Former monk, world renowned author and award winning podcast host Jay Shetty has brought ancient wisdom to more than 25 million fans. Jay is a lifelong student of change and your guide to navigating it successfully. Along with renowned experts Katy Milkman, Maya Shankar, and David Kessler, Jay will teach you practices and methods you can use when change is difficult and overwhelming.
“Success is a lousy teacher. It seduces smart people into thinking they can’t lose.” – Bill Gates
Microsoft Co-founder Bill Gates once quipped, “Success is a lousy teacher. It seduces smart people into thinking they can’t lose.” When we succeed, we often think our result is as a result of our actions, but when failure comes around, most of us don’t attribute it to our actions. As motivational speaker Jim Rohn often said, “Success is nothing more than a few simple disciplines, practiced every day, while failure is simply a few errors in judgment, repeated every day. It is the accumulative weight of our disciplines and our judgments that leads us to either fortune or failure. Failure is not a single, cataclysmic event. We do not fail overnight. Failure is the inevitable result of an accumulation of poor thinking and poor choices.” Success and failure are very similar, it is the result of good or bad decisions repeated over a long period of time.
Success is nothing more than a few simple disciplines, practiced every day, while failure is simply a few errors in judgment, repeated every day. – Jim Rohn
We all aim for greatness in life, but most of us are willing to pay the price required to attain the excellence that we ultimately desire. The significant difference between highly successful and low achievers is their commitment and persistence to achieving their goals despite their challenges. There are no shortcuts to succeeding in life; you have to go the extra mile, most times take the stairs instead of the escalator, create a door for yourself when others see a wall and keep pushing until you achieve your goals. Success is never an accident and failure is usually not a coincidence. As author and motivational speaker Jim Rohn often said,
“Success is nothing more than a few simple disciplines, practiced every day; while failure is simply a few errors in judgment, repeated every day. It is the accumulative weight of our disciplines and our judgments that leads us to either fortune or failure. Failure is not a single, cataclysmic event. We do not fail overnight. Failure is the inevitable result of an accumulation of poor thinking and poor choices.”
A journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step. Microsoft founder Bill Gates once said, “We often underestimate what we can achieve in a year and overestimate what we can achieve in five years.” To run a marathon successfully, you need to increase your run mileage by running consistently. To finish a 700+ page book, you can read 20 pages per day, and you would be done in 30 days. Most of our biggest goals seem overwhelming and out of reach, but if you take one step towards achieving your goals daily, the incremental progress will increase your confidence, and ultimately, you will achieve your goal. As author and motivational speaker Les Brown often said “You don’t have to be great to start, but you have to start to be great.”
“You don’t have to be great to start, but you have to start to be great.”
Small, seemingly insignificant steps completed consistently over time will create a radical difference.
One of the most exciting things that I do on a daily basis is to exercise and improve in the process. I cross-train, the action or practice of engaging in two or more sports or types of exercise in order to improve fitness or performance in one’s main sport. I practice the following sports activities: Basketball, running, weightlifting, swimming, pickleball, badminton, cycling, tennis, volleyball and badminton. Apart from the fitness and movement goal, I try to stay consistent with practicing each sport as it is a medium for improving daily. For example, I start my daily exercise routine with shooting basketball drills and the more I shoot, the more I know I can get better.
401: The Man Who Ran 401 Marathons in 401 Days and Changed His Life Forever is the story of Ben Smith, a marathon runner who completed 401 marathons in 401 days in England between 2015 and 2016. Ben was bullied as a child and he attempted to commit suicide as a result of that experience. As an adult, he was dissatisfied with the way he was living until he discovered his passion for running. He decided to run 401 marathons in 401 days, raise money for charity, and find himself in the process.
