8 Things I Wish I Knew Before I Turned 30

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When things are good, we think they'll be good forever.

And we're wrong.

When things are bad, we think they'll be bad forever.

And we're wrong.

Things are never good forever.

And they're never bad forever.

What we need to recognize is how

we can focus on living a life of meaning and purpose and seeking peace even in chaos.

The number one health and wellness podcast.

Jay Shetty.

Jay Shetty.

The one, the only Jay Shetty.

Hey everyone, it's Jay Shetty, host of the On Purpose podcast and author of New York Times best-selling book, Think Like a Monk and Eight Rules of Love.

If you haven't read either of those books, I hope you go and grab a copy to learn about mindset, peace, purpose, and love, relationships, and dating.

But today I'm talking to you about eight things I wish I knew before I was 30.

I'm 37 now and I've learned so much up until this point in life, but there are certain things that I know could have saved me time, money and energy before I was 30 years old.

And I want to share them all with you.

If I could sit my 20 year old self down for an unfiltered conversation, here are the truths about people, work and life that would have saved me years of stress, overthinking and wasted energy.

These aren't clichés.

They're counterintuitive lessons from psychology and human behavior that will change how you live, love and work.

Let's get in.

Lesson number one is people aren't thinking about you as much as you think they are.

I want to talk about something known as the spotlight effect from Gilovich in 1999.

He said that we overestimate how much people notice or judge us.

When the truth is, most people are too busy worrying about themselves.

Now, imagine walking to work with a giant coffee stain down the front of your shirt.

You feel exposed, humiliated.

You swear everyone's staring, whispering, judging, gossiping.

You spend the whole day shrinking into yourself.

But here's the twist.

When psychologists at Cornell University actually tested this, they found almost nobody noticed.

In their famous Barry Manilow t-shirt study, students were asked to walk into a room full of peers wearing a bright, embarrassing Manilow shirt.

The wearers were convinced half the room would notice and remember.

But the reality, only about 20% of people noticed at all.

The truth is, is we all live under what psychologists call the spotlight effect, the belief that everyone is watching us, when in reality, most people are too busy worrying about their own coffee stains, their own insecurities, their own spotlight.

Now, here's why this matters.

You're not being judged as much as you think.

The audience you imagine doesn't exist.

The world isn't scrutinizing you.

It's scrolling past, lost in its own self-consciousness.

The spotlight is in your head.

And once you realize that, you can finally step on stage, take the risk, wear the stain, because no one's watching as closely as you think.

Stop chasing approval from people who don't even know themselves.

Stop performing for people who wouldn't show up if you fell.

Stop editing your life for people who aren't even paying attention.

Stop carrying the weight of opinions that were never yours to hold.

Stop shrinking your dreams to fit someone else's comfort zone.

And stop letting silent critics rent space in your head for free.

Stop confusing someone's opinion with your own reflection.

They're not thinking about you in the first place.

Lesson number two, busyness isn't productivity.

We mistake being busy for being valuable.

This is something in psychology known as the effort heuristic.

We all know what it feels like.

We think if we're working 12 hours a day, we're winning, we're moving forward.

But the reality is you can hustle 12 hours a day and still not move forward.

We have to measure progress in outcomes, not hours.

Have you ever caught yourself bragging about how busy you are, or maybe even trying to make yourself sound worthy?

You might say, I worked 12 hours straight.

Hey, I had back-to-back meetings.

I barely slept this week.

We wear busyness like a badge of honor, but psychology has a name for this mistake, the effort heuristic.

It means we assume that if something took more effort, it must be more valuable.

But that doesn't always fit.

Researchers asked people to rate two paintings of the same artwork.

One was described to them as taking four hours to make, the other was described as taking 26 hours.

Guess what?

People rated the 26-hour painting as more beautiful, more meaningful, more worthy of praise.

Same art, same quality, but different story about the effort.

We all think if we're working longer, we should be rewarded more.

If we're working harder, we should win more.

If we're doing more, we should get more.

But here's the problem.

Just because something takes longer doesn't mean it's better.

A 12-hour workday isn't proof of impact.

