FEELING LOST? - The ULTIMATE ADVICE For Students & Young People | Jay Shetty

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 stillness and silence is one of my favorite ways for you to actually build that relationship with hearing your inner voice navigating your life can be so challenging and that's why in this video jay shetty shares his life lessons for finding your purpose and living a full life 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 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 like you know and it's just like trying to get through and the noise of everyone else's opinions are 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 a conference go to reading a book listen to podcasts 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 yourself is did i try it first you gotta try it first you gotta go to the restaurant yeah there's no point so you're gonna 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 you're 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 yeah 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 the 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 someone else loses how do we how do we manage ourselves in this competitive world of winning in sports of building a bigger business 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 confidence that's what you compete on or how long can we meditate before no 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 you 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 gonna 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 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 where are those two percent when 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 once i guess you could maybe like pat your head and do this and say yeah yeah 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 growing up 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 focused and there's an 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 70 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 it'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 still might be 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 crying correct so my mom would always every year on my birthday she'd always surprised me with the one thing i wanted and i wasn't spoiled 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 gonna do the same thing totally and tonight 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 when i had another uh guru ron named sad guru he said i don't like the word mindfulness because your mind is too full and you actually want to have my nothingness essentially you want to have nothing in your mind so you can be more peace you talk a lot about practicing meditation and also prayer and you say something that was interesting that you said about using silence to hear in between the lines 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 is so 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 seat 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 sight 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 was 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 chants exactly which are all beautiful sounds now the crazy thing is all of us wake up to something called an alarm right 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 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 scent uh 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 you could 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 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 scent 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 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's 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 uh 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 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 4 brain cancer and he'd 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 realize 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 the same this or that and i mean i i think you'd say this too about you and every guest you 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 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 child 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 etc 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 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 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 you guys and 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 is it true 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 it was there i've seen some people say 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 3000 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 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 in a conversation prayer is like you're speaking you're saying here's what i want you that's how i feel about me 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 your opinion 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 it's like 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 and i'm like yeah because you allowed yourself to be in line with your body and now your body's 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 when 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 us are negative 80 of 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 what's the difference between the monkey mind and the monk mind yeah i'm glad you brought that up so the monkey mind is what we experience on a day-to-day basis the monkey mind is restless the monkey mind is jumping from branch to branch the monkey mind's trying to find a bigger banana the monkey mind is constantly just like feeling flustered dissatisfied scarce and overthinking everything the monk mind is the exact opposite the monk mind is calm and composed among my knows to be focused and aware among my nose so everything in this book and everything that we're talking about is the transformation from the monkey mind that we experience to the monk mind the monkey mind is almost the enemy to the monk mind it's the opposite yes and how does someone who is living in a sense of scarcity because there are people living in scarcity where they're unable to pay their bills they're unable to provide food for their kids they're single moms they're they're stressed they're stressed they're overwhelmed it's hard to get into a sense of abundance when you're in scarcity and stress so 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 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 or have 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 mom 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 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 that yeah it's hurtful you feel sad you 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 i'll 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 if you broke your arm i mean and you've been through so many bodily injuries you can't rush the process it's going to take six weeks minimum to heal broken oh yeah minimum and you've got to 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 heard 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 come on pain makes you pay attention yeah that's what pain is for pain notice this notice this notice 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 it 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 it i'll do something else you have to go into that i'm not the person the pain that's said or whatever yeah 100 that's that's usually our response is 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 up 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 cost 15 000 oh so that's gonna 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 trying 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 it 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 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 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 for the night i came home and then she gave out i literally came i looked her in the eyes and go this is the scenario and i just want you to know that i guarantee to 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 to her 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 a 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 or that restaurant's bad but when you label them that person's bad now you can't learn from that person oh 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 true right we've always where 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 no 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 going to 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 as 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 big 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 and 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 would just wave it out yeah yeah you wouldn't wear it on your chest like this like a baby holding it yeah putting a pillow around a blanket you do like yeah protect it you'd protect it and so your purpose is like that and guess what people are gonna tell you every day that that jewel is not worth anything they're gonna 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 you're reminding me 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 right now 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 could 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 it wasn't like i sat down and i wrote this fancy tagline i was reading saleem 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 wasn't different it wasn't when you were 21 and i 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 it 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 should i find it the pressure of finding your purpose is crazy will 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 in the world what do you 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 singer he's a talented singer there's 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 i couldn't 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 new things so you said eight new things a month yeah until 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 if 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 you just keep working towards it if we were to truly find that peace every day and be able to be present relax our heart rate you know not empty our mind but listen to what's happening what would you say are the three questions we should ask ourselves every single day that would help us improve our life in that moment internal questions every day during meditation what should i be asking myself and what should the world be asking ourselves in order to make sure we're living a purposeful life yeah 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's 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 have 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 yeah right 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 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 whatever their first child they 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 ahead 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 it's hard to accept that yeah and i've been there i know you've been there 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 him 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 misused 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 or 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've 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're saying 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 note yeah so then let's move 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 you and 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 never indicating enough 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 and 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 to 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 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 agreement that he is one of the best players to be playing and they keep losing they didn't make the fight 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 and 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 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 where 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 