By the end of the run, Ben raised £330,000 for two anti-bullying charities Kidscape and Stonewall, and ran over 10,000 miles which is the equivalent of running from Syndey, Australia to London, England. During his run, Ben met and ran with 13,000+ people across England. He also Helen Rollason Award at the BBC Sports Personality of the Year Awards in 2016, In the book, Ben shares his struggle with bullying, mental health, divorce, and navigating the vicissitudes of life.
Running is just putting one foot in front of the other – that’s the simple bit – the hard part is choosing to go running in the first place. But once you make that choice, you can start putting distance between your old life and closing in on a new one.
Halloween is a worldwide celebration on the last night of October, on the eve of the Western Christian feast of All Hallows’ or All Saints’ days. The word hallowe[‘]en is derived from the Scottish form of All Hallows’ Eve – “the evening before All-Hallows Day” 1 Some popular Halloween activities include trick or treat, guiding, souling and most especially putting a mask in disguise. Just like the mask used during the Halloween celebration, most of us have a mask throughout our lives and days. We put on a mask to perform our different roles at work, at home, with family, friends and acquaintances. Depending on the circumstances, we constantly disguise changing the mask to fit the situation we are in leading to inconsistency in our behaviour and action.
Getting fired from a job is one of the most challenging things to happen to anyone. I was once furloughed from my cybersecurity gig in 2020 during the COVID-19 pandemic, and it was tough going through that experience. Navigating the aftermath of a layoff can be traumatic and lonely as people might begin to act awkward around you like you did something wrong. Some of your so-called friends would desert you like you have a disease, and others would ask you insensitive questions like “What did you do?” and others would not even reach out at all because they did not know what to say. It might not seem like that right now, but your firing is an opportunity for a rebirth, recalibration and a setup for your triumphant comeback.
Life will happen to us all at some point, whether getting fired, getting a divorce, losing a loved one or a health/financial crisis. Anything that can go wrong will go wrong (Murphy’s Law). The key to navigating the vicissitudes of life is to keep the challenge in perspective; nothing lasts forever; this too shall pass, and you will overcome this present storm. As author, Jim Rohn once advised ” “Don’t wish it was easier wish you were better. Don’t wish for less problems wish for more skills. Don’t wish for less challenge wish for more wisdom”.
“Between stimulus and response there is a space. In that space is our power to choose our response. In our response lies our growth and our freedom.”
You are going to be called names, the closest people to you are going to tell you that your ideas would not work, people are going to be mean to you for no particular fault of yours, and you are going to be stereotyped because of your gender, religion, or race. In the age of social media, we have become more unkind to each other, shutting each other up, and not listening to each other is the new norm. Learning to filter out the noise and tune into the frequency you want to listen to, is an act of self-discipline. People are going to try to hurt you with their words and actions but always remember that “It is not what you hear, it is what you listen to.” As the Austrian psychiatrist, Holocaust survivor, and author of Man’s Search for Meaning, Viktor Frankl once said “Between stimulus and response there is a space. In that space is our power to choose our response. In our response lies our growth and our freedom.”
It takes someone who is hurt to try to hurt someone else, hurt people hurt people. Most people are going through a lot of things that you know nothing about, behind those smiles is someone that is using their hurt as a cry for help. When people say nasty things or do things that try to hurt you or bait you for reaction, remember the words of the Roman emperor and Stoic philosopher
Marcus Aurelius who said:
“When you wake up in the morning, tell yourself: the people I deal with today will be meddling, ungrateful, arrogant, dishonest, jealous and surly. They are like this because they can’t tell good from evil. But I have seen the beauty of good, and the ugliness of evil, and have recognized that the wrongdoer has a nature related to my own – not of the same blood and birth, but the same mind, and possessing a share of the divine. And so none of them can hurt me. No one can implicate me in ugliness. Nor can I feel angry at my relative, or hate him. We were born to work together like feet, hands and eyes, like the two rows of teeth, upper and lower. To obstruct each other is unnatural. To feel anger at someone, to turn your back on him: these are unnatural.”
