at you and your relationship and mine and my wife's relationship one of us is always traveling yeah so you travel your partner travels i travel my wife travels sometimes we're missing each other imagine you've got really busy and hectic do you think that anyone listening or watching you can ask the same question if you were really busy and hectic and stressed out do you think your partner feels comfortable to tell you how they feel and get your attention uh if if i'm busy stressed out overwhelmed will my partner tell me how i feel about themselves or about yeah do you think they would feel confident to be like louis i need to tell you something really important um i don't think they would they wouldn't yeah they really wouldn't because they don't stress you out they don't want to switch you up you're not presents all these things exactly so exactly that and so what happens is when you're still your mind and body actually get to speak to you and give you signals of how they feel and so when you're still that's when you notice that ache in your foot that you haven't noticed for a month sometimes when you slow down that's when you get sick because your body wasn't allowing itself to be sick because you were pushing it to get through stuff and so just like your partners can't communicate with you until you slow down your body and mind can't communicate with you until you still and so there's a beautiful buddhist teaching that says what movement does for the body stillness does for the mind and so when we find that space stillness and solitude you really are able to hear your deepest desires and challenges your physical pains and and areas of growth it's one of the reasons why when people meditate they feel sleepy afterwards and they think they're doing it wrong but actually they're doing it right meditation just told you you needed more sleep you needed to rest yeah meditation was just a signal so sometimes when i meditate with people that i'm coaching that's right some of them some people will be like i'm so sorry i'm i'm so sorry i'm just feeling so tired and i'm like no then sleep the rest yeah that's what your body's telling you because you finally listened and some people like oh jay i feel so energized i'm like yeah because you allowed yourself to be in line with your body and now your body is saying that you feel energized that's great you've got that energy go work out go build something so or you've cleared out those negative thoughts or you've let go of those distractions or that resentment and so you're not feeling this weight so you feel lighter correct and so that stillness and silence is one of my favorite ways for you to actually build that relationship with hearing your inner voice is there too much silence like if you say okay five hours a day it's is there a tipping point where you're like okay i think you do two hours every morning but a lot of people say well i've only got 20 minutes maybe yeah is is five hours too much is an hour you know what is the maximum or minimum or sweet spot you think for people to be silent every day yeah to live a great life i think i think 20 minutes is a great starting point yeah because 20 minutes is significant enough time for your mind to switch off so we hear that studies show that we have 60 to 80 000 thoughts a day and a lot of people are negative 80 negative i'm guessing a lot of them are repeated and so if you're only gonna say i'm going to do five minutes it just takes five minutes to switch off like it takes five minutes to just overcome that noise and so i'd say that 20 minutes is a good amount of time and hey you're not trying and i think this is the challenge with meditation mindfulness you're not trying to empty your mind you're just trying to be present with it and actually and listen to it and experience it the reason why i start with identity is because i think that's the root of all our challenges and the first step to thinking like a monk is starting at the root not starting at the symptoms or the superficial or the surface level but let's go to the root if you're playing a role if you're wearing a mask if you're dressed in clothes that are not yours then you end up living a life that's not yours and in the book i give this example of method acting yes yeah amazing i'm a massive movie junkie and i love method actors so people like heath ledger of course from the dark knight series you've got jared leto so jared leto when he played the joker in this is not in the book in suicide squad he used to send dead rats in the mail to his co-stars he did because he was trying to get into the mindset of how someone that perverted would behave and then daniel day lewis when he was filming for gangs of new york he's actually wearing these coats that are centuries old so that he can get into character when he's off camera yeah when he can feel it right he's not wearing watches he's not carrying around his mobile phone they're speaking in the accents and he talks about how he actually went crazy because guess what when you fake being someone for so long you think it's your reality and that's what happens to all of us we play a role at work we play a role at home we play a role with our family we play a role at our friends and then we think that role is us right and we lose ourselves and to me that is the core reason why we're chasing things that are not important to us we're unhappy despite reaching accolades and we feel dissatisfied so what should our identity be then our identity should start with unlearning everything that we think we know about ourselves okay how do we unlearn so the best method of unlearning is this first and i'm gonna get really strategic and tactical because i think that people need to know what to do rather than a concept the first thing you do is write down everything you currently are chasing in your life make a lot of goals your dreams your goals your dreams published anything that you're currently chasing and pursuing okay write them down you can write down three quran and five you can write down 10 depending on how ambitious you are second line ask yourself what is the source of that where did you get that idea did you get that idea from a tv show you saw did you get that idea from your parents did you get that idea from your mom and your dad your sister your cousin did you get that idea because your friend just got proposed to on instagram did you get that idea because your friend just got promoted did you get that idea because you just broke up right or did you get an idea because you just feel it when you do it that you feel alive just give me a specific example that you had when you were 15 18 was like a goal or accomplishment that you were chasing and where it came from absolutely so my my goal when i was young was to be an investment banker and when i really asked myself where did that come from it came because in my community small community in london the most successful person financially was an investment banker so i believed you had to be an investment banker to be successful right so when i asked myself that question where does that come from it comes from society's version of success not mine and then the third thing you ask yourself is well then what is mine what is coming from inside of me and if you just do that three-step process now what you're doing is you're filtering out the noise and you're starting to listen to your voice the thing is you've got a voice inside of you but it's quiet it's like it's like jay like take note of me like lewis you know and it's just like trying to get through and the noise of everyone else's opinions is so loud so this way you filter it how do we start to find out what we truly want then not based on what other people think is success how do we how do we listen to ourselves and if you've been chasing something your whole life how do you say well actually that's not what i want this is yeah one of the biggest mistakes we make is that we confuse inexperience with being unqualified so because we've not tried a lot of things we just naturally believe that we can't be that good at them so if i've never spoken on a stage i just think oh i'm probably not good at that or if i've never played golf i'd probably think i'm probably not good at that and so we start writing off things without even trying them so the best method i can share with someone is take the next month take the next four weekends in the month that gives you eight days and get really tactical every single day that's why you're playing tennis a lot right now yeah take the eight days go join a course an online course or workshop go and shadow a friend go to a seminar or a conference go to reading a book listen to a podcast go and expose yourself to eight different things in a month eight different things eight different things in a month and guess what in a month you will have learned what you probably would have learned in eight years because most of us test one new thing a year maybe maybe if that exactly right like some people don't even do that but if you do eight different things in a month and this is how you have to see it if you went to eight different restaurants in a month you asked yourself after you eat a meal like i had that burrito or i had that taco did i like it right the first question you asked is did i try it first you got to try it first you got to go to the restaurant yeah there's no point so you're going to say did i like it the second question you ask yourself is why did i or why did i not like it like why is so important i think too many people just go i like it or i don't like it why didn't i like and the third question you have to ask yourself really really simple is do i want to do it again and if you do that's where you start uncovering is so my point is inexperience do not misinterpret inexperience for a lack of qualification i'm guessing you're doing things in your life right now that you would have written off if you didn't try i know you've talked about writing a bestselling book you've talked about it with this amazing documentary i mean i never believed i could do half the things i'm doing today and you know that because we met when i was just creating content on social media and it's like now when you see things expand you're like you don't know until you give it a go and ask yourself do i enjoy it yes so i grew up very competitive and you talk about competition as one of these i can't remember if it's like four or five different things and competition is one of the things that's actually like um i wish i had the page on here but you talk about competition as like not the highest level of ourself yes in my entire life i was competitive was driven to beat other people and in the last seven years i've shifted so much i'm still competitive still want to win but i'm not like hurt if i lose i'm not upset i'm not it's that doesn't defeat me emotionally whereas before it used to be like this was my identity winning i had to win now it's like okay what did i learn what did i gain from experience did i have fun did i enjoy it did i inspire people even if i didn't win in this situation in in chapter two you talk about negativity and the quote you use is is it it is impossible to build one's own happiness on the unhappiness of others does competition and unhappiness link together in your mind like if we need to be competitive to be happy in order if someone else loses how do we how do we manage ourselves in this competitive world of winning in sports of building a bigger business some of these different things being number one in new york times best sell this how do we manage that with this world we're in but also wanting to be happy at the same time yeah what a great question so the way i see it is that competition in and of itself is not good or bad and and this is like the monk mindset on 99 of things that this mug is not good or bad it could be filled with water or it could be filled with poison yes and so competition i'll give you an example as monks our competition is in how much love and respect we showed to each other that's your compromise that's what you compete on or how long can we meditate for no no no i can meditate longer than you so if any monk is hit and i did this plenty of times really if i sat there and i thought oh yeah look at him he's scratching his back he got out like he moved your meditation just got destroyed all the value and so monks will never ask how long you meditate they focus on how deep you meditate and someone who meditates deep doesn't go on about how deep it was but but you compete for showing respect you compete for serving each other you compete for how well you can collaborate and i feel like you live this yes like i i feel like you haven't used to do that yeah but you do that now like you think like a monk like i feel like we're always trying to find a way where we can be better friends to each other and support each other and so you're competing on that and and that's a positive competition that i think you can have so you can still use and this is the