10 Lessons I have Learned from the Last 300 Episodes of On Purpose

an extra extra special episode. It really really is because this is episode number three hundred and one. Now episode three hundred and one of the Ombourbosed podcast makes me

feel like it deserves a celebration. We've had hundreds of millions of downloads, we've had tens of millions of views, and more importantly, with the three hundred episodes we've had with over one hundred and fifty guests one hundred and fifty solo episodes, I just want to thank you all for the incredible support, the incredible love, the incredible energy that you've brought to On Purpose. I know that you're telling your friends every single day, every single week, every

single month, every single year about On Purpose. I know that you're showing up again and again and again. I love seeing your Spotify wrapped end of year lists where you were sharing how many minutes you've listened to on Purpose, and I keep seeing it grow on all platforms. So whether you're listening on Apple or Spotify, I see the reviews continuing to flood in. I just want to thank you for your support and your love and your kindness and your dedication to listen, to learn and to grow

and to do that with me here on Purpose. I promise you that this time that you spend with me is never wasted. It's fully, fully invested into your future and yourself, and I'm just so happy that we get to be here together every single week while you eat, while you cook, while you walk your dog, while you're at the gym, while you're driving, whatever you're up to right now. Thank you for being an on Purpose listener. Today's episode is all about the ten lessons I've learned

over the last three hundred episodes of On Purpose. I'm going to be referencing some old episodes, talking about some guests that we've had, and I hope that you're going to go back and listen to the ones that you missed or maybe haven't heard yet, and I can't wait to dive in. So if you're ready, I'm ready. Let's do it. And if you feel like it, grab a screenshot right now and wish us a happy three hundred episode birthday on Instagram, Twitter, wherever you're listening, wherever you share.

So the first lesson I want to share with you is you have to be patient for the big things, impatient for the small things. Be patient about the big things, and to be impatient about the small things. We've had so many incredible guests on the show that represent patience. People who've waited years for their big break, people who've waited decades to be heard and to be seen to make a breakthrough. I remember the episode with Chrissy Metz and her talking about her journey of being so broke

and still finding a way. There was patience for the big break or the big role, but there was impatience around what can I do right now to solve this problem. When you look at Mark Randolph, one of the co founders of Netflix, he had patience. They knew that Netflix, with where they started it as a mail delivery service of movies, would evolve. They were patient about its growth, but they were impatient about learning, about growing, about figuring

out what they wanted to do next. This balance of patience and impatience has been huge in my own life. I'm patient for things that feel like a true achievement. I'm patient about things that are the result, but I'm impatient about what I can control now. So I'm patient for the big winds, the big results, the big landmarks, the big milestones. I can be patient about those, but I'm impatient about what can I do right now, What's the action I can take that actually gets me closer

to that. So in the last twelve months, I feel that the things that I've been most impatient about is starting something. I was impatient about starting Psalmote, we the tea company. I was impatient about working on my new book, which actually requires a lot of patients and which was a lot of fun. I was impatient about some of the content I want to create and some of the new things I wanted to try on YouTube, where I know so many of you watch our videos and connect

with us. But I'm patient. You know, last year we won a lot of awards. We won a lot of book awards. To Think like a Monk, we won a lot of Webby Awards, But this year was a year where I was planting those seeds again. So sometimes what we get impatient about is we get impatient about the result and we get patient about what we can do. And it needs to be the other way around. We need to be impatient about what we can do and patient for the result. That's how patience and impatience can

actually work together. So remember to be patient for the big things, impatient for the small things. Ask yourself right now, what is it that you can do today that is going to shift or make a difference in your life? Do that today? Do not be patient for that now. The second biggest lesson that I've learned in the last twelve months and from three hundred episodes on the podcast is that nothing is as scary as you think. It's

worse in your imagination. Now, this to me reminds me of the first ever On Purpose episode that I recorded, not the first one that was released, the first one that was recorded, because often we will record and release in a different order. And so the first podcast we ever recorded was with Kenneth Cole, and I remember it was a dark, gray afternoon in la which is surprising, and he came to my apartment where we used to record, and I was so nervous about the questions about the flow.