A never-ending to-do list isn't proof of progress.

Exhaustion isn't proof proof of success.

Busy is not the same as effective.

So here's the takeaway.

Don't measure your value by the hours you burn.

Measure it by the results you create.

Don't ask, how hard did I work?

Ask, did my work actually matter?

Because at the end of your life, no one's going to hand you an award for most hours spent looking busy, but you will remember what you built, what you changed, and who you became.

Start remembering, you're not valuable because you're busy.

You're valuable because you're you.

Stop measuring your day by hours instead of outcomes.

Stop filling every minute so you don't feel like you're falling behind.

Stop mistaking exhaustion for evidence that you matter.

So many of us are so conflicted by that.

It's time to work smart.

It's time to work effective, not just hard.

Lesson number three,

your friends will change, and that's not betrayal.

There's a psychological term known as socio-emotional selectivity theory.

As we age, we prioritize depth over breadth in our relationships.

Losing friends, as hard as it is, is often growth, not failure.

Look, this is how it works.

When you're in your 20s, your inbox is insane.

You've got group chats, classmates, colleagues, Friday night plans with people you barely know.

Your social world feels infinite.

But something fascinating happens as you get older.

Psychologists have studied this for decades, and the data is crystal clear.

Your social circle shrinks.

Not because you're failing, but because your brain is recalibrating.

This is called socio-emotional selectivity theory, a concept pioneered by a psychologist at Stanford.

She found that as people age or even just perceive their time as more limited, they stop investing in endless social expansion.

Instead, they prioritize fewer, deeper, more emotionally meaningful relationships.

In one study, they tracked people's relationships across their lifespans.

Young adults reported wide networks with lots of acquaintances.

Older adults consistently reported smaller networks, but also higher satisfaction in those relationships.

What was even more striking was that the older adults had fewer conflicts and reported greater emotional stability.

It isn't age that changes us, it's how much time we believe we have left.

When time feels expansive, we chase novelty and variety.

When time feels expensive, we choose intimacy and depth.

That's why your 20s feel like you're collecting people and your 30s, 40s, and 50s feel like you're filtering down.

to the ones who really matter.

I think a lot of us when we're losing friends, when we grow apart, when we drift apart as we get older, we may start to judge people.

We may think people change.

We may think that we did something wrong.

The reality is people have less time.

They want to focus more on the relationships that matter.

And this becomes a natural evolution in life.

If you're feeling guilty that your social circle is shrinking, Don't.

It's not failure.

It's what moving forward looks like.

It means your brain is getting wise enough to realize a small circle that feeds you is more valuable than a large circle that drains you.

A small circle that tells you the truth is better than a large circle that tells you what you want to hear.

A small circle that celebrates you in private is better than a large circle.

that claps only in public.

A small circle that challenges you to grow is better than a large circle that keeps you the same.

You can have less friends that bring you more joy.

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Lesson number four is discipline is easier than motivation.

Most of us think that what we need to change our lives is more motivation.

The amount of people that come up to me and say, Jay, motivate me.

Can you tell me something motivational that will change my life?

We all feel if I could just feel more motivated, I'd go to the gym, start the business, eat better.

But here's the counterintuitive truth.

You don't need more motivation.

You need more discipline.

And discipline doesn't mean willpower or toughness.

It means designing your life so the right choice is easier than the wrong one.

Let me say that again.

Discipline is designing your life so that the right choice is easier than the wrong one.

Your systems are helping you make hard choices more easily.

Psychologists call this ego depletion.

Every decision you make from what to wear to what to eat drains your brain's self-control battery.

By the time the evening comes, that battery is dead.

How many of you have felt this before, right?

You've been making decisions all day.

What to wear, what to eat, meal prepping, what to cook, what to make for lunch, what to make for dinner.

Then you've got, what color does this slide deck need to be?

I haven't made the accounts balance up.

I haven't replied to my mum.

I haven't called my friend.

I haven't texted this person back.

I've got to update my dating profile.

It's exhausting.

And that's why motivation isn't reliable.

Motivation fades with your mood.

Discipline survives with your systems.