beautiful thing about the monk mindset you can use any thing in a positive way now in your second question about what does it mean about business and new york times about seller lists and being number one this is how i see it if while you're writing your book if while you're recording your podcast if you're sitting there going i hope this is going to be number one this better be number one i hope i sell more i hope i sell more copies than this person who's launching at the same time because that's the only way well guess what now the quality of your output right now has just dropped because guess what you're now living 75 in the future and you're 25 right now and guess what this 25 is gonna define that future goal and result and your happiness and you're happy whether you get the result or not totally whereas for me when i was writing my book and of course i want my book to be a best-selling book of course i want my podcast to do well of course we don't do anything for it to be lost like no one does that but what i do know is that when i'm creating when i'm producing when i'm writing that's all i'm doing see the truth is that only two percent of the world's population can multitask now the crazy thing is those two percent when people hear that they think i'm in that oh i'm in that two percent like everyone thinks that they're in there but most of us are 98 yeah and the truth is there is no such thing as multitasking what it is is fast switching between two tasks so the quality is just dropping because you can actually you cannot do two things at one time you cannot no one genuinely can do two things at one point i guess you could maybe like pat your head and do this and say yeah yeah but you can't do something productive at the same time right or creative and so what i'm saying is that when you're sitting here going this needs to be number one you are reducing that things ability to be number one because it now doesn't have your full focus right so so that's the difference maker that you can want to be number one there's nothing wrong with that but you can't keep comparing what number one is to someone else's goal too because everyone's got a different trajectory like there are some people that are kind of come in and do really well at one thing and you're going to do really well at another and that's why competition has to first be in your space like don't compete in a space that's not yours right because now you're just trying to be someone else again and you get yourself identity exactly exactly you talk about the four motivations one is fear desire duty and love and as i was reading this you know fear is kind of like the making sure you have your basic needs met right it's like do i have shelter do i have food am i protected am i safe you know living in fear it's being driven to get out of that fear i guess right or driven or driven by that then you have desire which is probably what was the most of my life was my one of my main motivation which was desire seeking personal gratifications through success wealth and pleasure that's probably most of like i don't know any teenage boy you know who's just like watching the media and seeing what their friends do they're driven by desire girls money cool toys results success i don't want to generalize it but that's what i saw a lot grinding sure me too now the the last two the third and fourth are duty and love duty is motivated by gratitude responsibility and the desire to do the right thing and love is compelled by care for others and the urge to help them and i feel like in the last seven years it's been more duty and love it's more like mission focus and there's amount of happiness that i've never felt before until i reached practicing duty and love and i remember i never was able to fall asleep at night until about seven eight years ago without an hour hour and a half of just anxious anxiety stress concern worry and when it shifted from seeking personal gratifications to being motivated by a mission and love and gratitude it's like i started to fall asleep within minutes and it's crazy but why do we live in this fear motivation and desire motivation when it only causes us a lot of pain great question man and thanks for sharing your journey too because i mean everyone as you can see lewis is already thinking like a monk so that's great i love it but it's so yeah great question the challenge is that we think things come with emotions feelings we think things come with feelings and emotions and guess what they don't so if you chase money well they might for a moment right or they won't i don't think they even do also it's such a false sense of feeling i don't maybe for a moment but it's so short-lived that it's it's not even worth counting almost so it's like when you when you think that i'm chasing money guess what you will get money yep and that's great money is really important and money is a really important resource but guess what money is not now going to fill that gap that void that feeling that emotion that you're missing in your life what are most people missing we're missing a deep sense of love i think i think the biggest need in the world as we've heard many times before from all the ancient texts they they summarize it like this to love and be loved like that is the need of humanity to love and be loved and when we don't experience that we then start looking for status we then start looking for money then we then start looking for recognition just to help us give the feeling of false sense of love correct and the challenge is because most of us didn't experience that from our parents and this is the key thing what we crave in life is what we did or didn't get from our parents what our parents did give us is what we continue to crave what they didn't give us is what we continue to crave so you'll find that most people's love languages that they chase are things that their parents didn't give them so if their parents didn't give them time they now crave everyone's time if their parents didn't give them gifts they'd crave gifts if their parents didn't give them acts of service they're craving those acts of service so it's because of our childhood and if we don't learn to process all of that experience which most people never get the time to do and i empathize with that because i've had to go through that i've seen me repeating my parents patterns i've seen something you were craving so i would crave a big thing for me was i would crave surprises and gifts because that's your thing yeah that's my thing still it's your thing it's still my face yeah and and i did your parents not do that for you no they did it my mom did a lot of it that's why you're still quite correct so my mom would always every year on my birthday she'd always surprise me with the one thing i wanted and i wasn't support growing up i didn't have a lot growing up but she would get that one thing whether it was like a power rangers toy or whether it was whatever it was you know something yeah things you want as a kid right and she would always surprise me with that and that became so deep rooted now i'll give you an example when i then married my wife you just expect people to know that that they're going to do the same thing totally actually no because i'm expecting my wife to be like my mom in the sense of i expected a surprise or show me love in the same way and she doesn't know that she's not a mind reader i can't explain expect her to know that so it took communication it took time for me to explain that so anyway i think that's where it stems from that desire it doesn't come from any you can say it comes from society and education of course it does but i think the deepest place it comes is what your parents did or didn't give what did you notice about the outside world maybe a year or two years into the flow of your learning you know about yourself and about the wisdom and the philosophy of being a monk what did you start to notice the most most common things of when you were just talking to people or just walking down the street and just being aware of what was happening absolutely it's it's it's actually i've been quite in the gita a lot the bhagavad gita modern day i guess somewhat modern day philosopher because i think this encapsulated perfectly he said that this is cooley uh philosopher wright he said today i'm not what i think i am i'm not what you think i am i am what i think you think i am right and i always feel that blows my mind every time i say it i'm not what i think i am i'm not what you think i am i am what i think you think i am so we live in this perception of a perception of ourselves so we've all seen the movie inception imagine you get lost so far into someone's perception and that's your perception so if i think lewis thinks jay is good then i feel good but if i think lewis thinks jay is not good then i don't feel good and we live like that today if i think someone thinks i'm confident i feel confident but if someone thinks if i think someone thinks i'm not confident then i don't feel confident and that's what i noticed when i lived as a monk that people were so far removed from their own understanding of themselves that they were either lost living a life they didn't want to lost living up to someone else's expectations or lost becoming someone to impress someone else and so people were so their real identity is almost buried under six feet of multiple identities they've created and that's what i started to notice we have a social media identity we have a linkedin identity we have a twitter identity we have a facebook identity then we have an identity we are to our boss then we have an identity we are with our friday night friends then we have an identity we are to our sunday people and we just created all of these identities and if you ask people who are you we struggle to answer that question and so as a monk you're just taught to dig deeper beyond all those identities and kind of again bring out yourself rather than define yourself so that was what i noticed i just started to notice that people had a big lack of self-actualization they were very disconnected from what they wanted needed and understood about themselves and most people's identities were crafted by the reflection in this mirror of their mom dad friends boss partner whatever right how do we start to tap into self realization better yeah how do we learn that about ourselves so i think it starts even at a physical level i'll give a basic example at a physical level anyone who's a physical fitness or a health coach will know that different bodies need different food different sleep different fluids we don't all need the same thing me and you with different body types can't do the same workout right right we can't i would die if i tried to lift what you lift it just wouldn't work and i would die trying to sleep on the floor right exactly no but exactly right and that's the point our bodies have different tolerances in different things that's self-awareness at the physical level already so now what i realized by living as a monk is i can't survive of a four-hour sleep at night like i realized that about my body when you were a monk uh kind of when i was leaving and when i kind of came back to my real bed and i was just like oh i like this this is good yeah right and and i kind of came to that realization that i'm not able to function as effectively as i want to i could when i was a monk because we meditated so much that just got you to a higher vibration exactly so now i meditate two hours a day then i used to meditate four six hours a day plus the collective plus the environment all of that helps so now that i don't have that i can't but if i have that i can you could have just slept with those four hours and then battery exactly so so the point i'm making is that's physical self-awareness we know our limits we know what we can do no we know what we can't do we know what a challenge is on a mental level what's self-awareness knowing what type of people i like to be with knowing who helps me grow and who drains me that's mental self-awareness so self-awareness at every level and then we go into the spiritual consciousness level that's disconnecting from all these identities and understanding the identity that we are wired for generosity and we're wired to serve and only in service can we be happy and that's us on a consciousness level that's the identity of consciousness like water is wet the sun is heating in light consciousness is service like that's how it fits why are we wired for that we're wired for that because all of us as consciousness have been designed and we see it since like even kids like i was i was giving this example of this beautiful and you may have seen it it went viral on instagram it was this little girl probably about two years old watching a cartoon and she takes a handkerchief and the cartoon character's crying and she goes up to the television and she tries to wipe it off right and it's it's incredible because this girl's two years old and she thinks this cartoon