The journey of the interview we had at the US wasn't even out yet. You didn't even know that it existed. And nothing, I truly mean, nothing is as scary as you think. It's worse than your imagination. Seneca said that we suffer twice, once in reality and once in imagination. I actually think that the suffering in our imagination is more painful. The way you think something is going to be in your mind is way scarier than it can

be in real life. Why are we scared of going to the dark area or dark room because of the unknown, and in our mind we fill that room with so much scary stuff. But then when you go there and you open the door, there's nothing in there, right, There's nothing under the bed. One thing we've realized is that the stories we tell ourselves are full of fear. The stories we tell ourselves are full of insecurity and anxiety. One of the podcast that I'm remembering very strongly whereas

I'm talking about this is the episode with Kobe Bryant. Now, Kobe Bryant was someone who surprised me because he was satisfied, content driven, and ambitious even in retirement. What we find with a lot of athletes is that when they come to retirement, there's a sort of impatience, there's a struggle, there's a back and forth, and there's a disconnection internally for them because it almost feels like the most meaningful thing in their life has already been achieved. What next?

What did they do now? How do they transition? How do they shift? And so a lot of us are told that or a lot of people, especially who are athletes whose career is based on age and fitness, are often scared of retirement. And when I met Kobe and I interviewed Kobe Bryant, I saw an immense I saw a sense of stillness and contentment in retirement where he was so joyful because he was now telling stories, which is what he believed in. So again, nothing is as

scary as you think. It's worse in your imagination. For athletes, I'm sure that the idea of retirement can be scarier in their mind. I want you to think about what's been scarier in your mind, what has challenged you so much mentally that maybe even made you act out of character. But now that you think about it, you're right, Actually, Jay, you're so right that when I did something in real life, it wasn't nearly as bad, right, It wasn't nearly as complicated.

And I think this is such an interesting exercise that everyone needs to do, because next time, your mind is going to do the same thing. Right. Your mind never gives up. The next time there's something scary, your mind's going to make it scarier. Your mind's going to make it harder. Your mind's going to make it tougher internally, your mind's going to make it more and more challenging for you personally. But what if you can see that differently?

What if you could approach it differently? What if you could challenge it? You know, when I interviewed Eva Longori, if you haven't heard that episode, it's it's a mind blowing episode about how she was working on Desperate Housewives and studying and you know, building her career. It's just an incredible journey of time management and focus and planning. And when you hear about them, your imagination it sounds difficult, and it was difficult. She worked extremely hard, but reality

of her making that happen for her. There was no other choice. There was no other option, and so I really want you to think about that nothing is as scary as you think. It's worse than your imagination. One of the ones for me this year was skydiving. When I went skydiving, when I thought about it, when I just thought about it before, even when skydiving, I felt sick in my imagine. I felt sick in reality from

how I viewed it in my imagination. And that one for me was huge because I found that what I did this was really interesting. What I did is that I visualized. I went onto YouTube. I searched for skydiving videos and real footage, and I watched how you go up in a plane, what it looks like when the plane door opens, and then what it looks like when

you jump out. Obviously I couldn't feel it, but just looking at that altitude and the height, like the fifteen thousand feet, even that made me sick in my visualization. It made me sick in my stomach just looking at the videos and imagining, closing my eyes and visualizing that I was there. Now. By the seventh time of visualizing it, I wasn't feeling sick anymore, And so I thought, Okay, now that I've been through it in my imagination, it will be much better in reality. So actually I lived

through the fear. I was living through the pain in my visualization. Now, granted this took a lot of focus, it took a lot of thought process, but it was just a fascinating thing to play around with that Sometimes people say, oh, well, what I imagine is worse, and therefore let me contextualize that will actually live it out in your mind? How bad can it be? Now, I'm not visualizing worst case scenario, like I'm not visualizing what if my parachute doesn't work? And what if this doesn't work?

