How to Find Passion & Fulfill Your Purpose with Jay Shetty

To help you to discover or develop your purpose, we have the man. I can't think of anyone more qualified to do this. I want to welcome a dear friend and Wisdom Gone Viral founder, Jay Shetty. Thank you for joining us, buddy.

Jim, thanks so much for having me, man. And it's so great to be here with you today. And yeah, I really appreciate you having me and So excited to speak to everyone.

You have so many fans here. And we had you on your— on our podcast a couple of times, and we're likely to turn this into a podcast episode also as well. And so thank you for taking some of your time and your talent to have a conversation with us. Now, you and I off camera have had this conversation about purpose. What is purpose? And is it something that you develop or you discover? Do you have one purpose? You know, these questions that people have.

Yeah, absolutely. And I'm so glad that you're making space for these really important discussions. I know we recently went live to talk about your incredible new book, Limitless. And, you know, I think that your dedication to helping people lead limitless lives is so powerful. And so I'm so glad you're opening up this space today. And purpose is probably one of my favorite, favorite topics to talk about. And it's because not only is on my podcast, do we have a conversation called On Purpose, because I'm trying to figure out how all these people are living their purpose to the point that when I studied the Vedas and the Bhagavad Gita, the topic that fascinated me the most was purpose. And so the way I think about purpose is in 2 parts. I believe that everyone has a passion that they can find, or multiple passions. And when we perform our passion, it makes us happy. It brings us joy. So when we do that act, when we're in a particular environment, when we're doing a particular thing, we experience passion. And we may experience that in particular environments. We may experience that doing particular activities, but all of us have one or multiple passions in our lives, and when we perform them, they make us happy. But here's the thing: when you use your passion to help others, when you use your passion in the service of others, when you use your passion to make a difference in the lives of other people in whatever way, that's when it becomes a purpose. So purpose is passion in service. And that's the best definition that I've been able to learn and understand and grow through when looking at the Vedic literatures and the studies that I did as a monk, and even the work you're doing. So let's say that learning about the brain makes Jim happy. Jim loves reading about neuroscience. Jim loves learning about the brain. Jim loves looking at studies. Jim loves learning about memory and attention and retention and presence. And he can memorize a million names and he learns all of that. Let's say he learns all of that. And he blows our minds, and we're all really impressed with Jim. And Jim's passionate about the brain. But this is what Jim's done. Jim's gone a step further. He's not just saying, I understand the brain and it's great for me. He's saying, I want to help you have a limitless brain too. I want to help you develop these skills. So he's serving through that passion. Now, yeah, so that's my overall first answer. We can dive into it so much more, but that's, that's kind of like the overview of passion and purpose, and hopefully that makes sense.

But we're seeing people here, like they're saying, that's such a great explanation. Purpose was my one word, you know, this year. Wow, best definition they've ever heard about purpose. And so you could have multiple passions, things that light you up, and then the application and service using that passion becomes, becomes, becomes your purpose. And so that— what advice would you give to somebody then? who's, who's here right now. I'm wondering if people know what their passions are, and clearly people have multiple passions. Like, I love to learn, and my purpose is teaching other people how to learn. What would you say your passion and your purpose?