character animal is crying and she gets a real tissue and tries to wipe it on the tv obviously it doesn't work and there's another another one that i saw with this statue of this rabbit and there's like four rabbits and one rabbit's like falling off the end and this little boy is trying to push the rabbit up but it's a stone rabbit it's just a statue but he's trying to help it back up so we see and there was a great article in wired about this about how we're wired for generosity our brain is happier in service why are we that way i'm not fully sure but what i do know from my experience as a monk or what i can verify is that we've been created to connect and serve right we've been created to connect and search if you don't know why my i can give you my opinion in the vedic opinion i i can't tell you why for everyone right the reason is the the main deep or the main vedic reason is is that we've been created that way because that's our nature and that's what makes us most happy because this whole world is almost a school an education system to make us realize that one truth to make us realize that one truth and we see that when we're serving when we're doing that we feel genuine happiness but when we're trying to gain and greed and power and strength we even feel empty as it slips through our fingers so the why is because that allows us to connect to our deepest self the happiest self that we have and modern studies have shown that so michael norton at cambridge university he did a study where they gave people five ten twenty dollars to spend on themselves have you seen this yeah and then they spent five ten twenty dollars on others so people spent 5 10 20 on makeup starbucks and normal right right that was that was the three comments three make up starbucks and then something else i can't remember and then people who spent on other people they also bought others the same stuff starbucks was still in there and they're buying all this stuff what they found is that when people self-assess their happiness before and after without knowing about this a b test people who spent the money on themselves didn't feel any happier or any less happier but the people that spend on others felt 10 to 20 percent happier and then he went and tried this out this was a college in in the united states that then when they did in africa they did it all over the world and the stats and the patterns shared the same wow that we're wired for generosity we're wired to serve to make us realize that that's our real nature that's our greatest self-awareness wow right so that's that's the vedic opinion and that's why i was that's why you had to probe me to go to why it is i know why it is but yeah but but i yeah i want to give people an answer that i feel they can connect with so what was one of the greatest lessons you learned in those three years then do you want to share the one i shared before or share another one i've got an i'll share another one yeah okay i'll show another one this is this is probably my one of my favorite things and it's because this was what i learned on my first day of monk school so if you think about what you learned on the first day of school when you were three or four if you remember what it was lbcd really alphabet the numbers right one two one to ten abc right the 26 letters of the alphabet so i remember my first day of monk school i've just shaved my head i'm now wearing robes i still look like i'm from london like i can't get away with it i'm walking around and i notice this monk who's teaching this monk's 10 years old and he's teaching a group of five-year-old monks right and i see him teaching he looks like an adult like wow you know his ability to like teach these five-year-olds and conduct himself and he's got this great aura about him and so i'm kind of eavesdropping on his class i can't obviously go and sit with a bunch of five-year-olds even though i really want to because i'm like i feel like a five-year-old next to that 10 year old and i i went up to him and i said what are you doing he said oh well we just taught their first class ever and i said oh cool and he said well what did you learn in your first class at school and i said oh well i learned the alphabet numbers and i said well what did they learn he said do you want to know what they learned on their first day of school i said yeah of course he said the first thing that we teach them the first thing you learn at monk school is learning how to breathe i said why he said because we're taught that the only thing that stays with you from the moment you're born to the moment you die is your breath all your friends family the country you live in all of that's going to change the only thing that doesn't change that stays with you from the moment you're born to the moment you die is your breath and he said notice when you get stressed what changes your breath when you get angry what changes your breath when you're sad what changes your breath when you're happy what changes your breath every emotion is experienced with the change of the breath so he said when you learn how to navigate and manage your breath you can actually navigate any situation in life and i was just blown away i was just like wow and then i remember researching it and noticing how athletes were taught how to breathe musicians singers especially those who play wind instruments who have to reach really high notes they're all trained how to breathe because they have to use their breath in challenging stressful pressure-filled situations but i was like so are all of us you've got to go on stage in front of 10 000 people you've got to go to a concert you just lost a deal or a contract our breath changes in all those scenarios yet we don't know how to use our breath to change our life and so for me that was a huge learning point where i just thought wow that's what you're taught the priority is on the root of things not the leaf or the symptoms and that's the biggest thing about living as a monk you're not dealing with your challenges at symptomatic level you're dealing with it at root level right people say are you stressed out just take a stress pill if you're stressed out just go to get a massage if you're stressed out just just relax watch netflix and chill but all that's doing is pacifying you escape for that hour two hours maybe a week but going to the root of it and learning how to change your breath means you can manage any situation in life and and that principle that's an example of the principle which is so much deeper that always go to the root it will take longer but it will last longer right right right if you go to the root it takes longer but it lasts longer but if you go for the symptom you get it quick and it never lasts and it never lasts and we don't know that yeah so that was the deepest principle i learned as a monk you always go to the root cut down the root of that weed in your heart get down the root of that weed in your mind don't just let it grow and kind of water a little bit and snip snip cut it a bit like let just really go to the room and just knock it out you know just get rid of it get a big axe and cut it down wow are there any weeds in your life right now loads uh in your heart or in your mind always my my daily practice is to refine my intention the the biggest weeds that we all get is on our intention so when i say intention i mean my current intention is to use everything i've been given everything that i have in the service of others so i want to use the following that i have to help people i want to use the money that i have to help people i want to use the network that i have to help people but every day that intention which is a beautiful little plant that's growing gets weeds around it no do it for the money hear that voice right do it for the fact just do it for the fame do it for the followers do it for this all these weeds are like going around my real intention every day every day that's a weed a weed is the intention that you don't want and the problem is sometimes you've let it grow so much the weed looks like the plant right the weed looks like your intention and you start believing it's the same thing so for me my daily practice is going back in reflecting on what is my voice right now in my head what am i saying to myself and i'm hearing make that deal it makes a lot of money do this do that do this more followers fame all that stuff and i'm cutting it down i'm cutting that weed every day and you've got to do it every day because the more you're surrounded by that energy right the more it's going to keep creeping in like a creeper weed right like i'm just using the plant analogy because i don't got in the toilet right like i have no idea but what's the intention you set every morning for yourself then if it's going back to the the core of what you really want to create what is that thing you want to create the most service yes service to to help people find their purpose whatever that may be and help them help other people find their purpose i think mark zuckerberg said it brilliantly at harvard he was saying that finding your purpose isn't enough you have to help other people find theirs and i know you're passionate about this whatever that definition is but it has to lead everyone so if i'm whether i meet a celebrity an entrepreneur or whether i meet someone who's starting out i'm always asking them a question how can you use what you have to make a difference in the life of other people yeah because if you start there everything else will work out but if you're starting from the point of what am i gonna get then you're always gonna feel disconnected and i see that i see people who live like that and feel pain in their lives every day i see that it's not like some conceptual philosophy we see it i see people who are only in it for themselves and they feel disconnected dissatisfied every single day and then you see the other extreme where people are just trying to give too much more than they even have themselves and they also feel disconnected and again nothing at all they have nothing at all right so we know again attachment and aversion two sides of the same coin so we want to be in that dynamic balance of growth but always to give yeah so i always think how can i go three steps deeper so that i can move three steps forward so i can give three times as much right it's all that's always my mentality how do i go deeper to go more forward to give more yeah and if i can get those three in action for that reason see it's all about the reasoning you can do anything you like but it's why are you doing it thoughts are something where we have 60 to 80 000 thoughts a day 80 are negative yeah most of them are repeating thoughts yes so let's talk about thoughts yeah my favorite technique that i talk about in the book is called spot stop swap and so that theme is all around how thoughts are meant to be spotted stop and reflect and then swap and what i mean by that is if you've got a thought that's repeating like you said and is negative i'm guessing you don't want that thought around for too long so you want to spot when does that thought arrive does it arise when i'm with certain people does it arise when i'm on a particular social media platform does it arise when i go to a particular place where is that what is the seed of that thought right so once i identified that i now need to stop spend some time in stillness and go is this thought benefiting me is this thought useful to me is this thought actually leading me to who i want to become and if it's not i need to swap it with a thought so one of my favorite ways of let's take an example of like i feel less than i feel uh like i'm not achieving anything i'm not good i'm no good i'm not good enough so you spot that and you go i always feel that when i'm going through this particular instagram profile because i'm looking at someone who i think is better than me okay what do i swap that with you don't swap that with you're beautiful you're amazing you're incredible because you may not believe that yet yeah but you stop it you you swap it with i feel confident when i feel attractive when i feel happy and joyful when and you figure out what is that thing that i need to be and do to feel that emotion yeah just don't lie to yourself don't lie to yourself because lying to yourself is not going to get too far and you're losing your integrity as well to yourself which makes you less confident yeah like i feel healthy when i exercise yeah i feel happy when i spend time with my wife yeah there's a there's a line that everyone uses fake it till you make it yeah it's really you should be facing it until you make it like face that fear face that doubt and say okay what can i do to improve this until i make myself feel better about it if you want to get a result for the long term yes like if you just want to make yourself feel better instantly then do what you need to do but if you really want to create a life that's lovely that's thoughts thoughts are can transform your life can in a positive