Like I'm not imagining the negative scenario. I'm imagining it as it is. And I think that's the key. That usually we visualize not a positive scenario, but a negative scenario. And I'm not asking you to visualize a positive or a negative. I'm asking you to visualize and as is scenario. The more we can bring ourselves back down to reality, the better our mindset is now. The third one is people won't always see your best work do it anyway. We live in a world where we think everything needs

to be seen and shown. Everything needs to be recorded and documented, Everything needs to be stored. And hey, I'm part of this too. But what I've learned to realize is that people won't always see your best work. People won't always know what you did before you did it. People won't always realize your background story. People may not understand what it took to get to where you are.

I look at someone like Mike Posner, he was one of the earliest guests on the podcast Phenomenal Journey, just what he went through with losing his father, what he went through with searching for his own truth, the work that he was doing across the States. The reason why I'm referencing that is just people may not see that. We see people for what we see on TV, and people see you for what they see on Instagram. Right, we judge people based on what we see on TV

and interviews. We're judged by how people see us on Instagram all the time and when we really think about it, when we've really stopped to pause. People won't always see our best work. And that's okay. It doesn't matter. They

don't need to understand us. There was this clip that went viral recently on Instagram and TikTok of me being interviewed on the Justin Bold Only Man Enough podcast, and I was asked this brilliant question by Jamie, his co host, and he asked me, what do people value that you don't? And you can literally see me pause for a second and really see me think about it, and I say,

being understood. What I've realized is that trying to be understood is difficult when you're doing things that are beyond people's comprehension, or trying to do things beyond people's comprehension. I'm thinking about my guest you Vow Noah Harari, the author of Homodaeus and Sapiens, and a lot of what he writes about can trigger it can spark debate, but it's hard for people to agree and say they understand

everything when it's challenging normal thought. This is also true of my interview with Gary v which was back in twenty nineteen, now two years ago, and it was all about how to stop caring what other people think, because people's thinking is based on their background and their walk of life and their realm of sight. Right, your realm of sight is what defines what you believe is possible

or impossible. If you grow up in a city or a town where certain things were possible and certain things were impossible, you artificially took on those limits amongst yourselves. And so I see this again and again from people on the podcast about people won't always see your best work.

Do it anyway, people won't always understand you, people won't always get you, and not everything about you needs to be seen, understood and heard, because in that process, you may actually run out of energy, right, You may actually get exhausted trying to make sure that everyone can see what you're up to. And I've found in my life that sometimes I think about these podcasts, these audio episodes have never been seen. Sure they've been heard, but they've

never been seen. And there are so many insights in these solo episodes that I know you keep coming back from that. I get in the flow and in the zone for as well. That may never be heard. That's okay, because you're not doing it for that. You're doing it because it's your best work. When I think about people who've been on the podcast, who are just doing their best work, regardless of if anyone's watching or not, if anyone's taking note or not if anyone's being observant or not,

they're just doing their best work. Number four is people will surprise you if you let them so get to know them. One of the things I find is that it's so easy to create a perception around someone through what we hear about them, what we see about them, and maybe even what they expose us to sometimes. But what we find so often, especially when I get to know people, is that there's so much more complexity, there's so much more texture, There's so much more to this

human being. How many times have you ever judge someone from a far, then you get closer and then you actually become friends with them when you'd actually previously judge them negatively, So you went from judging someone negatively from a far to loving them from a close. Fascinating, right, how you can go from judging someone negatively from afar to loving someone from close? What does that say? It says that people will surprise you if you let them

get to know them. People will surprise you if you get to know them both ways. People may surprise you and feel so much more loving, kind, amazing in person than you ever imagined, all the opposite, maybe from afar, you thought someone was amazing, and then when you got close, you realized they weren't your type of person. I find that this to be such an interesting way of thinking about it, and the way I'd suggest we all do it is, let's not waste our time. Let's stop ourselves

from judging people from afar. If you don't know someone, remove judgment from your mind, because it's just a waste of space if you haven't really spent time. I was sitting with a group of people recently and they were talking about someone that I actually know personally, and I didn't want to talk about this person, but I was thinking, wow.

