2 Transformational Habits To Change Your Mental State & How to Refine Your Intentions for a Happier, Fulfilled Life

this conversation are truly unique. I think you're going to hear a lot of new perspectives and ideas from me, and I am so grateful that you made time to listen to this episode. So thank you for being here. And I hope you've been loving it. I mean, we have been spoiled in the past few weeks, everyone from doctor Gabel Mattey to doctor Daniel aman Selena Gomez, Kendall Jenner, Alex Cooper. I hope you've gone back and listen to those episodes. If you haven't, do that right after this one.

Tell me a little bit about your background growing up. Absolutely. Yeah. So I was born and raised in London as a normal Indian kid, the highest values of success were work hard at school, get good grades. Life is all about performance. My parents were wonderful, very supportive, and more liberal than I think a lot of Indian parents, but still it was always about how well you did at school. And that kind of lasted for me until I was fourteen

when I started to rebel. And I think I started to rebel because I saw that despite myself doing well at school, I was still bullied for being overweight and obese at the time. I was still a victim of racism at the time in the area I grew up in London, but a lot of that was I was still experiencing these things and I was thinking, well, getting good grades in school obviously is not solving life for me. And that took me to the other extreme of rebelling.

So I got involved in petty violence crime. I got involved with experimenting with drugs. I just started going totally the opposite way, just as a desire to experiment and test because I wasn't feeling satisfied and happy with the life that had been paved for me. Well, that's very interesting. I never knew that part of your Yeah, yeah, I completely went off the rails, and that was my way of trying to look for something more meaningful. I was always seeking a thrill in life. I wanted to feel

deeply passionate about something. And you know, one of my favorite thoughts is for Martin Luther King, where he said that if you have nothing to die for, then you have nothing to live for. And for me, I was looking for that, but I was looking for it in all the wrong places. Tell me about that period with the drugs and the violence and all that. You know, at the time, it was that tough ego facade that I had, so I would portray myself as being very tough.

I was doing all these things, and I would have this ego, but inside I was actually really scared. I was actually really insecure. I was worried sometimes about going to parties or events because of who I'd run into any time I was experimenting with anything. I wasn't actually as confident as I'd make out to be. But I remember at that time, you would just put on this face to appear as if you had it all going right. How many years did that phase last. I'd say lasted

for four years, from fourteen to eighteen. Then what happened. Well, what happened was that when I was around sixteen, I lost two of my best friends. So one of them died due to gang violence and one of them died in a car accident. Like I look back, and I was like, you know, all of us that were involved in all these things, we could all go back home and our mums would cook us dinner. Right. It wasn't like we actually had to be part of gangs. It just became a part of culture, which I think is

very interesting. So for me, that was one of the biggest challenges. And when I lost two of my friends, that made one as a result of correct correct because of life crime, and one because of a car accident. And when I lost both of them, that really made me reflect because to me, they were good people. They were people who were very kind and loving, and I lost both of them at an early age, and that really made me start to question what's life all about?

Because if these are good people, they're beautiful people, and I've lost them, I'm spending my life in this field which doesn't seem to be getting me anywhere. And that really made me start to pause and reflect on how I was using my time because all of a sudden, time became very valuable. I started to recognize how little time we could have if it was used unwisely. So

would happened after that? So at that time, you know, you're a curious sixteen year old, And maybe people who are listening right now can feel like a curious twenty six year old or thirty six year old. It doesn't matter what age you are. For me, I was a curious sixteen year old, but I was still doing everything every sixteen year old. Does you know you just carry on? You think deeply, but you act UNDEPLI that yeah, exactly right,

like you? You think deeply, And I think a lot of us have this challenge today where we our mind wants to think higher, but we're still acting on our lower nature, and so we see that contradiction. So I was a walking, talking contradiction. I would think deeply, think highly, but live lowly and be completely a servant to my mind and my lower nature. And then I met a

monk when I was eighteen. So every week I would be at university and we would have different speakers, influencers, celebrities, authors, CEOs come and speak, and I didn't want to go because I was just like, what am I going to learn from a monk? You know, what does a monk even have? And so I literally said to my friends, who are getting into spirituality at that time, who told me to come, they said, no, you have to come, and I said, okay, I'm only coming if we go

