Sadhguru says self-importance creates seriousness, and you need daily breaks from it. The world keeps spinning without you. Entrepreneur Evan Carmichael wrestles with this: he fears that loosening up will kill his impact, but N.R. Narayana Murthy and Mark Cuban both argue you can take work seriously without taking yourself seriously.
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Good morning, Believe Nation. It's Evan. My one word is believe and I believe in you. I believe in your potential and I want to see that great thing that you have inside you explode out into the world and have a big impact. So to help you on your journey, today's message is, "Take a holiday from seriousness." Over to you, Sadhguru.
Just loosen up your life a little bit, laugh a little more, involve yourself with people around you, do things that you think is not so important. Don't do things which are very important, do simple things. It's very important you do simple things. Very important things you're doing in your life, you will become dead serious. You know, Bertrand Russell, an Englishman, Bertrand Russell said, if you're beginning to think that what you're doing is very important, you need to take a holiday. So holiday does not mean coming to India. Holiday is every day in those 24 hours, you must take a holiday from your seriousness. From your— seriousness has come essentially because of your self-importance. You hold yourself as an important person. I want you to see you are like a speck of dust in this existence. Tomorrow morning if you disappear, for sure in India nobody will miss you. Even down under, they won't bother much, you know. A handful of people, they will also forget soon enough. Isn't it so?
Oof!
Nature does woof, you're gone and nothing will happen in this world. Everything will happen wonderfully well even if you're not there. Every human being should be aware of this every moment of his life. It does not matter what the whole world says about you, it does not matter how significant a work you're doing, you must understand that tomorrow morning the world will go on fine without you. Whoever you may be. Isn't it so? If you constantly remind yourself of this, you'll have no reason to be serious. Definitely not dead. And don't be dead now, a time will come. It's time to be alive.
So this is a difficult message for me to absorb, in all honesty. I love a lot of the stuff that Sadhguru says, and I have fun in what I'm doing, but I would say I'm much more serious than I am fun in my day-to-day work. And I think a lot of it comes from— I believe that the work that I'm doing is important, not because of me being, you know, having a huge ego or being superhuman or doing— being better than somebody else. I believe everybody's work should be important. I believe as an entrepreneur, it's what we set off to do. We have a mission. We want to make the world a better place. And if you don't think that your work is important, then you don't work as hard on it. I believe that the videos I make are important. I believe filming day here today is important. We have fun doing it, but it's still important. I want it to get better. You know, I'm serious about it. And I think if I didn't care enough about it, or if I had too much fun, or wasn't serious about it, then I wouldn't put in the work. If I didn't have that ambition to really help you guys out and feel like that the work that I'm doing every day means something to people, that if I died, nobody would care and the legacy wouldn't continue. So this is where I struggle with this message. And I thought I'd still put it out there because I like hearing different points of views. And I like using them to challenge my own thinking and think, is this something that I need to shift my mindset around? Is it true? Does it speak truth to me? Or is it something like meditation, as an example, that I've tried many, many, many times, I'm still open to, but I can't connect to it as much as other people. I believe it works for other people. I'm not saying that they're liars if it's working for them, just because I don't feel it. And so I thought it'd be useful to share the message with you guys, and I'd love to know, what do you think? What's your opinion? How do you draw the line? Are you in Sadhguru's camp? Are you more in my camp that the work you're doing matters? Can you blur the line somewhere? I'm really curious to hear your take. Fill up the comments, share your thoughts, and I'll digest them and see if maybe I adjust my mindset along the way too. So that's the question of the day. What do you think? Should you be taking a holiday from seriousness? How are you applying that in your life, in your business, in your day-to-day? Really curious to hear your thoughts. I also wanna give a quick shout out to Linda Filler. Linda, thank you so much for picking up a copy of my book, Your One Word. I really appreciate the support. And I hope you enjoyed the read. So thank you guys again for watching. I believe in you. I hope you continue to believe in yourself and whatever your one word is. Much love, and I'll see you again tomorrow morning for another shot of Enespresso. I wake up every morning, espresso keeps me going.
Does it bother you that expectations always run so high of Narayan Murthy, of Infosys? And you know, with the expectations always running being so high and so consistently high, there's a risk of people around you expecting too much and hence facing disappointment. Does that bother you at all?
Not really, because while we take our work very seriously, we don't take ourselves very seriously. All these things would bother a person if he or she were to take himself or herself very seriously. So we don't do that.
So, and how does How does a corporation manage to not take itself so seriously?
No, the corporation takes it seriously, but not the individuals.
Not the individuals within the corporation.
But I was a dancer on Soul Train.
Okay.
And American Bandstand.
Wow.
They taped across the hall from each other. So I've never done this. Publicly? Is there any music?
Let me, uh, I'm gonna get out the way.
Yeah, please. I hope none of my shareholders are watching. My investment may go down. No, no, no, no, no, no. I need something with some beat to it.
That is far too—
That actually might have been like the theme music for Soul Train. You know, I don't have to do this, so you can just cut the music altogether. Whatever. I don't need all that. I've got many problems, self-esteem's not one of them. Hold on. I'm sure I'll be paying the price for that later. Luck— luckily that show kept me in shape. And I stay in shape, so I have minimal pain. I'm sure that was pretty unique amongst your speakers. That pretty much falls in place with my life philosophy, which is take life seriously, but don't take yourself too seriously. Just— Have a light touch. One of the diseases that we have in this world is seriousness. People take themselves very serious. And people who take themselves very serious and force other people to often suffer from this disease of insecurity, which is then connected to fear, which is then tied to how you treat other people. Let me give you the one word secret to happiness. One word.
This is all you need to be happy. It's the most important word ever.
If you had to think of one word that's most important to you or that sums you up or that would be kind of like a little beacon.
Hey, Believe Nation, if you want to know what the most important one word is for Tony Robbins, Gary Vaynerchuk, Oprah Winfrey, will.i.am, and Howard Schultz, I have a very special secret video for you. Check the description for details.