way or a negative way completely i feel like that's the foundation of our life is what we think the best place to talk about that though with thoughts is the movie inception so you look at how a thor is planted into someone's mind and how in that movie leonardo dicaprio in his wife's mind plants a thought that this is not real and that thought grows into a belief belief that is so strong it's crazy right and it's like that is literally what a thought can do and you see that in the joker movie so i i did a whole episode last year which is all about like mental health and the joker and you look at the joker stories he's trying to bring joy to others but everyone treats him badly and so the thought sets in if i'm not worthy i'm not valuable my father doesn't want me no one thinks i'm funny everyone makes fun of me even when i go on tv everyone's laughing at me that idea becomes his reality now i get that that's a fiction movie but the point is still that we see even in today's world that thoughts have the ability to become i i forget the word that leonardo dicaprio uses the movie but that thought yeah cancer or sometimes yeah it's like a cancer in the mind right it like really just expands and so i think we have to be so good at spotting stopping and swapping thoughts i love that okay so beliefs we want to ask about everything and question everything yeah uh spot stop swap thoughts what about words how important is the things that come out of our mouth into existence harvard did a table which i really believe is what mindful speaking is all about so what is this so it's called the it's called harvard list of emotions but i i kind of changed the name to emotional vocabulary because i think it sounds better so an emotional vocabulary if you look at all of the world's emotional vocabulary it's very limited we use five words to describe pretty much everything good bad yeah okay fine so it's like how's your week going good how's your day been bad how are you feeling okay literally like we use such limited words and that may be okay for the majority of people but in your personal relationships it's so important to expand your emotional vocabulary so this table that harvard has made which anyone can find just by typing in harvard list of emotions on google what that does is that it shows you that when you say you're sad what do you actually be in so it gives you all this list of emotions that sit under the word sad are you irritated are you offended are you disappointed have you been let down the more you expand your emotional vocabulary the more you can diagnose how you feel interesting and the more you can tell your partner or your friend this is how i'm feeling this is how i'm actually feeling and and this is one of the biggest mistakes with words is that we think our words mean the same thing now when you say love you might think forever and when i say love i might think for tonight right and that is literally how the word love or care or marriage or forever gets misused abused and thrown about because we both mean different things and our meanings are based on our backgrounds our beliefs our beliefs but how we were born our perspectives culture experiences everything yeah it forms our meaning so i really believe that in a relationship in our communication with words define words when you say yeah we're best friends or friends what does that mean to you when we're business partners what does that mean to you a contract in a financial legal sense is to define the terms right but in our emotional sense we also need to define the terms and we don't do that emotionally enough and that's why we feel emotionally like someone broke the contract and you have nothing to hold them to because you never made a contract you made a community you never communicated you never communicated the meaning of these words exactly and that's why words are so powerful but they're only powerful when we agree on the definition yeah what are the words we should eliminate from our vocabulary and what are the words we should be adding or using more of words that we should use more of in our life are words that give us the right feeling we want to feel so i'll give an example instead of saying now i work super hard i do get tired and i do get exhausted sometimes i'm very aware of it and i'm cautious of it and i realized that for a long time i just kept repeating i'm tired i'm exhausted i'm tired i'm exhausted and i'd say to my wife i'd say to my team overwhelmed i'm stressed yeah and i still do it sometimes so it's not that i'm perfect but you make me aware of it and i say that i started to realize that okay it didn't make me feel better by saying it and actually what i was trying to do was get validation from someone else to be like i know how hard you work and you're amazing and blah blah blah and so you know you're really doing it for a reaction and then i started to realize well i am tired but why don't i just say i'm going to make some time to nap today uh i need to i need to find some time today to rest i need to make sure that i uh you know get some time to myself today like when you flip it not by just saying oh i feel amazing because i don't feel amazing again you don't lie to yourself but you're trying to create words that help you actually get what you need so me saying i'm tired really what i need to be saying is i need to get some more rest today i better sleep early and then you go all right you know to rather you know what i think i'm going to sleep early tonight that's that's perfect because now i'll sleep early and i'll get the rest and i won't be tired hey riley i'm so tired it just creates this negative pattern of complaining and whining and and creating that you know what what's the difference between a positive mantra and fake positive thinking because there's you know the power of positive thinking but if it's not accurate to where you're currently at it could be out of integrity with yourself and you can feel off yeah so how do we have a positive mantra or a saying or thoughts or words that support our growth as opposed to i'm fine when you're not fine yeah and that's exactly what i'm trying to avoid yeah because when i'm tired if i was told to just say to yourself i'm healthy i'm excited i'm energetic i may survive for 30 minutes more but that's not going to survive for 30 days or three years and so for me i find connecting positive mantras to a act or an action for example if i'm tired and me saying i think i need to eat on time that action is what's going to solve the fatigue long term or me saying i need to sleep early tonight that action is going to solve the fatigue long term so to me the positive mantra needs to be linked to an action and a habit that's actually going to relieve you in the long term of that pain point right yeah like i need to get my schedule to be more organized on monday mornings and and my favorite example with that again i don't know if yeah this with the words is the definition that i think we see this most prominently in is the definition of time so so many friends will come to me and say my partner doesn't spend enough time or i don't have enough time and what they're really saying is from a partner point of view is i really want energy intimacy and presence and attention it's attention you're not asking for time you're asking for attention and i've had friends who have gone on weekends away with their partners and they'll come back and their partner on monday morning will say i wish we had more time together and the partners thinking well but we just spent the whole weekend together but they're like no because you were doing your work and by the beach and you were reading your book and i was trying to take care of the kids and you realize it was never time it was attention it was intimacy it was presence and so if we don't define those words right words are all about definitions if you don't define them people will break that contract and their emotional contract and you have nothing to hold them to well you didn't have the you guys weren't aligned to your contract no not at all you just had your belief that like oh she understands me he understands me like this is the way it is in my life and it must be the same way in their life exactly what are the actions we should be adding more of in our life and the ones we should be eliminating i think actions that we should be adding more of in our life are actions that create positive habits i think it has to be habits orientated it has to be stuff that we can repeat and and in think like a monk i talk about the four key habits in your day which are thankfulness inspiration meditation and exercise which is the acronym of time so make more time in your day for thankfulness inspiration meditation and exercise those are four actions that i think if everyone wants to take in their day this is what happens when you're thankful you boost your immunity you boost your self-confidence you boost your mood yeah because you go oh people love me that means i matter people care about me that means i have something to care about so it boosts your mood and then when you tell people that you're thankful you now boost connection and relationship and when you thank someone you now boost the feeling of i have people in my life that care about me and i care about them so much comes out of that one action inspiration or insight listening to a podcast reading a book reading a quote when you do that again you feel excited you feel enthused you feel like you're learning you feel like your mind actually works and that they can go somewhere so that's a great action meditation of course we've talked about length in the beginning and exercise people just don't understand that we could solve so many of our challenges simply by sleep and exercise and diet like those three things change your life could change your life and and we have to just get focused on one at a time and so we're in actions i i talk about this thing in principle is we want things to be small steps but big priorities so if you want to change an action in your life it needs to be a big priority and then you need to break it down into small steps what we try and do is we try and change everything at the same time yeah we're like okay i'm gonna only eat lettuce i'm gonna work out three hours a day i'm gonna sleep ten hours i'm gonna be it's like you need to shift your identity around like the thing and take the small steps towards it but don't try to do everything right away yeah like if you want to be healthy and in shape then you need to change your identity to say i am mr fitness yeah right i am fitness yes and i'm going to start living my habits and my actions towards being in fitness in in good health yeah but you can't cut you can't change every habit right away no because then you'll get burnt out after two weeks you'll be like this is exhausting yeah i'm not mr fitness you change your mindset and then take those small actions exactly and there's a beautiful quote from this is more like an underpinning actually this kind of leads to the next one we'll save it for the next one yep intentions yeah so there's a beautiful quote from the dalai lama where he said that we're born to help people and if we can't help them let's at least not hurt them and i think that's the intention that you want to leave every person happier than you found them leave every place cleaner than you found it leave every project more productive than you found it like you want to feel that if you couldn't uplift something or someone at least don't pull it down and i think that when you live like that in your intention people feel that this isn't necessarily something that you even have to say or do people feel that when you just leave a place and all you wanted to do is give your energy in a positive way so to me intention is just coming from a place of how do i leave every person just a little bit happier than i found them i don't have to change their lives right but i try not to hurt them try not to hurt them with everything that's been happening in the world right now i'm hearing a lot of people say that intention isn't enough like having a positive you had i had a good intention to like say the right thing but it offended someone and it impacted them in a negative way yeah so how do people understand that that it's it's about intention but it's also you might hurt people you might offend people even if you weren't intending to how do we shift that in our minds and our actions to sync up our intentions to actually impacting people in a positive way yeah that's what i mean it's like yeah it really makes so much sense a real deep intention means that you will care and do the research and study and often we have a good intention but it's not the deepest greatest intention so we try and wing it it's based on our beliefs correct as opposed to doing the research of other things correct and so really good intentions are make you ask questions and make you care and make you compassionate and sometimes that doesn't mean saying a lot