to a bar. And that was literally my land. I was like, I'm only coming if we go to a bar afterwards, and that's how that's how degraded I was. And they were like, okay, great, so they confirmed, and so I went and I went in there with zero expectations, and I was completely mesmerized. I'd never heard someone who spoke with such eloquence, who spoke with such grace, who really had an aura of contentment around them. I mean,

you have this too. The first time I met you, you have that too, And I think when you meet someone like that, For me, it was really interesting because at that time, I'd met people who were rich, I'd met people who are famous, I'd met people who were stunningly attractive, But I don't think i'd ever met anyone who was satisfied or content or happy or at equanimity exactly. I don't think i'd met someone yet at eighteen who had that Which tradition was you from? So he's from

the Vedic tradition. Yeah, from the Vedic tradition, the Vedic Hindu tradition. And for me, it was just you know when you meet someone and you just inspired them and you want to learn everything about them. So I just went up to him and I said, look, I love what you stand for. And he was standing for service, he was standing for helping humanity. And I said, I want to have more of you in my life. I just feel like I want to experience more of this.

And so he said to me, you now need to spend your summer holidays or summer vacations as you say here. He said, you need to spend all of them with me in India. And so I started spending every one of my summer holidays vacations in India before that. Did you go to the bar that night? Did we did? We did go to the bar that night? Yes? No, no, no, no no, the monkey doesn't drink. We did go to the bar that night. I stack to my promises. I'm

very committed. I spent the whole night thinking about what I'd just heard and the biggest thing that stayed with me was he spoke about sacrifice, like giving up your own needs to serve others and going out of your way to make a difference in the life of others, and that really resonated with me at eighteen. It almost gave me that thing to die for that made me want to live. So then you did actually have a

stint as a monkey yourself. So every summer holidays, I spent half of my summer living with him as a monk, as a trainee monk, just visiting, and then I spent the other half of that summer working internships in the city of London. So I would literally go from steakhouses, bars, cars and the world of finance in London in the City of London to then going off and trying to emulate the life of a monk. And then when I graduated twenty two, I went and lived as an official

monk for three years. So there was a lot, there were a lot of month breaks every year, and during that time I was just going back and forth. So I meet a lot of people today, and I'm sure you do in your whole fast few decades that you've been serving people through your knowledge I'm sure you've met so many people who say, you know, I'm stuck between the two worlds, and I'm kind of I can't shake it off. I've done that. I literally did that for four years where I lived two polar opposite worlds in

one sense. The phrase to be in the world and not of it exactly exactly, and I didn't know that then. I was still learning that. And so when then when I got to go and live as a monk for three years, that really gave me that experience. So what did you oh so much? One of the best things I learned, which I think is just really practical, is discipline. And I think discipline is so I'd love to hear your thoughts on this, but I think discipline is so

underestimated today. I think we talk a lot about creativity and spontaneity, and I love all that. I'm very creative, I'm very spontaneous. But I think discipline is just so underestimated. I think anyone in any field, in any practice, whether it's finance or business or singing or art, discipline is

such a key trait. So the discipline to wake up at the same time every day, at four am, every single day, the discipline to sit and meditate for multiple hours a day, the discipline to do something even when you don't feel the benefit, the discipline to do something even when you don't have taste for it yet, but to recognize that with patience and practice, that taste will come,

and that meaning and fulfillment will come. That discipline is just so powerful, And disciplines is a hard thing to talk about because it's not attractive or sexy, So you tell someone to do something with discipline, they'll just be like, oh, that doesn't sound inspirational. But it's like, that's such a core part of life transformation in my opinion anyways, discipline. So I learned discipline. I didn't wake up discipline. I used to always try get off school if I could,

and all the rest of it. So to be able to take that on at twenty two in my life, to really value discipline and to break the mental limits of what I believe discipline was. I never believed I could wake up at four am. But then when you have people who are doing it around you, when you build up a practice, everything becomes possible, which is which is quite fascinating. When you start breaking your limits. Now

as you start to reflect. When people go into meditation, and if they're honest with themselves, there's a lot of inner demons that wake up too. The shadows accompany the

