Exhausted From Being a People Pleaser? Use THIS 0–10 Rule to Say “No” Without Guilt

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How amazing would it be?

I've been so fortunate to learn about these traditions that are 5,000 years old.

They're not my teachings.

They're not my wisdom.

It's wisdom that I've gained from my teachers and mentors.

How amazing would it be if these went viral and everyone for free could have access to these tools and skills.

What an amazing world we would live in.

What if compassion could go viral?

What if empathy could go viral?

What if the ideas that bring bring people together could go viral?

The number one health and wellness podcast.

Jay Shetty.

Jay Shetty.

The one, the only Jay Shetty.

So often we rush through life chasing deadlines, juggling responsibilities, and trying to keep up with everything around us.

But moments like these remind us to pause, to reflect, and to remember what truly matters.

Connection.

compassion and purpose.

That's what makes this gathering so unique.

Normally, on purpose is where I sit down with incredible guests to share their wisdom with you.

But tonight, the roles are reversed.

I'm stepping into the guest seat, sharing my own journey, the lessons I've learned, and the practices that continue to guide me every single day.

This isn't just another episode.

It's an intimate conversation about resilience, reframing adversity, and discovering how we can make wisdom go viral in our world.

And I'm so grateful you're here to be a part of it.

We are blessed at iHeart to be able to work with hundreds of creators who change the game every day.

And one of them is here tonight, a best-selling author.

Last time I saw Jay Shetty, he was about to go around the world, or like 40 cities with a book that he had just put out.

The biggest mental health and mindful podcaster in the world and has been for several years running.

And candidly, just a dear friend of mine and iHeartMedia.

Let's bring Jay Shetty up.

So some of this for me

is

is origin stories.

And I think everybody here knows who you are.

But just in case,

how did this happen?

How did you get here?

Tell us a little bit of the story of how you got here.

Yeah, well, first of all, I'm so grateful to be here and wonderful to be surrounded by all of you, making sure I can see everyone all the way up there at the back as well.

I have no idea how this happened.

I'm like living in bonus land.

I had no idea that any of this was possible.

I didn't ever believe that any of this would happen.

I remember

booking small college rooms and putting up posters to try and share wisdom.

And I remember going to give my first talk and

I waited for 10 minutes after the announce time, waited 20 minutes, waited 30 minutes, 40 minutes later, realized no one was coming.

So I practiced my presentation to an empty room.

And then the second time, same thing happened, practiced a presentation to an entry room empty room the third time i realized i had to fire the person putting up the flyers

but that person was me

and so i couldn't really do that and so i practiced empty rooms for for weeks and weeks and years

and i had lived as a monk for three years before that

and i was just trying to share what i'd learned

and to be honest i was lucky if five to ten people would show up at an event in London on a Friday night that was absolutely free so that I could just share wisdom.

I had a day job.

I was working full-time as a consultant in the city just to pay my bills.

And then I'd spend my evenings trying to share wisdom.

And so that's how it started.

But that led to one day putting out videos and then podcasts and books and everything else.

But that's really the journey.

That's really the work.

More than five to ten people here tonight.

A lot of what you talk about, which seems appropriate to start here on a day like today,

a lot of what you talk about is reframing adversity.

You just told a little story about how you had a little adversity.

You're trying to get a career going, and after hours, career.

We are running and gunning, a lot of us marketers in the corporate world, hour in, hour out.

We hit adversity all the time.

We hit it emotionally.

We hit it professionally.

What I love about talking to you is how practical it gets so fast.

Talk to us a little bit about what that means for you, reframing adversity and what we could do literally tomorrow morning, maybe, to live a little differently.

What's really interesting is there's this beautiful teaching that comes from the Buddha that I love, and it's called the second arrow.

So the Buddhist talks about how

if someone shoots an arrow at you and sadly it hits you it's gonna hurt that's what it feels like to experience adversity we all have that whether someone shouted at you someone said something mean on the subway

your boss is having a bad day maybe your child said something to you right whatever it is like everyone's got their version of that your friend screwed you over

your boyfriend or girlfriend or whoever it was broke up with you for for no reason at all.

That's the first arrow.

And the Buddha talks about how the first arrow hurts and you can't really change that.

But the Buddha says, don't fire a second arrow at yourself.

And the second arrow is the meaning that you attach to that first arrow.