Yeah, my, my passion is trying to assimilate and articulate very complex things very simply. So there's a beautiful statement by Albert Einstein where he said that if you can't explain something simply, you don't understand it well enough. And so for me, I am fascinated by that statement. And every time I come across a piece of information, I'm always like, how can I make this really easy to understand? How can I make this really simple so that anyone and everyone can understand it so that I can actually practice it and live it? So that's my passion. And when I try and use that to help people find their potential, that's my purpose. And so often what I talk about when it comes to passion and purpose is that you find it through 2 ways. You may find it through what you like and what you're interested in, but you may also find it through pain and what, what causes you pain. So for example, I find it really painful when I see people who are not living their potential because I believe that there are so many smart people out there in the world, there are so many talented people out there in the world who don't even know their power. And, and I actually believe that the world will change not because of me, but because of all of those people who can do so much more than I can, or maybe Jim, you can. You know, we all know that everyone's talented in a different way. And what if the whole world was living to their potential? You know, what would that mean? Like, what kind of a world would that look like? So that's been something that always caused me pain. So whenever I see someone who's settling for a lower potential than they have, I'm always engaged and encouraged if they're open to it, to help them seek out more. And so sometimes I meet people who say, Jay, my greatest pain that I see in the world is obviously, and I'm involved in this work too. And I know Jim, you are in charity work too. And this is what I did a lot as a monk. Like, you know, you want children to be fed and have food and have shelter. And they say, okay, I'm going to go and build the biggest charity in the world because that's my passion. Right? So a lot of the time we can uncover this either through our interests, We can cover it through our pain points.

No, I love that. I mean, one of the— I could relate to that in terms of my passion being learning and wanting other people to learn, and also the pain of people that I see that feel limited when they're really not. And an encourager for that.

We have a— You experienced, Jim, of being called the boy with the broken brain. Like, you know, it's like you've also— that pain made you realize the power of your brain. And so, yeah, sorry to cut you off. I just wanted to point out, you know, you've, you've shared so beautifully on that.

No, absolutely. Daniela, I mean, I think you answered it, has this question saying, what if you feel like you've lost your passion?

Yes, absolutely. And I can definitely identify that. And there's a beautiful verse that I quote in my upcoming book, Think Like a Monk. There's a verse from the, I believe it's from the Manusmriti, if I'm not mistaken. Yes, from the Manasamhita, which is— it's an ancient text. And in there it says, when you protect your purpose, your purpose protects you. And in this regard, with your question, Daniela, we can also use the word passion. So when you protect your passion, your passion protects you. And the reason why that's so important is you think protect, that sounds like a jewel, like you protect things that are valuable. And it's really interesting that the word protect is used with passion in these ancient literatures, because the point is that your passion will constantly be put down. Like, you may have heard the words, oh, you're wasting your time, or don't bother with that, you'll never make it, or you'll never be successful. So people are always almost damaging your passion. And so if you don't protect it, if you don't carry it around like it's this priceless jewel, if you don't honor it, you can sometimes lose it. So how do you get it back? One thing I'd like to say is that purpose is like an adult Passion is like a teenager and interest is like a child. Curiosity is like a toddler.

Hmm.

Curiosity is like the womb. So the, the birth of purpose comes with the inception of curiosity. And so if you have lost your passion, which is like a teenager, you start with the child, with a baby of curiosity and interest. What are you curious about? What are you interested in? And sometimes I think we put this, put this, uh, overwhelming burden on ourselves, like, God, what am I passionate about? I'm not passionate about anything. But then you're like, well, what am I curious about? I'm really curious about neuroscience. I'm really curious about relationships. I'm really curious about, uh, how environmental technology works. I'm really curious about artificial intelligence. You don't need to be passionate about something in the beginning. You simply need to be curious and interested. And you have to follow that initial curiosity. And how do you know your curiosity? You listen to me and Jim talk, one of us mentions something, and all of a sudden you go, oh, I want to know more about that. And you're like, Jay, I wish you were talking more about this thing. That's the thing you want to go be curious about. You listen to another podcast, you listen to one of Jim's interviews with someone else, and they speak about a subject that you've never heard before, like longevity or virtual reality or, uh, you know, whatever, augmented reality or whatever it is. And you, you have a click and you go, Ah, that's fascinating. Let me learn more. And then you go and dive into it.

And would you recommend for— we have a lot of parents here who are here engaging here about their children, that novelty, exposing them to novelty to see where their curiosity goes?