In Clockwork, Revised and Expanded: Design Your Business to Run Itself, small business author Mike Michalowicz provides a step-by-step method for getting more done by doing less – making it easier than ever to have your business run itself. Mike suggests that the four-week vacation is the ultimate acid test for a business that runs itself.
There are three stages in a business’s life that every successful entrepreneur experiences. Stage one is when you are scratching your head thinking about starting a business, stage two is surviving the startup stage, and stage three is the growth stage.
You fought a very steep battle to get here on earth with the millions of sperm cells you had to navigate to get made. No one might not have told you of late, but you are specially made, uniquely positioned, and here to make your greatness felt. You are not here to drop two or three kids, work in multiple corporations, get old and DIE. Most of us will not live a life based on how we want it to be, but it is never too late to be who we are. You might have forgotten how special and unique you are due to the vicissitudes of life; the trials and tribulations have gotten you into a funk. It is part of the human experience; life is about learning to suffer with grace because if you don’t handle the challenges of life with grace, they will stay in your face.
What you are going through right now, no matter how tough they might seem, is not who you are. You are one of a kind; there is no one like you, and there will never be anyone like you. You are here for a special mission to make epic shit. You are a force of life who might have forgotten your essence, but the beauty of life is that you have the remote control in your hands. By making the right choices, you can change the direction of your life and alter its course at any time. American philosopher William James once quipped, “The greatest discovery of my generation is that a human being can alter his life by altering his attitude.“
No matter what it is you are dealing with right now, it is going to pass, and you are going to be okay. It might not feel like that now, but your potential is enough to get you through any situation or circumstance. Unlocking your potential will require stretching, embracing the discomfort and playing the long game. You can’t know your potential until you step outside your Comfort Zone. All we need to crack any situation is in us; we need to stay in the moment and dig deep to find solutions to our problems. Nothing lasts forever; everything is transient, constantly changing, and impermanent.
There is no one like you, and you are beautiful and made to deal with any situation trusted upon you. You are here to unleash your greatness, unlock your potential and become the best version of yourself. As Ralph Waldo Emerson once noted: “To be yourself in a world that is constantly trying to make you something else is the greatest accomplishment.” Your greatest achievement in life is to unlock your potential and become what you are meant to be. As the saying goes, GOD’s gift to us is our potential, and what we do with that potential is our gift back to him. It is never too late to be who you might have become, you are never too young to learn, never too old to change. You are specially and uniquely made to unlock your potential by solving the puzzles of life that come in the form of trials, pain, suffering and heartbreak. Our happiness is ultimately derived from recycling our pain and suffering with purpose.
This is not a drill; there are no do-overs; once it is done, it is done. Most of us sleepwalk through life; we spend our limited time engaging in things and people that are not and will not take us closer to our ultimate purpose. We spend half of our walking hours in situations we don’t necessarily like; we delay living, operating on autopilot and in a trance of low-level thinking. As Henry David Thoreau observed in Civil Disobedience and Other Essays, “The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation. What is called resignation is confirmed desperation. From the desperate city, you go into the desperate country and have to console yourself with the bravery of minks and muskrats. A stereotyped but unconscious despair is concealed even under what are called the games and amusements of mankind. There is no play in them, for this comes after work. But it is a characteristic of wisdom not to do desperate things..”
We spend our youth pursuing wealth, and we eventually spend the wealth on our health in old age. Our slumber makes us falsely think money would solve our issues and problems. Money is like alcohol; it only brings out what is already there. Austrian neurologist and Holocaust survivor Viktor Frankl asserted:
“Don’t aim at success. The more you aim at it and make it a target, the more you are going to miss it. For success, like happiness, cannot be pursued; it must ensue, and it only does so as the unintended side effect of one’s personal dedication to a cause greater than oneself or as the by-product of one’s surrender to a person other than oneself. Happiness must happen, and the same holds for success: you have to let it happen by not caring about it. I want you to listen to what your conscience commands you to do and go on to carry it out to the best of your knowledge. Then you will live to see that in the long-run—in the long-run, I say!—success will follow you precisely because you had forgotten to think about it”
Life is over so quickly. It is possible to reach the end with no regrets. It takes some bravery to live it right, to honour the life you are here to live but the choice is yours. So will be the rewards. Appreciate the time you have left by valuing all of the gifts in your life and that includes especially, your own, amazing self.