I didn't want to share about them because it's a confidential, of course, relationship, but I was just thinking my head, Wow, People just watch the news, they read a few articles, and we think we know someone. Imagine if someone did that to us. Do you think if someone wrote an article on you and watched a couple of interviews when you were nervous, out of place, not sure, and that they judge you on that, Or people judge you based on a few Instagram comments or a few people's thoughts,

but they've never met you. People will surprise you if you get to know them, So don't make a judgment from someone from Afar. Allow yourself to get to know them. And if you're never going to get to know them, then keep them out of your life, keep them out of your mind. Don't waste any energy there. And that applies to number of five. You really don't know why anyone's going through, so don't waste your time on it.

You know, I think a lot of the time we're like, oh, yeah, but they'll be fine, or that's okay, or they don't need to worry about that. But the truth is that we don't really know what anyone's going through. Sometimes I'll see someone who comes up to me in the street and will say to me, you've just been listening to your podcast, watching your videos, and all of a sudden they'll break down crying, and I'm thinking, wow, this person just went from being fully happy to being really vulnerable

with me. And I'll ask them and be like, are you okay, Like tell me what happened, And someone will open up and say they lost someone, they lost a job, they have been caring for someone who's sickly or unwell. People are going through so much. If we could simply recognize that we don't know what anyone's going through, so let's not judge them, Let's not waste our time on that. Let's really really truly focus on ourselves. The sixth one

is your health is unique, so treated that way. We've added an incredible selection of guests from the health and fitness world, whether it's doctor Joe Dispenser, Dave Asprey, whether it's doctor Stephen Gundry or Ben Greenfield, and we've also had doctor Mark Hyman Rich role whim Half. There are some incredible guests in this field that I highly recommend

going back and listening to their episodes. But what I've learned from listening to all of them is that your health is unique, and you have to treat it that way. I think when we hear about a diet or we hear about a new super food, we do one of two things. We discard it because we think it's irrelevant, it's a fad, it doesn't apply to us, forget about it, or we get so obsessed with it that we think that has to change what we want, that has to

fix us. And the truth is the answer is actually much more in the middle, which is tested out and see if it's true for you. I think this has been my approach to food and diet for the past few years, trying to really find what is it that I want to eat for breakfast based on how I want to feel. So I know that when I eat breakfast, I want to feel energized but not heavy. I want to feel focused and clear, but I don't want to

feel so full. It's taking me a long time to figure out what I need to eat, and I'll share that with you in a second. Done with lunch, the same thing. Sometimes after lunch, I love the taste of something, but for the rest of the day, I'm feeling really heavy. I'm feeling tired, feeling lethargic. I know that my lunch needs to keep me going. My lunch needs to give me that momentum. My lunch needs to be that pick me up. Then I need a snack at about three to four pm to keep me going till the end

of the day. And then finally dinner, which I really want to be comforting as well. So I've tried out a lot of different things for me. One of the biggest things that I realized recently by doing a micronutrient test is that I was slightly allergic to oats, and I love oats, so that was really difficult to discover. But at the same time that I had low vitamin D and the vitamin D was affecting so much in

my life, so I healthy so unique. If someone else was looking at me, they would have thought, Jay, you look healthy, you look fine. I knew I didn't feel great, and I realized that was partly vitamin D. I also realized that when I was eating oats in the morning, I was feeling bloated. I was feeling uncomfortable. But then switching it to cheer pudding, which has been a game changer for me with blueberries and raspberries. I'm now finishing my mornings feeling activated for the rest of the day.

The same is true for my workouts. For a long time, I was hitting the gym, I was getting bored. I really wasn't engaged with it anymore. And I got into tennis during the pandemic, and I loved it. I enjoyed it every single day. It was brilliant. And then, as time would do with anything, I started to realize that I didn't love just playing tennis. So I wanted to add something and I started noticed that I didn't feel

it strong anymore. So I added weight training, and that weight training has given me not only an edge while playing tennis, but it's also given me a feeling of strength of confidence. It's been so great for my physicality. And so often the mistake we make is we go into these extremes on our health and we don't realize that our health is unique. So just because I said cheer putting is good for my breakfast, doesn't mean that's