So, oh, they broke up with me because I'm not good enough.

Oh, my boss is yelling at me because they hate me.

Oh, that person snarled at me on the train because,

you know I just I have that energy and so you start giving meaning to that which doesn't exist and that second arrow is where all of our adversity really begins we're actually tough enough to heal from the first arrow every single one of you has healed from the most difficult things things that I'm not aware of things that you may never share whether you've lost a loved one, whether you went through a really difficult health challenge when you were younger, whether you grew up without a parent, like whatever you've been through, you've been through really, really hard things.

And you can do extremely hard things moving forward.

And so the first thing you can do waking up tomorrow, to Connell's point, is make a list of every hard thing you've been through.

It will only make you more confident.

It will only make you more courageous.

Make a list of every difficult thing you've done in your life.

And the second thing is stop giving negative meaning to hard things that happen.

Stop firing that second arrow at yourself.

Those are the two things I do.

Just to repeat it, like

conversations with you, whether it's in private, before we come on or here in front of a crowd, I find it so helpful.

I'll tell sort of a candid moment of a couple of years ago, we were sitting and doing a Q ⁇ A together.

And after the Q ⁇ A, I said, yeah, my son's going off to college in a year, and I'm sort of freaking out about it.

And I think he's on a trajectory that he's trying to figure himself out.

We all are.

And your instinct,

this really happened.

Like your instinct was, let me call him.

Let me call him.

You want me to talk to him?

I'll talk to him.

It'd be cool.

I won't make it weird.

And it was so

of service.

But I thought to myself afterwards, like, God, that's got to be exhausting to constantly be helping.

And you really are.

what do you do for yourself

to reboot to reinvigorate yourself

because you are constantly in service like that in some sense taking on other people's stuff so much what do you do to keep

stable going okay what do you do

i'll try and be brief about the things that i think are obvious so i meditate daily

i exercise five six days a week, eat healthy.

I have a very disciplined regimen when it comes to all of that stuff.

So that helps a lot.

But on a deeper level, and to take it a step deeper, because I think all of you are here today and we have this intimate space to be more open and vulnerable.

For me, I've been really fortunate that my teachers are like a reservoir of joy.

And I get to

be with them deeply often.

And so my monk teachers, 75 years old this year, he was in New York actually earlier this week.

So I would finish my workday and spend Monday and Tuesday evening with him for like three, four hours.

And he is just full of wisdom.

He's full of light.

He's full of life.

And I'm just in his aura, just like soaking it in.

And he's just truly one of those people that you meet and you're just like, I feel like he's looking through me.

I feel like he sees all my flaws.

But I feel loved and I feel held.

And I've known him ever since I was 18 years old.

And for 20 years, he's been my guide and my mentor.

And being in his presence is just unmatched.

And so I'm spoiled.

I'm overwhelmed with love for him.

And then the second part of it is really beautiful because when you are of service, when you're trying to give, I don't, when I'm trying to be helpful, you actually receive really beautiful stories.

And so I talked about this.

I was on the Today Show this morning and I was talking to Chanel, who sadly, one of the hosts who lost her husband to cancer.

She just came back after six months of taking care of him during that time and

while he passed away.

And she asked me a similar question.

And I immediately thought of two people that I met while I was on tour.

So this year we took on purpose across 15 cities of North America and Canada.

And I met two people that stayed with me.

I met lots of people, but two people stayed with me deeply.

One was a Navy SEAL who was just back from deployment that that weekend and said to me that when they're at deployment, they listen to on purpose.

And I just was like, wait a minute, how does that even happen?

Like, I just explained that to me.

And it was just humbling.

It just felt bizarre and ridiculous.

And I was like, teach me, like, tell me, tell me about you.

I'm so much more interested in learning from you.

And the second person was this 19-year-old girl who is a world champion cheerleader.

And at 16 years old, she's world champion across America.

And she had a freak accident where she had a really bad fall.

And she had a disruption in her spinal cord, which has left her paralyzed, which includes her hands.

She was in a wheelchair when I saw her three years on.

And she was the most vibrant person I'd ever met in my life.

She was beaming, she was smiling, she was joyful, she was telling me her story story with full of life.

Her name is Michaela Noble.

And I was so inspired by it.

And I was like, what?

How did you do this?

Like, how, how can you be that positive?