light that comes. Yes. I made a video called why Meditation made Me a Bad Person, and it was exactly a line with this, So I talk about how you know when you see people meditate today, it's like everyone looks really serene and tranquil and wearing yoga pants and these beautiful sunsets, and it's like, well, when you start meditating, it wasn't like that for me. A beautiful analogy that's given in the very literatures is of cleansing a mirror

of the mind. So a mirror that's not been cleansed, or an attic or a loft that's not been cleansed for years and decades and lifetimes is covered in dust. So when one first starts to clean it through the mechanism of meditation, the first thing that happens is the dust comes in your face, and that dust is those inner demons. Your ego. You start noticing it more. Your pride, you start noticing it more. You're lost, your anger, you're greed,

you're envy, all of these demons. You start to notice them, all the things you don't want other people to find out exactly, all the things that have just been sitting there and you haven't focused on and you don't want people to know you have them exactly, and you start seeing them more so. First, when I started meditating, I was like, oh my god, I'm such a bad person. And really, the way I broke through that was recognizing that again, I am not those things. They are not me.

I am not envious. I'm pure consciousness. Envyous something that I've taken on as a garment that needs to be taken off. A lot of people say, I don't have time to meditate, to have all this work to do. I have to take care of the kids, my job, I have all this stress. Aren't those the people who need it most? Yeah, we all need it most. I feel like we'll excuses are always going to be there.

This is why I say to people that I think it's good that we start five minutes a day, ten minutes a day, But if you can take a day, take half a day, whatever's practical for you. If you can take a week or a weekend, go on a retreat and have a real deep experience of how powerful meditation can be. When you have a deeply profound experience, you want to do five minutes every day even if

you don't have time. Right, we all make time for the things that we're in love with or that we really really need in our lives, and we also forget that it's the pause that helps everything else. And I think we think, and I know, you've got your daily every day, which I think is so beautiful, and it's like we forget that, Wait a minute, if you don't breathe properly, none of this is going to last for very long. Then you left after three years? Yes, what

was going on in your mind? Yeah, so this one's easier to answer. In hindsight, it wasn't as easier to answer then At that time I was conflicted. The first thing meditation does is that it gives you a really raw mirror reflection of who you are to yourself. And for me, at least for my psychophysical nature, my meditation was giving me the self awareness that I wasn't a monk, that I enjoyed rebellion. I enjoyed my independence, and monk

life isn't about rebellion and independence. In one sense, it's it's a lot about surrender exactly. One of my teachers said to me. He said that he felt it was my time to leave so that I could share what I'd learned. And when I actually left at that time, it was really heartbreaking because I was still conflicted whether I was doing the right thing or not. So I

always describe it was like a divorce. I really felt like I got divorced from the love of my life after three years, because I'd given up my corporate jobs, I'd given up a girlfriend I was dating, I'd given up my family, I'd given up everything to make this step, and now I was going back into a world that now was judging me as well, because when I left, my extended Indian family was like, You're really going to become a monk after all that education, after working so hard,

all your family's doctors and lawyers where they relieved. When I came back, they were like, you failed at being a monk, like really like they were like they were more mortified. They were just like what they sent you back,

it weren't good enough to be a monk. So it was actually harder to come back to some time, did you re enter into I re entered into moving back in my parents physically and mentally feeling like, wow, this is going to be really challenging because now I have to think about normal stuff, like maybe I have to think about a career, maybe I have to think about money, maybe I have to think about paying rent, and then all of these, you know, all of these thoughts start

bringing up. So I started every day. I would wake up at the same time every day, and I would meditate every day, and I was trying to stick to as much as I could. And there were a few months in between where I did the opposite. Like I remember the day I left being among, the first thing I did was buy lots of chocolate. The second thing I did was go and catch up on every single movie and TV show i'd missed out one. And so