your breakfast, but try it out. Just because I said I was loan with Vitaim, indeed doesn't mean that's what you're lowing, but it is worth checking out. So I find that these are all points of connection, points of

reflection that we can use to change our health. Now, this was one again that I read about, which is all about the infrared sauna and cold plunge, and this has become huge for me and rather where every week we're doing three cycles of fifteen minutes in an infrared sauna than to three to seven minutes in a cold plunge, three cycles of each back to back, and it has been so powerful and I'm actually missing it. I haven't

done it for the past couple of weeks. It got cold outside and I became one of those people that I was like, oh, I don't want to be called. But now I'm looking back, going I need to get back to it. I cannot wait. And so your health is unique. Please treat it that way. Please do not just keep trying to apply someone else's therapy for your body. Treat your body uniquely. The next one is figure out what you enjoy doing with your partner and with your friends.

This is something that I've realized more and more when I'm coaching couples or I'm even seeing my friends and relationships, is people don't know what they like to do with other people. So often one's ends up happening. Is we end up sitting around everyone's on their phone. How often does that happen? Or maybe a movie's on in the background, or maybe you ordered some food as well. But what do you truly enjoy doing with different people? So I've got friends where I know we can talk for hours

pretty much feels like a podcast episode. It's a Q and A for hours, and we love that with each other, with rather its experiences and experiments. We like playing games, we like trying out new things, We like trying out even like a round a mini golf. Right, But doing something active and experiential with rather always works with other friends of mine, I know that what we like to do is dinner in a movie, like that's our thing

to do together. It's so important to start discovering what you like to do with people, because what I've found is that as time goes on, you end up doing more of the same thing. And if you haven't discovered something that brings you a lie, usually settle for something quite weak. So really think about the time you spend with your friends. What do you do. Maybe you're trying out new restaurants. Maybe you're trying out new games at home. Maybe you have a friend that you only play video

games with. Maybe you have someone else that you read a book with. Maybe you start a book club. What I've found is that people who learned together and people who experience together have deeper, more powerful bonds. Why because when you're learning and you're experimenting, you're more more vulnerable. When you're learning and experiencing, you actually go beneath the surface. There's no more small talk there to try that out. That's really what led to me and Rady starting PSALMAT

because we were experimenting. We were learning together about herbs. Well she was doing the learning, actually I was just doing the tasting. But that's where we discovered that we loved tea and we wanted to create something for everyone in the world. And so simply by learning and experimenting, you never know where you're going to end up. Number eight is you can do anything you want in forty eight hours if you truly put your mind to it.

Earlier this year, I've read a stat that said one person died in India every five minutes from COVID and I woke up to that stat and then I was talking to another friend in India who was telling me how dire this situation was, how bad it was, how many people we knew that were losing their lives and the challenges that they were going through and rather and I felt compelled to try to do something, but I didn't know how long the problem was going to last.

I didn't really know anyone in the space who was helping. So I started researching. I started reading about what charities were having an impact, what NGOs were having an impact, on the ground making a difference, and in forty eight hours, Rather and I organized a fundraiser for India for COVID relief called Help India Breathe, And in forty eight hours and across the weekend, we raised over five million dollars.

It just blew my mind because we went and found a production company, We had to find the charity, We had to locate the NGOs, We had to make sure that the money was being spent correctly. We had to go and find out the friends who wanted to be a part of our fundraiser. We had to get these graphics made. We had to get the video footage made. I have probably you never felt so mission driven about something in my life ever before. And I saw that that conviction and that focus for a worthy cause really

brought something out in me. Often we think, oh, I need months to plan something like that, and if you saw it, you'd be like, oh, well, they must have been working on this for a while. It looked professional, it worked great, but it wasn't at all right. And I wrote our script that morning. I remember going through it with her and we were just working on our script.