It's why President Obama only wore two suit colors as president, why Steve Jobs wore the same black turtleneck.

They weren't lazy.

They were protecting their discipline.

They cut small decisions so they had energy for the big ones.

This is known as something called decision fatigue.

So many of us gets tired making so many small decisions all day that we don't have energy for the big ones.

Keep your energy for the big decisions in life.

People spend more time planning their wedding than they do making sure the person they're marrying is the right person.

People spend more time getting their degree than making sure the job they choose is worthy of their qualification.

We waste so much more time in getting something than we do for preparing for something.

Stop waiting to feel motivated.

Start setting systems that make discipline feel natural.

Lay out your clothes the night before.

Put healthy food where you can see it and take away all the bad stuff.

Block websites that waste your focus.

Because success doesn't come from chasing motivation.

It comes from designing a life where discipline is the default.

Lesson number five is that most of your fears are memories, not threats.

The fear you feel today

usually belongs to yesterday.

When you feel fear, your brain tells you it's about this moment.

But most of the time, it isn't.

Think about a child who is laughed at for reading out loud in class.

Maybe you went through something like this as well.

Years later, as an adult, they're asked to present at work.

Suddenly, their heart races, their palms sweat, their throat tightens.

They think I'm scared of public speaking.

But the truth, they're not scared of this meeting or presentation.

They're scared of that classroom.

This happens because of emotional memory encoding.

When we experience something painful, maybe it's embarrassment, rejection, failure, the brain doesn't just store the fact, it stores the feeling.

The amygdala, the brain's fear center, tags that memory as danger.

And the next time anything even resembles that situation, your body reacts as if the past is happening again.

Maybe you had a really uncomfortable experience in water when you were young.

Now every time you get into water, whether it's the ocean or a swimming pool, you feel tight-chested.

That's why the fear you feel today often belongs to yesterday.

They're not about real immediate threats, but about old memories being triggered.

In fact, research on the amygdala found that fear responses are often two to three times stronger when tied to past emotional memories than faced with new situations.

So the fear in your chest isn't always truth.

It's often a memory replay.

You're not afraid of the presentation.

You're afraid of the old humiliation.

You're not afraid of love.

You're afraid of the heartbreak that came before.

Here's the takeaway.

The next time fear shows up, ask yourself, is this fear about now

or am I carrying it from then?

Because once you see that most of your fears are echoes, you can stop letting yesterday control today.

Stop letting people who hurt you years ago hurt you again today.

Stop letting old wounds cause more pain than the moment itself ever did.

Stop letting memories control moments that deserve a fresh start.

Stop letting yesterday's rejection steal today's confidence.

Stop letting a single chapter convince you the whole story is broken.

Stop letting the past keep winning when the fight is already over.

What I want you to think about with that is that whenever you come up against something,

frame it back.

Recognize where it comes from.

We have to cut it at the root.

You're not going to solve your life by only getting over the symptom right now.

It's by cutting it at the root.

Figuring out where it started, figuring out where it came from, almost tracking it back.

helps you cut it right there and then.

And it can transform your life.

Because so many of us are not taking risks today because of pain we felt in the past.

So many of us are not taking on challenges today because of hardships we had in the past.

So many of us are not trying things today because of failures in the past.

You don't want to let your past have such a tight hold of control over your present and your future.

You could miss out on an amazing partner, an amazing career, an amazing life because of a choice or a mistake or something that happened in your past.

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Lesson number six, you're more likely to change by belonging than by willpower, because identity is contagious.

This will actually blow your mind.

It transformed how I think about human change.

I've realized that there are three core aspects to human change.

Coaching, knowing something that is three or five years ahead of you, knowing someone who's three or five years ahead of you on the journey you're about to go through and having their guns can transform your life.

The second is consistency and commitment, when you can actually commit to action, commit to making a change and you do it over a certain amount of time.

And the third, which is what this one's all about, is community.

We need community for accountability.

We need it for competition and we need it for collaboration.

See, most people think change is about willpower.

If I just tried harder, if I just pushed more, if I just forced myself, I'll change.