I completely went the opposite way. And I think that's very natural that when you've been in one extreme, you can fall back into your old habits very quickly. And I think some of us feel this after holidays or retreats, or you go on a meditation retreat with deep back and you go really deep for two days and three days, and then you come back and then after a couple of months then I started to kind of come back

in the middle. So, other than discipline, you learned, of course, reflective self inquiry, right, absolutely, yeah, absolutely, the bigger questions of existence one hundred percent. And this is what I talk about that I think today we're we're so enamored with circumstantial solutions, but what we're trying to do is solve our existential challenges with circumstantial volutions. So my point being, existentially, we don't feel connected to ourselves existentially, we don't feel

like we're serving. Existentially, we don't know our purpose, and we try and solve that with the bottle of wine. We try and solve that with a late night out with friends, and again we feel that same thing every week. So circumstantial solutions don't solve the existential problem. So for me, this reflective self inquiry that you're speaking about was me really asking myself, what is my life about? What is

the purpose of my life? What do I want to do with this incredible time and human form that I've been given, this unique blessing of being a human with a human mind and human consciousness. It's such a gift and such a blessing, how can I make the most

of it? And so I used to spend every day, after meditating for two hours a day, I would go and sit in a library and just read, and I would read and study everything I could to try and find more answers and the particularly the commonalities between what I'd studied in Vedic texts and what I was seeing in modern knowledge. Share some insights, yeah, absolutely, great question.

I think one of the biggest insights I saw was that all ancient texts tell us that we're not the mind and we're not the body, and all of our problems come from our belief that we're the mind and we're the body, which are transient, femoral, ungraspable movements and consciousness. Exactly exactly what you explain, far more articulate and beautifully than I ever will. So I'm going to leave that to you. But that's the truth that we are completely in the belief that we are this mind and body.

The mind and body are an experience. Exactly, you're the one who's having the experience, right Exactly. We are simply witnessing, we're observing, we're within that where the energy that sees through the eyes through the years and functions through the mind and body. And so for me, one of the first things was, how can I remind myself of that on a daily basis now that I'm in a world where I'm back believing that I'm the mind and body. When I was a monk, you forget you're the mind

and body. We didn't even look in the mirror to leave for three years, because you're removing that aspect of yourself. And so I started to put up like a small sticky note next to where I brush my teeth every morning saying, remember you're not your mind and not your body. So every morning and I'd be brushing my teeth, I'd look at that, and that would help me and remind me that I wasn't. So how did that lead to you know, pure now well known in the world as

an expert on success a purpose driven life. But tell me a little bit about your initial kind of foray into the world of business and the world of commerce and the world that in a sense, everybody wants that right, everybody wants success in one way or another. So one of the first things that happened when I came back is a lot of my friends now worked at large corporate companies and they'd been working for a number of years, three to five years, and they were all experiencing stress

and burnout. So they heard that I'd come back and they reached out to me and said, Jay, you're a monk. Right this is twenty thirteen. They were like, you're a monk cri. I said yes, and they said, well, you must have learned something about like mindfulness and meditation. These words were just kind of coming up into the mainstream world at that time. And I said, yeah, I learned how to meditate, and I learned these principles of leadership and these values and how to work from a deeper

place and intention setting. And they said, well, do you mind coming in and speaking at our companies? And so I started to get invited into corporates and a lot of the executives then would ask me to coach them one on one. So this was almost like a natural default coaching world that was created in my life out of demand rather than me. But the monk could actually helped you exactly. I would not be where I'm at

today without living as a monk. And I laugh about that now because so many people when I was about to become a monk. Said yeah, you realize no one will ever hire you ever again, who wants to have a monk on their resume? Right? Like? What job do you get with that? And so I was speaking at these companies, I was coaching executives, I was working one on one with incredible people in England mainly, and then I went through again this reflective self inquiry. I said,

I'm serving a certain type of person right now. But having lived in India and wanting to serve absolutely everyone, and having lived in England and seeing that not everyone has access to money, and not everyone has access to invest and not everyone has access to coaches, I was like, how do we scale this to every person in the world? Like, how do we really touch every person who has a phone, every child, every young person? How do you just spread this everywhere? Right? Like how do we get it out

of the corporate boardrooms and beyond? And so one of the reflections I had at that time was maybe this is going to happen through video and content. And so what I did was I had a video series idea before I ever made a video, and I pitched it to every single major media company in England and I was rejected by forty media companies for my video idea because I had no background in medio communications. And so I went and chased some well known executives and directors

