Before You WASTE Your Life Away, WATCH THIS! | Jay Shetty

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.

Okay, welcome back everyone in the School of Greatness podcast. We've got the iconic, the legendary, my friend Jay Shetty in the house.

It's good to see you, man. Thanks for having me.

This is, I'm so Super pumped you're here. This is fun. You've been on before. I think you were the first podcast you did was with me.

Literally, yeah. It was two years ago. 2018, January. 2018. Yeah, it's 2018. We met in October.

2017. Halloween 2017.

When Masked Masculinity came out, which is amazing. Yeah, man.

It's been almost two and a half years since we've known each other.

Yeah, two and a half years, I guess. But I feel like I know you better than that. Than the time that we spent. I know. Because it's deeper.

Well, we've spent a lot of quality time together. We pretty much meet like every month for dinner.

I love it.

For like five hours.

Yeah, we have these bromance dinners.

Amazing dinners where we talk about meditation, mindset, we talk about personal challenges, what.

We'Re learning from, what we're learning, what.

We'Re overcoming, mistakes, everything. And we just started playing basketball together, soccer, tennis, everything with Novak Djokovic. We've been on trips together.

Yeah, we just went to Puerto Rico together. We've been in Ohio together when we came in for the school.

Yes, I'm a greatness.

We've done a lot of good things. Been in New York together. Utah, Utah together.

Yeah.

What was Utah? When it was me, you, Brendan, and Mel as well. When was this? That was for the Powerful youl.

That's right.

Okay, yes. Utah, right?

That was Utah. Yeah, I thought maybe. You've done a lot of good things for me, man. Yeah. You had a live event that you came out with a few months ago. That was incredible. Just so many good things we've done. So, it's been amazing to watch your journey, your growth. And if you haven't checked out the last interview we've done, make sure you guys go watch that because there's a lot of good stuff about your story, your background and everything else. And you just came out with a book that's coming out soon called Think Like a Monk: Train youn Mind for Peace and Purpose Every Day. I'm almost finished which I almost never finish books. So, I'm excited about this because there's so many powerful strategies and tools to train your mind for peace and purpose. And one of the first ones that I love that you talk about is identity. I think a lot of us get tied into our own identity and it causes a lot of stress in our life because we're focused on how we look and how we want other people to perceive us. Now, why is identity something that you focused on in the beginning as something that was important to talk about in the beginning of the book for you?

Yeah, absolutely. First of all, I wanna say I'm really grateful to be back, Louis. That's amazing. You know, having a real friendship in this space and collaborating and loving what someone else is doing, I think first of all, just the friendship we share is really important to me and meaningful to me. And I feel like a lot of people feel like when their career is growing, it's harder. When you're older, when your career is growing, when things are moving forward, when we're busier than ever, it's harder to build deep relationships. It's really hard. And the fact that we've done that in the last two and a half years, I think is testament to who.

You are and the type of person than you are. It's hard to be conscious. I love you too, man. It's hard to be conscious in creating those relationships when you have work, you have family, you have your relationship, you.

Know, all these different things. So yeah, back to identity. So I start off the chapter with this beautiful thought from Charles Horton Cooley and I love telling it because it's just the best. And I think it was written in like the 1900s. And he said, Today the challenge is, 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. It's crazy, man. And it's like, it blows my mind every time I say it. It gives me the chills, like I feel it. And 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.

Daniel Day-Lewis. Yeah, 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 not. because he was trying to get into the mindset of how someone that perverted would behave. And then Daniel Day-Lewis, when he was filming for Gangs of New York, he's actually wearing these coats that are centuries old so that he can get into character when he's off camera. Yeah, when he can feel it, right? He's not wearing watches, he's not carrying around his mobile phone, they're speaking in the accents, and he talks about how he actually went crazy. Because guess what? When you fake being someone for so long, you think it's your reality. And that's what happens to all of us. We play a role at work, we play a role at home, we play a role with our family, we play a role with 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 list of your goals, your.

Dreams, your accomplishments, anything that you're currently chasing and pursuing. Okay. Write them down. You can write down three, you can write down five, you can write down ten, 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? Or did you get that idea because you just feel it when you do it, that you feel alive?

Ask yourself. 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 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. 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 Jay, take note of me, like Lewis, you know? And it's just like trying to get through and the noise of everyone else's opinions is so loud. So this is what 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 listen to ourselves? 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 probably think, oh, 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, a workshop, go and shadow a friend, go to a seminar, a conference, go to reading a book, listen to a podcast, go and expose yourself to eight.

Different things in a month.

Eight different things. Eight different things in a month. And guess what, in a month you will have learned what you probably would have learned in eight years because most of us test one new thing a year.

Maybe.

Maybe. If that, exactly, right? Like some people don't even do that. But if you do eight different things in a month, and this is how you have to see it, If you went to eight different restaurants in a month, you ask 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 ask yourself is, did I like it? You gotta try it first. You gotta try it first. You gotta go to the restaurant. There's no point. So you gotta 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 it? 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. 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 with writing a best-selling 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.