no that's not a good story that's not an inspirational human being yeah it's a 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 helped build it to where it is today and he probably apple won't be where it is yeah today without him being a rejection which is crazy to just think of that yeah exactly so if people 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 lives 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 or 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 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 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 could 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 said 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 going to 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 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 ourself and i think if we go back to those three questions you said like when you're feeling a failure over and over and over again or you feel a sense of i'm not enough or whatever it may be go back to asking those three questions to yourself how can i be of service today or serve today what can i love about myself so even when everyone's saying no what is it to love about me to remind yourself and not be validated by other people's opinions yeah and who do i want to be yeah that i can love yes exactly who do i need to become who i need to become that i can love and just keep focusing on the process because the process is the prize yes and focus on that journey 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 but i'll quote a modern day i guess somewhat modern day philosopher because i think this encapsulated perfectly he said that this is cooley uh philosopher right 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 yeah 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 could have just slept with those four hours and 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 giving this example of this beautiful and you may have seen it it is it went viral on instagram it was this little girl probably 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 you don't know why my i can give you my opinion in the vedic opinion i can't tell you why for everyone right the reason is the 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 five ten twenty dollars on makeup starbucks and normal stuff right right that was the 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 they then when they did in africa they did it all over the world and the stats and the patterns showed 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 lb cd yeah kelly 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 ten 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 and 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 oh you're 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 cut 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 root and just knock it out there 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 notes uh in your heart or in your mind always my my daily practice is to refine my intention that 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 garden at all 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 the 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 going to get then you're always going to 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 you know it works right right now there's a lot of anxiety there's a lot of concern there's a lot of fear in the world with coronavirus and just people concern in general of the chaos of their life whether it's granovirus or anything else that's happening people seem to live in this fear state of mind right now a lot 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 what 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 but we suffered twice and this is the one what actually happens to us and then 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 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 you can cause sickness in yourself you can go see this by the story so not actually the reality the the effects 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 yes 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 reps 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 raise it embrace it get close to get intimate with it we've become the bat we're in the back 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 but 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 it 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 intentions to play what is it going to take for me in order to get on the field you know do i need to get here 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 it was powerful it's 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 coffee 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 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 eager 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 my pain is the 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 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 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's 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'll see kids you want to share go out their way they want to share 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 onto 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 a hundred 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 of rich let's print that happy list pick a service list bring a list of who is we should do that we should do that serving the most in the world wow it'll be competition 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 yeah 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 the 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'll always be dissatisfied because guess what someone's always saying someone's always gonna have more i was speaking to a friend recently 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 cost and so he was joking wow he's 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 then 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 for that scarcity i want to talk more about uh the things you've learned from pre uh monkhood to being a monk to now not being a monk sure and when i met you i didn't know you were a monk i just saw you as the guy who had 50 to 100 million views of video on facebook which i think a lot of people are familiar with you from facebook you make wisdom go viral you do these great parables you do these great stories lessons insights i don't think you really started talking about being a monk until recently yeah so i think people just were like who is this guy and how is he so insightful sure but then when i met you i was like oh it's it all makes sense now that you have all this wisdom and you told me that a lot of your videos just were just notes from your books that you were writing you know your journal when you were a monk yeah you would take all these notes down from the lessons you were learning absolutely and now you're just going back and looking at those notes and saying let me shoot a video about this and it's like it's 50 million views so yeah it's crazy um 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 love 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 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 right 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 been watching entrepreneur after entrepreneur loved hearing from ceos their success stories i was a huge fan of rags to riches stories 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 autobiographies i thought i hated reading until i was 14 until someone handed me an autobiography i think i remember reading the rock sort of biography 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 would work with some of these biggest companies in the world and then i'd go to livingston like polar opposites we'd be out at night drinking networking after this yeah right there's 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 say how 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 experienced you hadn't met someone who started a non-profit or something like that i had i had but i i had met people who've 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 so when i was with the monks i felt completely in love with their character the way they behaved the way they 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 to 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 your 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 if there is wood you have a thin yoga mat so anyone who does yoga knows those thin yoga mats not the push ones and then your sleeping bag literally you got 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 that mung from london like everyone can 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 do of course so i still had the premium sleeping bag we'd wake up at about 4 a.m every day every single day 4 a.m so the first week must have been a little rough to like get into the 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 gonna i'm gonna 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 me 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 going to be for the rest of my life so wow so i'm going to be 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 4am from 4 to five fifteen you have collective meditation collective prayers collective chant yeah group chanting yeah group challenge that's been very like 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 the legendary monks yeah the legend of meditation 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 5 15 to 7 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 videos are 5 000 years old linguistically and philosophically the oldest books on the planet and so you're trained in the vedas for an hour 7 30 to 8 30. and that's a 10 year old book yeah wow it's the oldest book like yeah oldest dated book i've heard of so yeah wow over 5 000 years old holy cow yeah it's crazy it's absolutely crazy it was funny actually i i was sharing 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 he 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 they did five thousand years ago will the beatles be around in five thousand 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 whatever 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'd 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 schedule 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 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 what's it called the place you're at ashram or honestly so monastery is an ashram ashram is just a sanskrit word for 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 our 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 were 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's 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 why do you 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 right like you you know you were told at school that you weren't very good and you weren't good at english and now you have new york times best seller right yeah and it and it's like but no one noticed that potential inside you no one noticed that oh louis 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 and 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 and if you want to learn how to become happier in your life then make sure to check out this video right here push through the excuses the habits the fears and the the actual physical constraints that you have in your life right now so that you can make the pivot i am not a what speaker or a wise speaker i'm a how

Channel: Lewis Howes

Views: 95,128

Keywords: jay shetty, jay shetty interview, jay shetty speech, jay shetty motivation, jay shetty inspiration, jay shetty video, jay shetty ultimate advice, lewis howes, lewis howes interview, school of greatness, self help, self improvement, self development, personal development, motivation, inspiration, inspirational video, motivational video, success advice, how to find your purpose, jay shetty how to find purpose, wealth, how to be successful, jay shetty advice for young people

Id: Y_kgV5X-iEs

Length: 133min 54sec (8034 seconds)

Published: Sun Oct 11 2020