Australian palliative caregiver Bronnie Ware in her book, The Top Five Regrets of the Dying: A Life Transformed by the Dearly Departing. 1 the 5 top Regrets of the Dying are:
1. I wish I’d had the courage to live a life true to myself, not the life others expected of me.
2. I wish I hadn’t worked so hard.
3. I wish I’d had the courage to express my feelings.
4. I wish I had stayed in touch with my friends.
5. I wish that I had let myself be happier.
1. I wish I’d had the courage to live a life true to myself, not the life others expected of me.
The regret of not having lived a life true to themselves was the most common one of all. It was also the one that caused the most frustration, as the client’s realisation came too late. They say though that we do more to avoid pain than we do to gain pleasure. So it is when the pain becomes too much that we finally find the courage to make changes. Until then, the pain within me was just continuing to fester until it did reach a breaking point.
The majority of us are the same, in that we just want to be happy. And on some level, we all have hearts that suffer.
We are all fairly malleable, bendable creatures really. While we have the choice to think for ourselves and have free will to live the way our hearts guide us, our environment has a huge effect on us all, particularly until we start choosing life from a more conscious perspective.
According to Ware, the number one regret we might probably have is wishing that we lived life on our terms. We wish we had woken up earlier from our slumber, stopped living in autopilot, come out of the trance, and lived our lives based on what we really want to do here on earth. As the saying goes: “In your 20s, you cared what everyone says about you, in your 40s, you stopped caring; and in your 60s, you realized that no one was really thinking about you.” For most of us, we would come to the realization that the people we are trying to impress are really not thinking about us. When you wake up from your slumber, the cat realizes that he is a lion, the chicken realizes that he is an eagle and the human realizes that he has limitless capabilities.
Running on autopilot 2 is a function of our conditioning. Most of us are stuck in subconscious programming; in fact, some brain scans reveal that we operate only 5 percent of the day in a conscious state; the rest of the time, we are on subconscious autopilot. This means that we are making active choices during only a small sliver of our days and letting our subconscious run the show the rest of the time.
When we’re running on autopilot, a primitive, or subconscious, part of our mind drives our reactions. Astonishingly, our subconscious stores every single experience we ever have. This however isn’t just a neutral storehouse for facts and figures; it’s emotional, reactive, and irrational. Every moment of every day, this subconscious mind is shaping the way we see the world; it is the primary driver of most of our (often automatic) behaviors.
Meditations
‘When you press the pause button on a machine, it stops. But when you press the pause button on human beings they start. – Thomas L. Friedman
Podcast
I have averaged two to three hours of exercise daily in the past two years. My exercise routine includes Basketball shooting, swimming, weight lifting, running, cycling, pickleball, lawn tennis, and badminton. It is one of the most consistent things I have done in the past couple of months, and I consider it very gratifying and joy-inducing. The benefits of exercising can not be over-emphasized from producing dopamine, aiding the aging process, and helping sustain a positive mood, sleep, energy and cognition. Exercise has been very therapeutic for me, and it has helped me deal with the dark days.
Arnold Schwarzenegger has constantly re-invented himself from being the world’s greatest bodybuilder, and highest-paid movie star and later becoming the thirty-eighth governor of California (the world’s sixth-largest economy.). Growing up in Austria, his father constantly encouraged him to be useful. In Be Useful: Seven Tools for Life, Arnold shares seven life principles that have helped him become one of the most recognizable faces in the world and the secret to his extraordinary achievement.