But here's the counterintuitive truth.

You're more likely to change by belonging than by willpower, because identity is contagious.

A few years ago, researchers studied why some people quit smoking successfully and others relapsed.

They found something surprising.

It wasn't the strongest willed individuals who succeeded.

It was the ones who changed their social circles.

If you were surrounded by smokers, your chance of quitting dropped dramatically.

But if your spouse quit smoking, your likelihood of quitting jumped up.

If a close friend quit, your odds went up.

Same habit, same nicotine, different environment.

Why?

Because we adapt to the norms of our group.

A Harvard study on social networks showed that obesity, smoking, and even happiness spread through friends groups like contagions.

If a friend of yours becomes obese, your own risk increases by 57%.

If a friend becomes happy, your own chance of happiness rises by 25%.

Willpower didn't spread.

Identity and connectivity did.

So if you want to change your life, stop asking, how do I get more willpower?

Start asking, who do I need to belong to?

You'll fight to match the energy of the people you sit with.

You'll pick up their habits without even realizing it.

Here's the takeaway.

Willpower is fragile.

Belonging is powerful.

The fastest way to change your habits is to change your people.

Because you don't just become what you practice.

You become who you're around.

Stop spending time with people you don't want to be like.

Stop wasting energy on people you don't admire.

Stop building connections with people who only drain your confidence.

Stop investing in circles that make you smaller instead of braver.

I think this is a huge one because if you look at a change you want to make in your life and you're thinking, why don't I change it at New Year's?

Why didn't I change it on my birthday?

I promise you, it's because you didn't change your circle.

No, no, you're thinking, Jay, I've got some really good friends.

I don't want to leave them.

They're amazing.

You don't have to leave them.

You have to build new circles around new goals.

When you have a goal, build a circle around it.

It doesn't mean you leave your friends or your family family behind.

It doesn't mean you cut people out.

You can still love them.

You can still keep them in your life, but you have to create new circles around new goals.

It is so much less likely for you to achieve the goals you have with the circle you currently have.

And I know you're thinking, Jay, where do I find those people?

I don't know people like that in my community.

I didn't grow up in that area.

Find them online.

Find them in books.

Find them on podcasts.

You can associate with people by giving your attention to them.

It's not the people around you physically that define who you're becoming.

It's the people you choose to give your attention to.

Who are you listening to?

Who are you following?

Who are you allowing in?

What are you consuming?

That will transform where you're going.

Lesson number seven.

You don't burn out from working too hard.

You burn out from meaninglessness.

Long hours don't always cause burnout, empty hours do.

Most people think burnout comes from working too many hours.

They'll say I'm exhausted because I'm working 70 hours a week.

But here's what the research shows.

It's not the hours that burn us out, it's the emptiness.

I once coached a woman who is a high performer at a huge firm.

She worked 60, sometimes 70 hours a week.

But outside of work, she was full of energy.

She ran marathons, she volunteered at a shelter, she traveled.

Then she switched companies.

Her hours stayed the same, maybe even a little lighter.

She was making a bit more money.

But within six months, she was burned out, drained, and ready to quit.

Why?

Not because of workload, but because the work no longer meant anything to her.

The tasks were repetitive.

The recognition was absent.

She felt like a cog in a machine.

Same hours, less meaning, more burnout.

This lines up with Christina Maslak's research on burnout, the world's leading scholar in this field.

She identified three dimensions of burnout.

Number one, exhaustion, feeling drained or used up.

Number two, cynicism, feeling detached, negative, resentful.

Number three, inefficacy, feeling like your work doesn't matter or make a difference.

What drives burnout most consistently isn't just long hours.

It's when your work feels meaningless, misaligned, or unseen.

Gallup found that 76% of employees experience burnout, but the strongest predictor wasn't the number of hours, it was whether they felt their work had purpose.

Maslak's research shows that people who feel their work lacks recognition or significance report two to three times higher levels of burnout, even at similar workloads.

In contrast, people engaged in meaningful but demanding work, nurses, social workers, startup founders, often sustain far higher workloads before burning out because purpose acts like fuel.