Like, I was like, if I listened to all my advice, I wouldn't be like you.

Right.

So explain to me how you did this.

And I meant it.

I was like, explain to me.

And she explained to me that she believes in God and that.

God reminded her how beautiful her family is and just how that's been her source of shelter and love.

And I have never forgotten that moment moment I shared with her.

I met her for like 10 minutes or something, but I can't stop talking about it and thinking about it because she was showing me

how vibrant, energetic, and beaming someone can be when they can't walk, they're in a wheelchair and they've lost their dream.

She'll never be able to cheer again.

And so

that's how I get inspired.

The people who I've learned from, and I find even the people that say they're learning from me, they're actually inspiring me more than they know.

I think a lot of what we strive for as

marketers, as professionals, is when we're working on that one idea, that one campaign, and it goes viral.

And we're like, wow, in marketing speak, you've got a lot of earned value, earned media on your hands.

But you use this term, making wisdom go viral, which I can't imagine anything more timely.

than this as a goal.

Just walk us through that.

What does it mean for you?

Why do you talk about that a lot?

Yeah, I read a book before I started creating content by Saleem Ishmael.

The book's called The Singularity.

Oh no, the book's called Exponential Organizations, published by the Singularity University years ago, really old book.

And it almost talked about how Uber and Facebook and how those early companies had their rise.

But he talked about how all amazing companies or organizations or people had an MTP or a massive transformational purpose.

And he talks in the book about how Google's MTP is

organizing the world's information.

Their MTP is not building Google Ads or Google AI or Google Glasses.

It's organizing the world's information.

It's massive, it's aspirational, and it allows them to do anything.

It's not like we can just have a Gmail account.

And he said, Ted's was ideas worth spreading.

So I spent a lot of time thinking, like, what's my MTP?

And I came up years ago now, like maybe eight years ago, with making wisdom go viral.

And it really stuck for me and it really stuck for a lot of other people.

And then COVID came and viral had a whole new meaning.

And then everyone's like, maybe you should change that.

So we didn't use it for a few years.

And it's kind of having a comeback now.

But MTP,

talking about

why that's important and what it means, when I started creating content, there were only like three or four things that went viral.

So it was cats,

which I love.

Any cat people?

Yeah.

All right.

Okay.

Dogs?

Didn't know that we were going there.

Yeah, dogs, dog people.

Yeah.

Number three, babies, baby people.

Yeah, all right, yeah.

So cats, dogs, babies.

And then people taking their clothes off.

So those are the people taking their clothes off.

No one, really?

So those are the four things that went viral.

When I started creating content, health and wellness, mindfulness, meditation, wisdom.

didn't really exist on the internet.

Like it wasn't viral.

It was there, but it wasn't viral.

And so I thought, how amazing would it be?

I've been so fortunate to learn about these traditions that are 5,000 years old.

They're not my teachings.

They're not my wisdom.

It's wisdom that I've gained from my teachers and mentors.

How amazing would it be if these went viral and everyone for free could have access to these tools and skills?

What an amazing world we would live in.

What if compassion could go viral?

What if empathy could go viral?

What if the ideas that bring people together could go viral?

Because I wasn't seeing that.

Until this day, On Purpose's mission is I promise you, we will get the same or more views than any of our peers in this place without using clickbait.

Like that's, that's our mission.

Like that's my rule.

I will never ask a clickbait question because I don't want to because our mission is we're going to prove to you that if you serve the word world healthy food,

but looks good and tastes good, then they'll take it.

But if you serve the world junk food, of course they're going to eat it.

It's obvious.

And so my push to myself is always, how do I ask the least clickbait question and get it to go viral?

Which annoys my team because they're like, Jay, if you just ask them about Kanye, it would help.

And I'm like, Yeah, I'm going to go for this whole interview and not mention Kanye.

And I did that, and yeah, it still works.

So, that's kind of where I come at it from, which is, yeah, how do we truly make wisdom go viral?

I'm totally not going to ask my next question about Kanye.

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We at iHeart are a multimedia company.

Broadcast radio, podcasting, of course, is our bedrock, but

we are everything from iHeartRadio Music Festival in Las Vegas to Jingle Ball.

Yes, Jingle Ball.

If you want to see how loud our company gets, it's Jingle Ball.

But it always...