Oh, that's beautifully said as well. I think it's so important that as a young person, you just get exposed to as many alternatives as possible. Now, you can never expose your child to everything in the world. Of course, that's not possible. You can't afford that. You can't travel across the world, but as many things as you can, because that's going to help you and your child observe what it is that they really engage with. And I think that that's so important because even me— see, one thing that I, I again expand on in the book is I talk about how you can't really, you know, you can't really compare inexperience with disqualification. So what we, we, we think of inexperience as a lack of qualification, but they're not the same thing. Inexperience is just you haven't tried it, so you don't even know. So I grew up as a very shy, very camera shy, very stage shy individual, genuinely speaking.

I—

my first speech that I gave on stage, I was around I don't know, 7 or 8 years old at school, and everyone started laughing at me. So I cried off of stage, and my teacher had to come and hold me and walk me off of stage at the age of 8. That was my first public speaking experience. So I was kind of scarred by that. And I— my parents forced me to go to public speaking school and drama school. And in the beginning, I was like, I don't want to do any of this. But the amazing thing is that I was just inexperienced. It wasn't that I couldn't have the ability. And so I would say, even with your children, they won't know what they're passionate about until they try a few things.

I love that. And we are just big children, so we can apply that same to our— regardless of your age or your stage, we could do that. Another question for you is, and thank you for doing this, I have multiple passions. How do I identify the passion I must choose to fulfill my purpose?

Yes, absolutely. And, and by the way, there may be different stages of life where you pursue different passions and different purposes too. Like, I don't think life is about having one passion and one purpose and it's strict and then you can never change. Like, you know, my, my passion at one point was to live as a monk and, and my purpose at that time was to serve people through being a monk. And I served people in that way. And today my passion is media and I'm serving people through media. And so, passions evolve and change, and you have to allow yourself— you know, sometimes the reason why we don't allow other people to evolve is because we're not letting ourselves evolve as well. So it's so important to allow yourself to, to go through changes and being honest with yourself. And, you know, I, I go through that a lot when, when I talk about my transitions, and I've had so many. And so when you have a lot of passions, the only way to know which one to, I guess, focus on or to get driven on is where you see the most dedication to improving your expertise. The passion means you like it or you love it, but the one that you should commit to is the one that you're most committed to improving your actual expertise and strength. So I'll give an example. Let's say my 2 passions are making videos and playing soccer, football. Right, as I call it back in England. And those are genuinely— so I know that Jim's a big tennis fan. We've, we've been to a couple of tennis games together to watch our good friend Novak Djokovic. But tennis is like my second sport, and I'd say my first sport is soccer and football. It's what I've been in love with since I was a kid. I'm very passionate about it, but I don't want to do what Cristiano Ronaldo does every single day to be able to play that game at the top of his ability. I do not want to do as many crunches as that guy does. I do not want to sleep in his routine. I do not want to run as much as he does. I don't want to put in the work that Cristiano Ronaldo has to do to play soccer. But in the world of media and making content and writing and wanting to share messages, I'm willing to do all the work it takes. That's where I'm willing to deepen my strengths and expand my expertise to improve the way I can communicate these messages with others. Does that make sense? So, so you follow the passion where you're happy to put in the work to do the expertise.

That's astonishing. Astonishing. What do you guys think?

This is a fun conversation, man. I'm saying stuff in this that I haven't said before, so I'm loving it. It's great for me.

Jay's book is Think Like a Monk. You could preorder it. It comes out, uh, I believe this, this fall.

Yes, September 8th. I have my copy here, my first copy. But yeah, no, September 8th the book comes out. Still a while away.

And, and Jay also has like the most popular podcast ever, On Purpose. I've been honored to be a guest on his show.

People loved you, Jim. People should go listen to that episode. Jim just crushed it.

Highly, highly recommend it. If you search both of our names on, on Google, you'll find both of those shows. What if the things you love are not easily connected to your purpose? I'm not sure. I'm not sure. Does that, does that mean something to you?