What I find so amazing about all of this is that I want to remind you that you can do anything you want in forty eight hours if you really want to. And to think that all of you donated so generously. We had about two and a half million donated just online, and then two and a half million were from the likes of the nod Coostla, Ray Dahlio and from India Aspera, and it was amazing in the Aspera gave a million dollars, Ray gave a million dollars,

the Nordcostla gave a million dollars. And then we have all of this collective two and a half million dollars raised on Facebook, Instagram, YouTube and social media. And we had so many friends get involved. Shawn Mendes supported it. We had Ellen de generous, Willow Smith, the Smith family donated generously. Brendan Burchard came out very end and donated so magnificently. Jamie kern Leema, the founder of it Cosmetics, came right at the end and gave as well. Rohan Os.

I mean, the list goes on of people who just gave with open hearts, and whether you gave one dollar, five dollars or a million dollars, it all added up to hopefully affect at what I was told around two hundred to two hundred and fifty thousand lives. And so I just want to thank you, but I also want you to remember that if you really care about something, if you really believe in something, if you're really focused on something, it's incredible what you can do in forty

eight hours if you really want to. Don't underestimate the time, and don't underestimate yourself. Number nine, which I realized through everyone I talked to, is consistency continues to bring the greatest joy. People who've done something consistently are feeling more joy than those who start something and stop something and start something again. Spoke to John and Julie Gottman, who've been researching marriage and relationships for decades, feeling very, very joyful.

Speaking to my monk teacher Garangadas, he's been a monk now for maybe around thirty years, maybe just under thirty years. Really joyful people who are able to do something again and again and again. Doctor Robert Wardinger, who's an incredible, incredible professor at Harvard. Again, he has been consistently looking at studies around people's minds, hearts, lives, and how we live joyful. What are you doing consistently that's changing your life.

I have my Genius Community. If you haven't heard of it, you can check out jus dot com. It's my wellbeing community and we have thousands of members from all over the world across one hundred and forty countries, I believe, and these thousands of members come together every single week inside our well being community to grow, to learn, to power up. So in the podcast, I give you the insight and I give you the access to the guests

that we're working with. But Ingenius we actually coach people through the five key areas of life, that being physical, mental, emotional, spiritual, and financial health. And so when I've been doing that every single year now for nearly four years, every Sunday, and it has been phenomenal. We have an amazing book club inside. It's just one of my favorite offerings that we truly have. Check out jhdgis dot com if you haven't already. The tenth and final one is experiences are

greater than things. My sister and I were reflecting back on our favorite Christmases and it's amazing because none of them did we remember a gift we received from our parents. Every one of them we remembered an experience, a memory, a moment, but never a gift. And even this year, when I think about how I'll remember this year, I'll think about the people I met, the unique experiences I had, whether it was seeing friends perform live or launched their movies.

I remember going to watch our friend Camilla Cabello go to launch Cinderella, which was so much fun to watch. We got to travel with the Jonas brothers and see them on tour thanks to Joe, Nick and Kevin, which was so much fun as well. I had the greatest honor and privilege this year to officiate the wedding of Charlie McDowell and Lily Collins, and it was one of

the most meaningful, fulfilling experiences of my life. The preparation, the reflection, the connection with their beautiful family and friends. It was the most humbling experience this year. So when you look back at this year when you're planning for next year, plan experiences, plan those special connections with human even travel trips they didn't go to plan. We went on a few travel trips with my friends to Temecula, Santa Barbara and they didn't go to plan. We didn't

really end up in the nicest place to stay. Our travel was crazy, the weather was crazy, but we had an amazing time. Those are the memories. Make more memories in twenty twenty two. Focus on making memories, capture them, keep them in your heart, and make sure you come back to On Purpose. I'm so grateful. I'm genuinely, so so grateful to each and every one of you, and I cannot wait to experience twenty twenty two together, to be on this journey with you, and I cannot wait

to meet you in person. If you see me on the road, if you see me anywhere, come and say hello. I love love love saying hello, So make sure you do. And if you've been a listener of On Purpose for this year, it would mean the world to me if you could go and leave a review on whichever platform you listen on, Spotify, Apple, Stitcher, wherever you listen, please please, please go and leave a review. It makes a huge difference to a podcaster and I also love reading them. Thank you so much. He