sometimes that means listening learning receiving understanding and i think when we are trying to show our good intentions we say a lot and it may be taken the wrong way yeah but when we really want to be our good intentions we're just listening and and learning and asking good questions and you do that really well like you know whenever even if we're you're this person even if we're on a dinner like lewis will ask this many questions even if we're having dinner yeah and we'll go back and forth and i'll ask questions and but you you're really curious and inquisitive person in a in a positive sense and that's why people always feel very comfortable around you to open up and share because they feel that you're really listening right and so i think that's a big part of it is that uh when we're doing that the second part is even if you do all of that there will be people that get offended yeah so even if you master the way of communicating and you really care and you do the research there'll be people that get offended and what you have to realize is that there are just so many more triggers right now so many to everyone's lives and there are deep triggers there too there's historic triggers there's there's so much going on that you can't make it about you and i think sometimes we're like oh how did they get offended me i tried so hard but it's like don't make it about you because there's so many more things that play here there's so much more going on so again we try and reflect it because we want to be liked or considered to be supportive yes but we're not realizing there's just so much more at play here all of a sudden one of your mentors is a teacher there at this ashram right yes you said it's time for you to go yes so what was that conversation like when you said you're no longer welcome yeah and how did you start to plan for your exit yeah definitely so i've been there for three years i've literally traded everything been celibate for the first time in my life for that long it's you know for that long ever like it's huge yeah and then he sits down with me and he says i think you'll be able to share what you've learned if you leave you'll be able to share this with everyone if you leave and i felt like it was this nice way of saying you're not ready to be a monk like get out of here that's how it felt it felt like i'd failed and it felt like he was like breaking up with me like i equate it to a divorce it was almost like him saying to me it's not you it's me you know it's not working out like it kind of felt like that this is the same month that you who came to speak no no it was his teacher oh wow so his teacher so like more so yeah even more so right like and and it kind of felt it wasn't disingenuous on his part it was just it was a reality check it was a reality check that this wasn't going to last forever and it was it was one of the most toughest humiliating ego-bashing crushing things that happened because here i was thinking i'm going to be a monk and i'm going to do this and i've got all these plans and then all of a sudden three years on all your plans have failed i've got no money i've rejected all my corporate job offers and i moved back in my parents five years ago with 25 000 worth of debt from studying which is a lot less than what you have in the us because uk education is cheaper but still 25k debt no work experience for three years and and also just it's not even just no work experience you've literally been in another world right you've been in another world it's not just like oh i've been on the same planet you've been disconnected i forgot who won the world cup right right i have not read a newspaper i've kind of kept up to date but not much and not much you know so i moved back to my parents and i'm thinking to myself what am i gonna do like now i'm gonna have to think about paying bills and i'm gonna have to think about my my parents aren't well off so i didn't have anywhere to just i had their home to hang out in but it wasn't like oh yeah i'll just live off my parents for a bit i'll figure it out i was just like i literally have nothing like if i don't figure this out i'll be sleeping in my bedroom that i grew up in for the rest of my life and that's it like that's life sure so so it was tough it was it was the closest i've ever been to like a very low point because your biggest dreams have just crushed and i know no one can really understand my dream of becoming a monk but you can equate it to i don't know playing in sports like i know for years like that but whatever it is music it was it was like your biggest dream on the planet just comes crumbling down and and i felt it it hurt it really hurt and it hurt the ego because all my friends or family who are just about convinced that i was becoming a monk when i was coming back they were all like what i thought you were going to be a monk what are you doing like do you fail at that you know it was kind of like you failed to be careful exactly you can't even think about nothing you gotta focus on nothing so i was getting a lot of backlash and i was feeling like the monks i was like i you know you start judging yourself and you put that mirror on to others i was like oh the monks are going to judge me my friends are going to judge me like i'm going to feel so and i felt alone i really felt alone because i'd let i'd let go of a lot to go there i hadn't talked to my friends for ages and so anyway i moved back and i literally from the day after i left i just started reading and learning more about what was happening in the world started leading reading about personal development and started reading about the vedas again like my practice so i never left my practice i brought it with me and i had that moment where i had to decide i was like wait a minute i've been taught how to deal with anxiety pain pressure and everything is a monk and for the first time in my life i had to put it into like practice but in like acceleration mode like i had to put everything i'd learned into practice and everything i'd learned was tested in that moment and that was hard because i was just like wow i really need to now apply everything i've been talking about teaching all this kind of stuff and i have been tested but now this is a real test right real world yeah real world it took me like nine months to 12 months to feel like i could go into a normal space again maintain my energy and still be able to interact without feeling drained or without feeling like i'm in a lower space or without feeling like what's the point of this you know all that kind of stuff because that's your mentality what's the point of this all you know so meaningless yeah but then having to realize actually it's not meaningless because i was trained to realize that everything gets meaning when i give it meaning so if i see it as meaningless it is but if i use it as a service it can be the most powerful thing in the world it took me like nine to 12 months to be able to adapt that mindset so that i could kind of live with normality again to something right yeah so when did you realize you wanted to start creating videos that was much later so i ended up doing two things when i left one thing was all my friends who worked now at big companies they were stressed out and hating their lives and so they started to invite me to speak at their companies like google and starbucks and they were working what you learned from being a monster yeah that's it they were working on these big brands and they're like jay come teach us what you've learned like we're stressed out maybe you learn how to meditate and i was like oh yeah and this is like this is five years ago when four to five years ago when mindfulness and all this stuff was just on the rise it was it wasn't huge yet like now everyone talks about it so i kind of had come back just to that moment when yeah good timing but without any strategy whatsoever and i actually remember this is i know you've got andy puticombe on your wall i remember finding about finding out about andy pettigrew when i was still a monk and and i always talk about this i always was there for 10 years or something 12. he was a monk for 10 years and i think when he left in startup headspace i remember learning about headspace when i was a monk i remember hearing about it and it was very early days then like monk made it yeah that's possible yeah and now i always look back again that was my big i wish i could have invested then that's like my thing like i was like i had no money to invest but anyway it's brilliant app but the point being that i kind of came back at that moment in our in our world where mindfulness well-being all these things were coming into the corporate workplace and so all my friends were inviting me so i started speaking all these venues and i'd been speaking while i was a monk i've been speaking since i was 16 so that was a very natural part teaching was very natural and i loved it and people were getting so much out of it i was like wow like my monk experience is really there to help so many people and because i'm still living it i can still give it and all of a sudden all of this environment had a meaning and purpose again and i started to see what my teacher had said that you're you're there to share this with people but then i saw this barrier that i was hitting that most of the companies that wanted it were corporates and i saw this rise in technology and i hadn't even joined social media yet so i avoided facebook when i was when i was in university because i thought i was going to be a monk so i tried to avoid it and i never used it when i was a monk so i never used facebook youtube twitter anything until 2014 when i just had a normal friend page where i didn't do anything on it so i joined social media in 2014 10 years after facebook's launched so i noticed this rise in technology and i also start thinking i need to understand companies better so i start reapplying to loads of companies to get my job back to see if i can learn about technology because i'm like i need to get technology i don't get it enough so i'm applying to all these companies i get rejected by the same 30 40 companies that would have let me walk in three years ago and finally one company gives me a job it's called accenture and so i get this break at accenture and i join it when i'm like 26 27 and i'm joining with a bunch of new grads who are 21. so i'm like the oldest guy there and and i'm joining and i'm like i'm just here to learn like i keep reminding myself the intention here is just learn consume and you're not going to be here for a long time so i started learning about social media technology so happens they were growing digital and social media at the same time and i just got stuck in self-learning spent every hour trying to figure it out had training from their experts and i ended up becoming the top social media influencer in accenture inside 400 000 people just through just experimenting learning and figuring it out because i had a feeling and it wasn't because i was preparing i just had a feeling that social media would be useful right that was it so anyway then i've been at accenture for 2013 october to 2015 october and i'm recognizing that now i'm not playing to my own passion everything that i'm teaching about living your passion your purpose your living what really matters to you i'm not doing that myself because i'm still talking about digital and technology when actually what i want to talk about is life and the mind and wisdom so i quit my job comfy corporate job doing really well for myself and i'm trying to get into media and so i'm writing to every big media company with before my videos and saying please give me a job like i'll come in like a video journalist salary i was looking at salaries that like a quarter of what i made i was like i don't care about the money i want to make videos and i want to spread a message i'm getting rejection email after rejection email saying jay you never studied media jay you have no background so i'm getting rejected by all the biggest companies uh business insider huff post the economist wired you name it i've got all the emails and then i try and network with the editors of these magazines so i find out where they are i go to the events i try and talk to them and they're like to me hey man you're like 28 years old why do you want to do this you make more money right now hang in the corporate world do it as a hobby i remember running after one of our biggest news anchors in england called jon snow and he rides a biker in london but he's like he's huge he's on channel 4 one of the biggest broadcasters for us and so i run after him when he's on his bike and i'm like john please please stop and he stops he's really kind i said john can you please give me a job i'll just i don't even want to get paid i'll just watch you and i because he creates these powerful documentaries he's interviewed the best of the best like mandela and all this stuff life-changing conversations and he goes to me he gives me a card and he