I'm kind of where you are. I can make sense of it, but I don't want to misinterpret it. So I don't want to answer it and then give the wrong answer to what the person's asking. But what, to be honest, things don't have to— the problem is when you, when you say that, it's like looking at a puzzle. And then I'm sure a lot of people during quarantine have been doing a lot of puzzles. You start the puzzle and you're like, oh, it doesn't make sense because it's not connected. That's not how you do a puzzle, right? You don't look at the puzzle and go, oh no, they're all disconnected pieces. No, that's how it starts. And so you just go to one corner and you put one piece and then you find another piece that connects with that. And that's how passion and purpose works. Like if someone asked me and Jim, I think, I think Jim would say the same thing. We align on a lot of themes. But if someone told me, Jay, 10 years ago you'll be doing this in 2020, I wouldn't have guessed that. I didn't know that. I didn't have like a master plan or strategy to, to do what I do today. I didn't ever believe any of this was possible. And so all I did was I stopped putting that one piece of the puzzle down. And then as I, as I grew older, I found another piece and I put it together and I found another piece. And even today I'm just doing that. I'm still piecing the puzzle together. And I think when you wait for there to be a full picture of everything lining up perfectly, it doesn't start that way. It probably won't even end that way, but it definitely doesn't start that way. I think start by just starting with what you have and where you are and, and with the tiniest piece of curiosity and interest and just keep following it. And, and, and there are times I, I came up with this thing in my life which has really helped me, uh, called the rule of 3. where I make 3 experiments all the time across a period of usually 3 months. And so I'm experimenting with 3 ideas, and usually out of the 3 ideas, only one works. And so after 3 months, I take that one idea forward. And I like calling it the rule of 3 because I'm like, okay, what are the 3 things I'm just playing around with right now? What are the 3 things that I'm experimenting with right now? And usually 2 of them don't work out. One of them does. You hear about the one that works out, but then 2 ideas just kind of didn't happen. And, and that's okay.

You know, we talk about a lot about small, simple steps, and I love this starting, starting bite-sized because inch by inch could be a cinch with something like curiosity. And so many people are getting their answers, their questions answered here. If your passions change, how can you tell if it's— if you're just being stubborn about following your passion? That's just not going to work.

Yeah, it all comes back down to expertise. Like, I can't tell you that enough. Like, I am I'm so passionate about football, like you have no idea. I love playing it. I love playing FIFA. I love playing with my friends back in London. Like, I love going to watch games. I know everything about the sport. I'm so passionate about football, soccer, but I don't have the commitment to the daily practice to get there. And so you can't— it's not just about what do I like doing, because that's, you know, you like a million things. Like, I also like basketball. That doesn't mean I'm going to try and become Michael Jordan. It's, it's so important that you are matching your passion with your expertise. You're matching your passion with your skills and going, okay, do I really want to build the skills that this is going to take? I think a lot of people look at the result and say, oh, I'd love to be that. Like, I know a lot of people who used to tell me, oh, Jay, I'd love to be an actor. Now, Jim has worked with actors. I've worked with actors in coaching. I know Jim's trained actors in memory and the brain, and I've worked with actors on their personal lives and You know, one of the things in an actor's life is an actor has to retake a scene. I've been on set with actors. They sometimes have to redo a scene 50 times, if not more. The same scene. Do you want to be asked to say the same line 50 different ways every day to get one scene right? That's the question you have to be asking yourself. It's not, do you want to be on the red carpet? It's not, do you want to be interviewed on, on Ellen or you know, whatever it is. The question you have to ask yourself is, do I want to be asked by my director to say the same thing again 50 times? I want to wait in a trailer for 4 hours a day. The trailer may not even be nice. It may not even have an official sticker on it. Do I want to do that? Because that's what it really is. That's what being an actor really is— learning lines, learning scripts, saying the same line over. I mean, Jim can tell you the truth. You know, he knows what it's like. And so that's what you've got to be in love with, not, not the result.

Hmm. How about your thoughts on— often you hear motivation, purpose, you hear this term that people say that they're their worst critic or they get in their own way, they sabotage or they procrastinate. Thoughts on procrastination relative to purpose?

