In this candid speech, former monk and internet guru Jay Shetty reflects on his sacred tenure and finds the one universal lesson that he learned through his years of struggle.
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00:00 People say you can't change your career at 30, that's when you're meant to be settling down.
00:04 You can't change your career at 35, you should have had it figured out by then.
00:08 Oh my god, you're not married at 38? What the hell are you doing with your life?
00:11 Who comes up with this stuff? I have no idea.
00:15 But this stuff plagued so many people that I speak to.
00:18 So many people open up to me and say, "Jay, I just don't know how to change. Is it possible?"
00:22 What do you think this guy was before he became who he is?
00:26 He used to be a PE teacher, right? Sports teacher at a high school.
00:32 How about her? She was a telemarketer for two weeks.
00:36 How about her? She applied to be a funeral director. It's incredible.
00:42 What happens in society is that we're clouded by the noise.
00:46 The noise of family expectations, the noise of our parents,
00:49 the noise of our brothers and sisters' expectations.
00:52 I grew up in a family where you could either be a doctor, a lawyer or a failure.
00:57 Those were my three options.
00:59 Anything else would just count me as a failure. I would have failed.
01:01 So basically I failed. I'm standing up here in front of you all as a failure.
01:06 I lived as a monk for three years. I committed career suicide.
01:10 I turned down two amazing corporate job offers when I graduated from business school.
01:14 I shaved my hair, I wore robes and lived out of a gym locker for three years.
01:18 And I did that because I thought I was going to do something meaningful,
01:21 help impact the world. And it was one of the best experiences of my life.
01:24 But more than becoming a monk, what that trained me to do was drop out with the rules.
01:28 People told me, "If you come back in three years, you'll never get a job."
01:31 They told me, "If you become a monk, people are going to think you're weird forever.
01:34 No girl's ever going to talk to you."
01:37 People told me, they were like, "Well, when you come back to real life,
01:40 will you even be able to talk English?"
01:42 And people were just really weirded out.
01:44 I'm just like, "Okay, I think monks speak English."
01:47 And there was so much different noise that I was hearing when I made that decision.
01:50 And the funny thing is, from having not been a monk for four years now,
01:54 I'm in one of the most incredible periods of my life that I could ever have asked for.
01:58 And so much of that is based on the fact that I decided to do something different.
02:02 So many of the times our expectations are driving us in a certain scenario.
02:08 We focus so much on life and what we want to be, as opposed to who we want to be.
02:14 Because we've always been told that life and jobs and careers are like boxes and containers.
02:19 There's only a finite number of options.
02:22 There is no formula, there is no pattern.
02:25 If you know what you're passionate about,
02:26 if you know what you're good at, then you invest in that.
02:28 People say, "Follow your passions."
02:30 I say, "Forget that. Invest in your passions."
02:32 If you're passionate about something, go and become the best at it.
02:35 Go and do a course on it. Go and learn from the best.
02:37 Go and find a mentor who's going to make you incredible at that trade.
02:41 Not only will you be criticized and grow,
02:43 you'll be able to find new things about yourself that you never knew.
02:46 Don't trade who you are for who you think the world needs.
02:50 Because the world needs you to be you, and I mean that.
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