in the media space in London. One of them I called up, who was a family friends family member, and I said, hey, I would love to have a break into the media. Here's my video idea. And he said to me, said how old are you? I said twenty eight and he said, you realize everyone who wants this job is twenty one years old. And I said, yeah, that's fine, I'll work as hard as them. And he said, aren't you getting married this year? I said yeah, I'm getting married this year. And he said, well, dude, you

make more money right now. Don't worry about it, just you know, just forget about it. Just start a blog. And so then I chased another TV broadcaster, very well known in London. I chased him while he was riding his bike around in London. I saw him, I literally chased after me. It was polite enough to stop and I said, hey, I want to come and shadow you. I want to learn from you. I worked for free. I don't want anything. I just need to learn how

to make content that helps people. And he gave me his card and he said, go and get a master's and come back in a year. And I thought, God, I I don't know if I can go and get a master's. And then I applied to four masters programs in London. I was rejected from all of them because I didn't have the background for it. And so then I was really feeling like I was running out of ideas. And I had this video series idea for mindfulness and wellness,

and I was thinking, how do I do this? And so I ended up at an ethnic minority TV training day run by the BBC. And I'm at this TV training day. I walk in and everyone's brown in the room and I'm like, oh, you're a brown unbrown, We're all brown. Like it's just like literally, it's just six ethnic minority yeah. Literally. And so then we're all trained that day and they were like, Jay, you're great, you can present you you know, you understand how to how

to work with etc. They were very encouraging. I said, Okay, where's my job in the media, and they said, well, there are no jobs in the media, and so I said, okay, what do I do? And they said, we'll start a YouTube channel, And at that time I had the biggest mentor block in my mind that you know, starting a YouTube channel only works for Justin Bieber Right, It's like a one in a million, one in a billion chance

that YouTube could do anything for you. One thing that I love now is Thomas Edison said that when you believe you've exhausted all options, remember this you haven't. And that's really become a big montra in my life because every time I've tried to take a traditional route to something, it's never worked, and I've always exhausted all options. And at that time, the only option I had left was

to start a channel. I started my own video channel, put up my first video, launched it and it did about a thousand views in twenty four hours, which wasn't great, and it wasn't bad. It was okay. And then within three months someone showed my video to Arianna Huffington at Davos, and so I got a call from Arianna Huffington and she said, I love your content. We'd love to test it out on the Huffington Post channel. And so then they posted four of my videos which I made for them,

produced in London. I sent to them, they posted in the US and those four videos did one hundred million views in mid twenty sixteen. I didn't expect that they were totally mind blown because they didn't expect that. And then I moved to New York in twenty sixteen, which is when we met, and I took a big risk in twenty seventeen March where I left that role, which was an incredible company to be a part of. But I really felt that I had to grow what I

believed in and spread it further. I started investing in my own video channel. I'm just blessed and very grateful to everyone who's ever watch, liked, or shared a video. And my real focus with all of these videos is how do we make wisdom go viral? How do we take all of these knowledge and insights that have not been consumed by a lot of people, and how do we spread them all over the world to give everyone access. People listening to you right now probably be saying to themselves,

how can I be like Jay? How can I be like Jay Shtty? What advice would you give them? How would you define success and purpose and the connection between those two. Sure so for me, Happiness and success are two different things. Happiness is how you feel about yourself when you're by yourself. That, to me is happiness is how you understand yourself without a reflection or mirror of

how anyone is viewing you. To me, success is our external achievements, whether that's monetary, whether it's awards, whether it's status. Success doesn't make you happy and happiness doesn't guarantee success. One is deeply internal and an inward journey, and one is an outward journey. And I think commonly we confuse both of them as one of the others. So we think if we get an award, will be happy, and everyone who's won an Oscar Award or an Emmy award

will tell you that doesn't work. Or we have the other option where it's like, oh, yeah, if I become really happy, then I'll naturally be successful and attract awards, money, and well, then that's not true either. And so for me, my monk life taught me how to be happy. It gave me the deeper connection with myself. It helped me declutter the noise. It helped me stop living with reference to wanting to be anyone or anything apart from deeply

being myself and deeply connected with my consciousness. So for me, that gave me access to all happiness. What I had to do was I to infuse that into my search for spreading this in a successful way. So my first thing is refining intentions. I every day will refine my intentions as if it's a seed that I'm planting every