Yeah, that's a, that's a great question. I think procrastination comes from the desire for perfection. You know, the procrastination comes from the desire for perfection and wanting everything to line up before we make our first move. So procrastination is the constant addiction to perfection, wanting everything to line up perfectly before we actually do anything. And, and so the only antidote to procrastination— I'm sure everyone agrees with this in, in this space— is, is action, is, is, is taking a step. And is trying something and getting feedback. You don't know until you try. You can have, you can have the best idea in the world. And this is why I love the book Lean Startup by Eric Ries so much, because he talks about the concept of a minimum viable product, an MVP, which is what all major tech organizations have and tools have and apps have. They all start off— if you look at Facebook and what it looked like when it started It doesn't look the same as it does today. Instagram doesn't look the same as it does today. Instagram didn't say, oh, we want stories and we want videos and we want pictures and we want filters and we want whatever else Instagram has— highlights. Instagram didn't say that they wanted all of that on day one, or even if they wanted that, they just started as a photo app. And, and that is the best lesson to all of us in procrastination, that Instagram could have waited 10 years to launch because they were procrastinating about what they wanted to be. Rather than just being what they were clear on and then adding and adding and adding. And we can all be apps like that.

Hmm. I think a lot of people suffer. I mean, thinking is good, but overthinking and wanting to be perfect will stall your progress before you even get started. Well, I want to thank you for, for living your passion and your purpose. Um, I challenge everybody right now, if they could take a screenshot of this, this conversation right now and tag Jay and tag myself, and share with us, if you're willing to, one of your passions and if you've discovered your purpose. And I will, uh, I'll repost some of my, some of my very favorites also. Do you see the comments here?

I do. They're crazy. I love the comments. I've got it open here on the side as well. It's awesome. Your community is so great, Jim. I absolutely love it. And I really want to say this, and I'm sure many of you already have, but if you haven't, definitely grab a copy of Jim's book, you know. It's like when, when someone puts— and, and I can say this because I've, I'm, I'm doing my first book too, and so I really identify and empathize with what Jim's doing— the process of trying to put where you are in life up until now into a book, it just— the amount of thinking that goes into it. And I've, I've read Jim's book and I've seen Jim's book. It's not just— it wasn't just like a, a quick write and just— it's not like a transcript of his podcast. Like, you know, it's not— it's a real book. It's, it's a real map. Uh, you know, Jim's book Limitless is a real map. And I'm like, when someone's giving you a map, that's gonna change your life, right? Maps change lives because you know where you are, you know where you want to get to. And so I, I really appreciate that, Jim, because, you know, I think it's so easy today. We all make so much content. It's so easy to just make a book based on stuff you've said before, but to really articulate, think about structure and put it out properly takes a lot of effort. So Thank you for doing that for all of us.

Thank you, brother.

It's—

I think it's interesting how you started this is, you know, giving that presentation and, you know, and just being terrified and getting that feedback. And now your videos, billions and billions and billions upon billions of views.

It is true. I am, I am a— my life is a perfect example of someone who is doing something that I was terribly frightened of growing up as a child. And I'm not making that story up. It's like, You know, it was, it was scary up until I was, I think, about like 16, 17. I didn't want to be on stages. It was so tough. So yeah.

It's a nice— it's a bit— I mean, with myself, learning and public speaking were my 2 biggest challenges. So I do believe, you know, your struggles can become strengths. And this is a great reminder for everybody, as this book is about learning and leveling up, is that every professional was once, you know, an amateur. That every, you know, everyone who's in it once, every expert, you know, was once getting started. And so that consistency, little by little, a little becomes a whole lot. So Jay Shetty, listen to his podcast On Purpose, his upcoming book Think Like a Monk. Tag Jay in this post when you post this. Share your passion, share your purpose. And, uh, Jay, my friend, thank you again.

Thank you so much, man. Such a joy being with you. I'm so glad we did this. Thanks, Jim.

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