goes jay go get a masters in media and then come back and i'm thinking spend two three more years yeah exactly i'm gonna go back like anyway so i came to a point where i literally had no other option than to start a youtube channel and and my honest limiting belief at the time was that doesn't work for anyone and that's what i said to myself i was like it's not gonna work for anyone but i literally had exhausted i think it's thomas edison who says when you feel you've exhausted every option remember you haven't and i'd come to that point where i felt i'd exhausted every option apart from starting a youtube channel so i launched the channel jan third 2016 two years ago and it's doing pretty well and so i started to make videos because i felt that was the only way we could scale this message beyond corporates beyond companies to people in the world who can't pay for that coaching who aren't part of this industry you know when you grow up in that circumstance you think everyone has that but when you look around the world most people do not work at a huge fortune 500 company yeah and i want it to go to them and beyond and i always always had this scale mind in my head i've always been a big thinker and wanted scale and when it comes to helping people there's nothing more important than scale to me right like being able to impact everyone in the world right you can't if you really want to help you can't say i'm happy helping 10 people no you know you want to help more people that's why video is the most powerful platform to spread a message incredible speaking in front of 100 000 people at an event isn't as powerful it's not big but it's limited still exactly it's a lot of people yeah but if you want to take it to as many as you can i think video is the greatest option at low cost to them and yourself like get completely like at no expense to anyone yeah you can change you can have an impact on someone's life and i didn't know that then but i knew that video was the form so i just tried and that's when i started making videos because i felt anyone in the world with a phone like more people have a phone than a toothbrush right so i was like anyone who has a phone can watch this and it can impact them and get their journey going whatever that is and so that's why i started making videos wow when did you realize it started to take off so it was after a month i was doing okay i was getting like 10 20 30 50k views on youtube which was pretty decent and it was just all organic me pushing it out sharing my videos again tweeting it out to lots of editors and publishers saying please feature my video and then coming back even on twitter and saying not sure about this message don't quite connect with it we don't think it quite works i got a lot of negative feedback as well but the audience liked it i was getting good feedback on youtube but from official people i was getting quite not negative but not not great feedback but i kept going i i've always had this mantra that i always believe all you need is one person to say yes and i still live like that when i have an idea i'm just like i'm gonna knock on every door and all i need is for one door to stay open it doesn't matter how many that is and so i started doing that and somehow someone showed it to ariana huffington she was at the world economic forum and someone showed it to her there and then i met with one of her team members who's now a really good friend of mine he was like he was the editor-in-chief of the half post at that time and he loved my videos he liked me and then i pestered him for a month after i'd met him to actually get my videos on half post then ariana called me she said i love your videos we want to feature them just make a series for us and then we'll post them up so i made a series of four videos so this was about three months after i started on youtube so it's march 2016 march april 2016. they launched my first video it gets a million in a week views on facebook on the huffpost which was great for them they're like let's try the second one they learned the second one a week after and that video is now on 40 million views and has another 120 million across facebook on other channels but that video did 40 million it did it it did 1 million in 24 hours and then like 12 million by the end of the week and then 24 million in two weeks and 40 million overall and the third video did another 15 million and the four footer did another 20 million and so that was the most views huffpost has ever had on any of their series in their history and then ariana was just like hey do you want to come over and be a part of us so that's when it really took off when when ariana spotted it and her team spotted it danny shea one of my favorite people in the world who who really had faith in me yeah and fought my battle uh when when i was just this guy making videos on youtube which i still still am but he really saw that add potential and ariana so them two were like the best and danny's uh danny's ariana's one of her favorite people they made it happen he invited me to new york to host a show on huffpost live which was their partnership with facebook live and i had a show called follow the reader that i created and produced where i interviewed self-development experts i would have loved to have you on that show had i still been there but we interviewed deepak chopra tim ferriss gabby uh dr shefali russell simmons etc and shefali's great yeah she finally is awesome yeah she's really cool so i got to meet all these incredible people and more on that show and that's when it so that was september 2016. that's when it really started that's when i came to new york before we continue this video make sure to subscribe below and turn on the notification bell right now so you don't miss out on these great videos every single day how does someone find purpose in chaos when they can't even get out of the thinking because they're just trying to survive yeah so a beautiful question my my biggest answer is first of all i empathize with anyone who's been in that situation having i can't ever say i've been in that situation in the same way but i've experienced similar things you've stealing in your life yeah in my own way and i've seen my mom go through stuff like that i i know that my mom worked really hard to raise me and my sister while working you know while running around and i've i've seen my mum be that incredible powerhouse of a person and the the main thing i would say is what you can do right now is find meaning in what you do make what you do meaningful passionate and purposeful you don't need to suddenly look to become an entrepreneur or start a side hustle or find some more time find meaning and the way you find meaning as you genuinely stop press pause for a second and go what am i living for like what am i living for right now and if you're living for your child and if you're living to provide and put food on the table that is a beautiful thing that we should celebrate more and sometimes it takes us a moment to stop and celebrate that and so i would say find meaning because you can't always find happiness you can't always find positivity but you can always find meaning in that position so i'll give an example like i lost someone really important to me a mentor a few days back i can't be positive about that you can't be happy about it yeah it's hurtful you feel sad you feel lost but guess what i can find meaning in it because i can make a list of every lesson he taught me and make a plan to try and live every one of those lessons wow that's beautiful and and so if you're in a really tough situation right now don't look for positivity don't look for happiness look for meaning that's a good one not trying to and not trying to get yourself out of pain too quickly or discomfort or frustration yeah which i've been a guilt of being like just be positive or whatever to people but i think it's like you know have your experience yes live your experience and find meaning as quickly as possible and create a commitment to how you want to use that meaning moving forward okay i may not be great tomorrow maybe not with next week next month but i'm going to use this meaning to serve other people to continue to do what i love continue to be great to my friends my family in the best way possible and when you start doing those small things with love and kindness so much more opens up it's like when you when you can be trusted with the small things and the small moments you get trusted with more and more and more and so like it helps to just in that moment and it's in those painful moments that you realize how powerful you are we all know that like you really recognize it and and what you said was beautiful about not rushing through the pain because and and you know this example's probably been shared before but if you have a wound and you've cut yourself it's like you can't rush the healing you can't rush it if you broke your arm i mean and you've been through so many bodily injuries you can't rush the process it's gonna take six weeks minimum to heal broken oh yeah and you've gotta sit through that it's painful there's no injections you can take there's no videos you can watch there's nothing you can listen to but our challenge is we try and rush through the pain rather than reflect through the pain we try to rush the healing process try to rush the healing and you can't rush healing and healing is meant to be slow because it buys you time it buys you reflection it gives you so much space to slow down to slow down and that's what your body is calling out from this is our emergency like how many times have you earned it where you slow down you slow down and that's when you fall ill because guess what your body has been trying to tell you to slow down when you feel pain so i write about it and think like pain makes you pay attention yeah that's what pain is for pain notice this notice this don't kiss me look at me it's crazy it's like a crying baby craving for attention when a baby's crying you don't just go eyes crying you just go oh yeah we'll just put it in another room and forget about it right like you go to and you find its needs whereas without pain when something's painful we're just like oh yeah i'll just forget about it i'll escape from i'll do something else you have to go into that i'm not the person i'm numb the pain or whatever yeah 100 that's that's usually our responses what can i do to numb this work more have sex more drink more whatever's more whatever it is rather than let me actually become alert and guess what the pain just gets higher and higher and higher and higher because unfortunately until it really hurts we don't stop or you need more and more to numb it with so true and so you go down the extremes of life so true now what's been the most painful thing you've had to experience since because i know leaving the monk hood was painful for you because this was a mission of yours that you wanted to have for your whole life and i think you were there for three and a half years so what's been the most painful thing i guess in the last six or seven years since that time that you've had to reflect back on take notice of pay attention to and reevaluate that's a great question i think for me it was in 2016 i moved out to new york so just let me paint a picture of 2016. i moved three jobs i got married wow i moved country and i just just started a whole new life like my life just transformed so we went to all of that with my wife in one year and by the way all of that was surprises the job chains were surprises yeah the country change was a surprise the marriage was not a surprise we planned but apart from everything else everything was a surprise now i said i like surprises so i can roll with it but my point is that's a lot of transition so much transition and i felt the burden of being in a new city where we had no family we had no friends and my wife who loves being around her family and no one understands just how close she is to them i felt this burden on me that i had taken away her time with her family and now she was alone so i was going out to work and she'd be crying at home and i was thinking she's got no friends she's got no support and i know you can relate to this with moving and relationships and so much going on and so it's like i'm dealing with that and guess what six months later i have to leave and move on and work on a new career to build everything myself and then i'm four months away from being broke and so on top of all of this i've now got four months away from being broke i've got enough money money saved for four months to pay for rent and groceries and that's it in new york city and that's it and guess what even on top of that i've got 30 days before my visa runs out and i'm kicked out of the country so i can't even live here anymore so not only have i just got married moved job three times changed career again had to move into apartment four months of being broke and i might get kicked out in 30 days and my renewal for my visa costs 15 000 so