single day. And I feel that every day we are challenged with working for lower intentions I money, fame, power, and control, whereas to me, higher intentions are love, compassion, empathy, service, connection, community, and unity. Those to me are higher powers to work for. And so for me, every day I'm literally refining my intention, taking out the weeds of desire for ego and pride and fame and trying to replant the seeds of doing

this for love, compassion, and empathy. That to me is the core of a happy life, first of all, because without that, you end up building something that you may not even want to build, and you then look back down from your tower and go, wow, I wasted a lot of time building a tower I didn't really want to be on the top of. And so for me, that's step one. The second step for me is recognize that you have genius, you have unique potential. We're on

infinite potential right now. You have unique potential inside of you, and it's your role to uncover that. You don't need to be me, you don't need to be deep actor, you don't need to be anywhere. You need to be you, and you have that genius, then it's about strategy, and I do think strategy is important when you're building a business, when you're building an institution, when you're building a company,

and I think the most effective leaders. There's a beautiful statement by Martin Luther King again where he said that those who love peace need to learn to organize themselves as well as those who love war. And to me, that's been such a driving force in my life that if we truly love peace and love, we have to be really organized, we have to be really effective, we have to be productive because that's what people need. So for me, becoming strategic about your endeavors is important if

you want success. Success won't come from just having good intentions and being a nice person. You have to become strategic and deeply focus on your strengths in that space so you know all the wisdom traditions tell us seek the highest first, and everything else comes right. And in short, the formulas pursue excellence, ignore success, and it comes. I couldn't agree more. I couldn't agree more. And I think that's the problem that we get attached to the result,

not the process. So I love waking up every day and making content, writing, making videos, speaking, being on a podcast with you. I love this. I'm not looking towards an external form of success. I'm in love with the process, in love with excellence. A little while ago, you use the word self awareness. I think that's the best definition of spirituality one can have. The self is what spirit is. Right, But our world right now is sacrifice the self for

their selfies. Yes, which is again going back to the wisdom traditions. You sacrifice your soul for your ego. Yes. And that's the downfall, so well said, and that's the biggest challenge today, that we are completely captive of our mind and bodies rather than living beyond them. The mind body is the selfie, correct, correct? Exactly, that's what a

selfie is, right, exactly, That's exactly it. You know, there's again I'm going back to young people who are inspired by you who are looking at their life ahead, give

them a few tips right now. Yeah. Absolutely. One of the first things I'd say is genuinely take time to be with people who are growing yourself, not your mind and body, like be around those people, whether it's listening to deep back, whether it's reading specific books, whether it's going on retreats, whether it's have those experiences in your life that they're helping you go beyond your mind and

body and right now. If that doesn't make sense, what I mean by that is go to places where you forget to think about how you look, who you are, and what your status is like. That's a very practical way of doing it. Go somewhere no one knows you, Go somewhere where you get to explore yourself beyond the self you think you are right now. When I started, I never thought this would happen. The strategy for social media is deeply serving your audience. It still starts with service.

It's like, do you really understand people's needs, dreams and worries? Do you really understand what people are challenged by? And do you really want to make a difference in their life? If you do, your content will naturally get views and likes and shares, And if you don't take the time to care for your audience by understanding them, then your

content won't. So if you're just trying to get likes, views, and shares, yes, you may get one viral video and you may get one little hits and it may make you feel better, but when you're taking time so I'm deeply having conversations with the audience I create for. I spend so much time in personal meetings with people who are aged between eighteen to thirty five because that's the

majority of my audience. Just talking to people to learn about what their challenges are, what can be helped with them. I've been coaching people for the last ten years of my life younger than me and just observing their challenges and helping them. When it made no money, when I was a monk, I and told so many people when it made no money and got no views. So I've done this for the last thirteen years of my life, when it made zero money, when it had zero views

and had zero followers. If you don't know who you are, you don't know the world. If you don't know yourself, you can't actually relate to anybody else. Peace can only be created by those who are peaceful, just like love can only be shown by those who have experienced love.

So this is a very important work that you're doing, and I must congratulate you for doing this at such an early stage in your life and being such an inspiration to so many millions of people, now billions, I would say, and I have to thank you for doing this because you're really doing it so effectively,