So the truth is, you don't burn out from giving too much of yourself.

You burn out from giving yourself to things that don't matter.

If you feel drained, don't just just ask, how many hours am I working?

Ask, what am I working toward?

Cutting hours might help temporarily, but finding meaning changes everything because exhaustion is survivable.

Meaninglessness isn't.

You can bring meaning into your work.

You can bring energy into your work.

Find something that you can be curious about.

Find something to bring passion into the workplace.

You don't have have to have the perfect job.

You have to bring passion into the workplace.

Lesson number eight, your brain lies about the future.

We think we're good at predicting what will make us happy.

I'll be so much happier once I get that promotion.

Once I move to that city, everything will be better.

Once I'm in that relationship, I'll finally be complete.

But psychology says we're terrible at this.

Daniel Gilbert, a Harvard psychologist, ran a study with people who were absolutely convinced that winning the lottery would transform their happiness.

When they checked in with lottery winners a year later, their happiness had barely changed.

In fact, many felt less fulfilled.

Why?

Because their relationships, routines, and sense of purpose hadn't shifted, just their bank balance.

And here's the twist.

When Gilbert looked at people who had suffered catastrophic accidents and lost mobility a year later, many of them reported similar happiness levels as before the accident.

What felt like the end of life became the start of adaptation.

This is called effective forecasting error.

Our brain systematically overestates how long good or bad events will impact our happiness.

We imagine the promotion as a permanent high, when in reality, we adapt quickly.

We imagine the breakup as endless despair.

But over time, our emotional baseline returns faster than we think.

Gilbert calls this our psychological immune system.

We recover emotionally far more quickly than our imagination predicts.

It's fascinating, isn't it?

When things are good, we think they'll be good forever.

And we're wrong.

When things are bad, we think they'll be bad forever.

And we're wrong.

Things are never good forever and they're never bad forever.

What we need to recognize is how we can focus on living a life of meaning and purpose and seeking peace even in chaos.

In one study, college students predicted they'd be miserable for months if they were rejected from a dorm lottery.

A few weeks later, their happiness levels were back to baseline.

A large body of research shows we consistently mispredict both the intensity and the duration of our emotional reactions.

So here's the truth.

Your imagination about the future is usually wrong.

It exaggerates both the joy and the pain.

That's why the best advice isn't trust your gut.

It's test reality.

If you learn to test reality, to experiment, to try, you will know more than what you may think or predict.

Before making a big life decision, like moving cities, quitting jobs, ending relationships, don't trust the move in your head.

Run a small experiment.

Spend a week in that new city.

Shadow someone in that career.

Try a day living that lifestyle.

Because imagination inflates.

Reality educates.

You think happiness will never end and you think pain will never end.

The truth is, pleasure ends quicker than you think and pain ends quicker than you think.

I really hope that these eight lessons will help you get the next decade of your life to be the most powerful one yet.

It's these lessons that shift your mindset, change your careers and change your life.

It's not waiting for something magical external.

It's about changing that internal dialogue.

Make sure you subscribe.

Remember, I'm forever in your corner and I'm always rooting for you.

If you love this episode, you will also love my interview with Charles Doohig on how to hack your brain, change any habit effortlessly, and the secret to making better decisions.

Look, am I hesitating on this because I'm scared of making the choice because I'm scared of doing the work?

Or am I sitting with this because it just doesn't feel right yet?

This episode of On Purpose is brought to you by Chase Sapphire Reserve.

I believe that travel is one of of the greatest gifts that we've ever been given, and Chase Sapphire Reserve has been my gateway to the world's most captivating destinations.

When I use my Chase Sapphire Reserve card, I get eight times the points on all the purchases I make through Chase Travel and even access to one-of-a-kind experiences, experiences like music festivals and sporting events.

And that's not even mentioning how the card gets me into the Sapphire Lounge by the club at select airports nationwide.

Travel is more rewarding with Chase Sapphire Reserve.

Trust me, discover more at chase.com forward slash Sapphire Reserve.

Cards issued by JPMorgan Chase Bank NA.

Member FDIC, subject to credit approval, terms apply.

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