that's going to eat into those four months i have probably never been under that much emotional physical and and mental pressure in my life like genuinely i felt it and i thought my body changed my my breath was more stressed i would be breathing faster shorter breaths not deep breaths heartbeating faster not working out you get into lazy habits you start craving junk food i'm living in a 500 square foot apartment with my wife which is which is tiny like everything's in that space and guess what we both work from home so i'm now sitting at a desk hunched over trying to figure stuff out she's trying to cook in the same room like i'm trying to just just try to figure out what to do and i remember the next morning sending like a hundred emails to people and just being like this is who i am this is what i can do how can we serve and that was the same year that i ended up meeting you later in that year and the beginning three months of that journey was so stressful like they were so stressful because i was like what if i have to move back to london what am i going to say to her parents i mean i just took their daughter away like uh just got married i've lived in new york city for six months and my life's falling apart like you know so much and i've got all these views but there's nothing there's nothing happening in we met you also you also i mean at this time you're also growing so much how are you able to create and reach this impact with your videos as that's growing while you're under so much stress and uncertainty and i stopped a bit of that time like things slowed down like things slowed down i remember i i wasn't crying as much as i was because i don't enjoy creating from stress or pressure and i don't think you can really create something from stress and pressure so we really slowed down at that time and when i was creating i was creating from a place of recognizing that i could share what i had learned and what i had grown in so far so anything i was sharing was like this is what i've learned so far so that was the biggest pain that i've been through in the last seven years for sure and all i can say is that i remember coming home to my wife knowing that this was going to be the truth and i came and i said to i said to her i guarantee you this is going to be the best thing that ever happened to us what the pain the pain i said that to the night i came home and then she gave out i literally came up i looked her in the eyes and go this is the scenario and i just want you to know that i guarantee you this is the best thing that's ever going to happen to us and i said this is this is a monk statement that we used to repeat i said i'm just not going to judge the moment don't judge the moment because what we do is we try to label moments as good or bad and when you label the moment as bad it now does not have the opportunity to become good i'll give an example if i go i don't like this book this book's bad right and i don't and i love this book but if i say that guess what i will never pick it up and recognize the value that's inside of it because you've labeled it yes and we label stuff like we label oh that restaurant's bad but when you label them that person's bad now you can't learn from that person a great one that's a really good one as soon as you start labeling people or anything is good or bad you limit it you stop it from being something else and here's the truth every moment can evolve into being anything if you give it the opportunity to right but as soon as you say it's got no value anymore you lose it and so for me i had to say to myself don't judge the moment and i'd keep repeating that don't judge where you're at don't judge what's happening yeah don't judge it as negative don't don't just start saying it's negative because guess what we've all been in positions where a gift turned into a curse and a curse turned into a gift it's true right we've always our dreams came true and it ended up not being what we wanted exactly it fell apart and it led us into our dream totally why is it that so many people that win the lottery yeah go broke yeah gifts can turn into curses too but because we label them as the best moment in our life or the worst moment in our life whereas when you approach things to neutrality and just what you have on the table you can be like okay what am i going to do next that's why the greatest quarterbacks are neutral energy they'll get a little excited they'll get a little fist pump in there every now and then but they're not hyped every play and they're not negative every play they have this calm they see the field they you drop a pass and it's like a little bit let's go but it's very neutral even when you score a touchdown unless it's maybe the super bowl or a big championship at the end of a game in the middle of the game you want to keep it pretty like even keel paced so you can prepare for the best or the worst that's great yeah but always up and down it's like your energy levels will go up and down and you'll be exhausted you need to have energy in life totally and if everything is tied around a story of this is bad this is wrong i'm in a bad place i'm messing up i'm going broke that energy is gonna pull you away from service exactly or creation or creativity of how do i get out of this place so i think it's really i love that and i used to have a coach and i think a lot of coaches use this or at least he used to say to us he would be like if you if you lose cry for a day and if you celebrate if you win celebrate for a day yeah and then move on the next day get back to training don't don't let go live in the past don't live in the past and what we do is when we lose we cry for a month and when we win we just move on which means that our negative experiences hold us back and weigh us down more than our positive experiences so we're actually allowing because we don't immerse ourselves in winning and growth we only submerge ourselves in negative experiences we need to celebrate also we try to celebrate i've been uh you know that's been part of my life as well i was like moving on too quick and now we try to like let's enjoy let's go to lunch or dinner and really like appreciate this moment and celebrate this moment and even have a dinner with some friends and family otherwise what are we working so hard for 100 and we almost feel like we can't we can't do that because that makes us complacent right but but that's my point it's never good enough exactly but if you win celebrate for a day if you lose cry for a day move on simple and you've learned so many lessons over your years as a monk you learned a ton of lessons moving to you know getting married moving into a new country building building companies launching products and books and you've had ups and downs what's been the biggest lesson in the last 12 months for you because you've learned you've created so much in the last 12 months you've done so many things what's been the biggest lesson for you in your life oh that's a great question i think i'd have to say that it's a and i was saying it to a friend on the phone this morning when i was on the way to you and i was just i was just sharing it with him because he was having a moment in recognizing this there's a wonderful verse in the manusmithi which i talk about think like a monk it's a monk book and in the verse it says when you protect your purpose your purpose protects you now i wanna i wanna unpack that what i mean by that is your purpose is like a rare jewel and a rare gemstone and imagine you were walking around with the most expensive diamond or jewel in the world how would you protect it you want to just like you want to just wave it out yeah yeah you wouldn't just wear it on your chest like this like a baby holding it yeah putting a pillow around a blanket you'd be like yeah protect it you'd protect it and so your purpose is like that and guess what people are going to tell you every day that that jewel is not worth anything they're going to tell you that that jewel is actually valueless it doesn't have any impact on your life they're going to try and take away that value they're going to tell you that there's another jewel out there that you need to have more value and what ends up happening is you don't i love the word look at the wording protect your purpose you have to protect it so what happens is your success grows you get more opportunities more ideas more things coming your way temptations but they can all take you away from your purpose distractions and to me i'm repeating this for myself because i'm like i just want to stick to what i was born to do and i'm so grateful that i get to do it i'm so happy i get to do it and i want to keep protecting it i don't want to get lost in the waves you know you don't want to just get chucked in the waves of the ocean and just get lost and just not know where you're going so for me when you protect your purpose your purpose protects you so that's been your biggest lesson that's my biggest lesson why do you feel like your purpose has been maybe distracted i don't think it has but i'm saying it so it doesn't like reminding you yeah i'm reminding myself like i'm preaching to myself right now especially being in hollywood and the temptation of all these opportunities out here totally and i think for me it's a bigger lesson also because it gives me more faith so i always encourage and this is actually actually this is why it's my biggest lesson i encourage so many people that i coach so many people i mentor obviously everyone in my community and audience and everything to go and follow that go and live that purpose and i see time and time again that when i see people trying to live their purpose they are protected that it things work when you're playing in your dharma and your purpose things work things move you feel momentum they happen and i'm not saying they happen without effort but they happen they move whereas when you're not you just constantly feel like you're grinding up against you know a war i know challenges just just constant so what is your purpose and when did you discover it good question what is my purpose is simple it always has been since not since the beginning because i discovered it afterwards my purpose is making wisdom go viral and i've stuck with that and i've kept it that way because to me and there's more to it making wisdom go viral through entertainment i would say is my purpose because i believe that that is something that is uniquely my goal impact and service and the beautiful thing is i'm not limited to a platform so that can be books it can be podcasts it can be tv shows it can be moved it's not limited and this i learned by reading i was reading after and this was after my video started to to get seen this wasn't before i did it wasn't like i sat down and i wrote this fancy tag line i was reading celine ishmael's book called exponential organizations and in this book he talks about something called an mtp a massive transformational purpose and he says that every major person organization in the world has an mtp so an mtp has to be aspirational it has to be massive and it has to be service and purpose based so google's is organizing the world's information notice it doesn't say we're an seo company notice it doesn't say we do google ads they're organizing the world's information that's how big they're dreaming and when you're organizing the world's information you can do driverless cars you can do google glass you can sell google ads whatever it is and so ted's is ideas worth spreading that's what they are that's what they're about so jay shetty is making wisdom go viral that's what i'm dedicated to so when did you discover it because it wasn't when you were it was it wasn't when you were 21 and kind of college i'd say i was 30 probably two three years ago so i'm 32 now so i'd say like two three years ago is when i discovered something 30 years old is when you discovered your purpose correct so what was your purpose before that my purpose before that was finding my purpose like it's like that process of just like my purpose before that was 14 years so i've been online for four years i've spent 10 years offline talking about the same stuff sharing the same messages in talks in universities in small seminars in coaching and mentoring like i've been doing the same thing for 14 years but i didn't realize it was my purpose until very recently but i just did what i enjoyed and naturally try to get better at it so if we don't know what our purpose is and we're working towards finding our purpose it's okay that's actually where you're going to spend most of your life discovering what you're purchasing totally and that's the best bit because i think a lot of people are like well i don't know what my purpose is totally that's why i just how should i find it the pressure of finding your purpose it's crazy we'll stop you from finding your purpose literally the pressure is so heavy and that's why it's not about finding that it's just starting with the basics what am i good at and i talk about it i break down dharma in here and i talk about what are your passion what is your expertise what is your compassion because that's really important what is your compassion for the world like what problem do you want to solve i often people will say there's so many things i could do there's so many things i'm like my question is not what causes you the greatest joy sometimes my question is what is what causes you the greatest pain mm-hmm make that your purpose make that your purpose if you don't know what your joy is you definitely know what your pain is what do you not like and so for me go serve that thing 100 so for me the greatest pain i see in the world is people not reaching their potential that is that causes me more pain because i believe that there is someone out there who is stacking shelves who has the cure to cancer there is someone out there or talented singers he's a talented singer there is someone out there who's not living to their potential and i think we're better people we're better partners and we're better parents when we live to our potential so that's what i'm trying to solve and i'm not saying that's the biggest thing you're saying it's my thing whenever i work with people i'm always telling them to find your purpose focus on what you're most passionate about or what you you have the most pain around they go it's the same thing like do the thing you love the most keep doing it until you either discover that's it or maybe i don't love that anymore like i played so many sports growing up i used to love baseball i used to love soccer and then i got bored with it i got burnt out by it it wasn't a love of mine anymore it wasn't a passion and then i switched to football and it was like oh this is a passion and i'm actually more gifted physically for this sport than it would be for soccer i was too big for soccer kind of run seven miles a day right now on the field but i think you need to try lots of things and you might think it's a passion but you might get burnt out and discover i don't love it anymore what else is there and keep trying the things that you said eight new things a month yeah until you discover can you discover it might take you to take a 30 40 50. right it doesn't and that doesn't matter like it doesn't matter like it the fun is in the growth and the journey and like for me the last 10 years before this happened and my life changes like those were fun i was happy i wasn't unhappy because of that because i didn't know the exact point yeah exactly and now i'm very clear on it and i'm happy for it to evolve too like i don't think it has to stay the same i may sit with you in two years time and tell you something completely different right and i'm okay with that but i can only work with what i have now and i think we start trying to postpone our purpose or find a date by which you have to you put a deadline on your purpose doesn't make any sense like if if you really care about it how can you put a deadline on it i know you just keep working towards it what are three skills that everyone should try to learn in the next one to two years that will help them in their life tremendously no matter who you are and where you live in the world three things we could start to practice learn master that'll improve our life yeah that's a great question you asked me a lot of great questions here so like every question you reminded me of something which which i'm going to share is a bunch of years back i went to the launch of eric schmidt's book how google works nice and i was in the audience i didn't get to interview more medium or anything like that but i remember sitting in the audience and there was someone else there who was interviewing him and talking and they were like and someone asked this question from the audience so a student got up and they said what do you think is the number one skill that students should be focusing on and they said everyone should become data analysts they're like everyone should become everyone in this room should be coming and i was sitting there going i know nothing about being a data analyst and i think sometimes we throw out these careers or like hard skills and technicals and it's like well not everyone's going to vibe with that so i just want to share that because i think so often like we get bad advice like that and i'm like imagine i pursued becoming a data i know and you have to also know the perspective of the person you're getting that advice from so your perspective your your three things that people should be taking on is going to come from your work perspective and your experience what's worked for you correct but what would you think so i'd say the first one for me is learn how to have a conversation with yourself like just learn how to have a conversation with yourself like if you don't know if i'll give one of the studies that i share in the book which absolutely love men and women were asked either to be alone with their thoughts for 15 minutes or they could give themselves an electric shock if they were bored they took a shot 30 of women chosen electric shark and 60 of men chosen electric shock because they didn't want to be alone with their thoughts for 15 minutes for 15 minutes why is that because we have not learned to have a conversation with ourselves or even love ourselves no we haven't and i think that starts with the conversation i think you're right we don't love ourselves but that starts with learning to talk to yourself so find time for you to talk to your own mind to talk to yourself to understand yourself to find out how many of us when you go to a restaurant you know whether you're going to go back or not based on what do you like the food when you watch a movie you know whether you're going to recommend it to your friends based on whether you liked it or not why do we keep visiting the same people the same places and doing the same projects when they don't lift us up so many of us are not aware of the same people that we hang around with that bring us down the places that don't feed us they drain our energy and the projects that don't light us up yeah but we keep going back there because we don't talk to ourselves because we don't talk to ourselves because no one like i can ask you hey did you like that restaurant but when do we ask ourselves hey do i like do i want to hang out with that person does that person want to be in this relationship we get scared of those conversations so we avoid them so that's fascinating the second thing to have a conversation with yourself learn to have a conversation the second thing is know how your mind tricks you so we played this game in the monastery where every time you lose to your mind you put a scoreboard up and you put a one for the mind and zero for you when you lose to the mind meaning what like so let's say you make a commitment so i make a commitment that i'm not going to eat sugar and then you do 20 20 and i do the mind beating the mind beats me to it so i'm going to put a one for the mind and a zero for me it's great it's competing with yourself in a good way it's fun yeah and people do this with like i guess now with like dollar jars or whatever like you put a dollar in and you swear but that doesn't make sense because you end up making money every time you swear so but if you beat your mind and you put it it's great yes so you have to start learning the tricks of your mind when and how does your mind fool you into making bad decisions that's good if you know that where did it fool you the most that it was the hardest for you to overcome yeah i think the biggest thing was it's probably eager like it's wanting to it's like walking into a room expecting respect walking into a room expecting to be dealt in a certain way like when you're like like treated treated with you you buy your own hype right you fall for the stuff like do you still favor this sometimes i think we all do yeah i think i think i'd be i think i would be in ego if i didn't say i did like is like ego that's the trick of the ego the ego makes you think you're untouchable and the ego makes you think that you are you know that nothing about you can can ever go wrong or you're you're perfect or not even that but the ego can bring you down nothing can hurt you when the moment you think you can't be brought down you will be brought down the moment you think that you can't one of my teachers would always pray that he never and he's been a monk for 40 years he would always pray that he would never fall to his temptations and we said to him you haven't fallen to your temptation for 40 years why do you pray for that he goes i haven't fallen because i pray for it wow like he was like because i pray for it because i'm not just because i think it's gonna yeah he's aware and there's a beautiful story of um benjamin franklin where he talks about before he died i believe he had 13 or 14 precepts these were qualities that he wanted to gain live by and gain so like simplicity integrity virtues all these powerful things and he was asked when he was on his deathbed which was the one he didn't accomplish and he said the last one that was humility and that's like the display of humility like you can't think you're at humility and then be humble like that's not possible it's an oxymoron so we stay humble with all with greatness happening yeah you know if you're achieving your dreams you're making an impact you're doing great stuff how do you stay humble i think the biggest one is surround yourself with people who are constantly better than you and when i say better i don't just mean materially i mean when i'm around my monk teachers i just feel filthy right like they're so dirty yeah yeah they're so pure that it's such a mirror reflection i'm around them and i'm like whoa i've got so much yeah i've got so much like dirt yeah and and that's a good thing like i love being around them and they don't say that to me like they don't make me feel that way it's just that you get a mir when you're around people who are transparent you get a reflection of yourself like so i get that when i'm with them so first thing is spend time with people who are more spiritually elevated and more conscious because you get a reflection without them even saying it yeah the second thing is keep increasing your goal posts like most of us are not our goals should keep us humble not other people's goals we try and think other people's goals keep us humble because we're looking at what people are doing it's like your goal posts should never be achieving or it should be bigger and better yeah big one all the time always thank the people who gave you the gift that is being recognized like if you're being recognized for a gift someone gave that to you thank you thank you teachers give it give it back to them because i think we forget that you start thinking yourself made and i don't think anyone's genuinely self-made i just don't think that's true because someone had to give you an an interruption an interaction exchange a skill a gift an idea whatever it was these are really fun questions first one is to have a conversation with yourself is know how your mind tricks you and be fully aware of it and humility a part of that or no i would say that was just my personal example of what i think i can i can struggle with sometimes okay and the third thing everyone should learn the third skill everyone should learn is how to have difficult conversations with other people so hard because i think that marriages are made of it dating is made of it friendships are made of it i think sometimes we've had some difficult like in the sense of i like to call you up and say and it's like i think we're good at that with each other and that's why our friendship is strong because i think we're honest with each other and yes i feel that you feel comfortable telling me stuff like we've had email exchanges where you've you've been honest with me and i've been honest with you and of course like i think that's good because i think when you don't have tough conversations with people your your relationships just just sit on the surface or they never go anywhere if you're looking for more greatness in your life make sure to check out this video right here and also check out our free pdf the three secrets to unlock the power of your mind to help you change your life download it right here we're all faced with great opportunities brilliantly disguised as impossible situations and we are at that point

Channel: Lewis Howes

Views: 960,613

Keywords: Lewis Howes, Lewis Howes interview, school of greatness, self help, self improvement, self development, personal development, success habits, success, wealth, motivation, inspiration, inspirational video, motivational video, success principles, millionaire success habits, how to become successful, success motivation, jay shetty, jay setty speech, jay shetty interview, jay shetty purpose, how to find your purpose, life advice, success advice, wisdom, purpose

Id: kbyBLXKck8o

Length: 182min 58sec (10978 seconds)

Published: Sun Apr 11 2021