It always warms my heart to talk to creators like yourself or Malcolm Gladwell or Questlove, who are partners with ours, for whom audio in particular is very, very specifically important.

Malcolm Gladwell puts it in a way when I was talking to him, and he said, you know, it's funny, video for me comes in through the eyes, but audio goes straight for the heart.

And he said, I swear it's not, I'm not making this up.

He's like,

I've seen audiences react differently to the stuff I do as a creator.

Why is audio such a huge part of your focus, particularly podcasting, the on-purpose podcast?

What itch does it scratch?

What need does it serve?

Why does it play such a big role in your life?

You can't just quote Malcolm Gladwell.

I grew up.

Malcolm's like my hero.

I grew up reading all his books.

So it was so wonderful to meet him in Qatar.

I love Malcolm.

His work's incredible.

And I love that.

I love that approach.

It's beautiful.

For me, audio feels like you're on a phone call with someone, which feels so intimate because no one calls anyone anymore.

And so

there's such an intimacy in feeling like someone's in your ear.

It's so close.

It's so vulnerable.

It's so personal when you're letting someone into your ear.

And I see that in the different

communities I have.

If someone watches me, they know a certain part of me.

But if someone listens to me, they know me far more deeply.

I know the difference when I meet someone who listens to on purpose regularly versus someone who follows me on Instagram.

It's a completely different conversation I'm going to have with that person.

And if someone's listening to my audiobook, same thing.

It's so meaningful because I think we all

consume more deeply through our ears.

We could be looking at something and looking at a million things.

And when you're watching something, like Malcolm said, like when you're watching something, you're looking at the characters and you might look at their hair and the bag that they're holding and their fashion.

And then you forgot what they said.

But when you're listening, all you can do is listen to what someone said.

There is zero distraction.

So the intimacy, the vulnerability, the personal connection is just unmatched.

And I feel so lucky that I get to live and sit with people, whether they're at the gym, gym, whether they're on their way to work or back, whether they're walking their dog, whether they're trying to walk their cat, whether they're cooking, like, you know, it's like whatever you're doing, like you're a part of someone's life.

If you think about that, audio is the only thing you really do while doing everything else.

So you're a part of someone's life.

Whereas you sit down to watch a show.

You're not doing a, you might do a bunch of things and watch, but when you're doing a bunch of things and you're listening, it's like, there's just this beautiful, captivated connection.

And so I, and I feel that with someone who who people, when I meet them and they listen to the podcast, they'll often come up to me and say, I feel like I know you.

And my answer is, you kind of do.

Yeah.

You know, and

it's different from someone saying, I follow you on Instagram.

I feel like not talking about artificial intelligence, we would be remiss in not hitting it at least for a second.

We have a pretty incredible research team at iHeart, and they are laser-focused on this topic today of what does it mean

to make human-generated content versus AI-generated content?

This is a challenge we all, as marketers, are grappling with, figuring out: is it a tool?

Is it a friend?

Is it a foe?

What do I do?

You know,

nine out of ten

humans in the United States still feel like it is very important to me that the content I consume is made by human.

82%

of those people are

uncertain of, of concerned about ai can mean a lot of different things but generally it's it's a position of anxiety it's not yet a position of let's go this is gonna be great

um

how do you process that how should we think about that

i think fear around new technology is always normal and expected.

And I think we felt the same way about social media, and if not more today, than we did when it was founded.

And same with the internet, and same with color television and probably everything else.

And so the fear doesn't surprise me and it feels like a normal human reaction and probably the most justified ever because AI is definitely the most scary and the most,

yeah, the most potentially dangerous one out of all of them.

And I think it seems like it's got worse every time.

So

it's fair and it's real.

I think at the same time, we've seen that the technology is not going to go away because we're scared.

It's not going to disappear because we don't like it.

And sadly, we're not smart enough as humans to end something before it ends us.

And so we're going to let it take course.

We'll make a documentary in 10 years' time.

The next book in 12 years will be about how you to get your kids off of AI instead of phones.

And we'll do the same thing again.

As Mark Twain says, history never repeats itself, but it always rhymes.

And so you see that happen again and again and again.

So what do we do, right?

So what do we do?

If we take all of what I just said and that's just what humans do, then what do we do with that?

We only really have one choice, which is how do we learn to engage with it effectively and not let it use us?

And when I think about creativity, I fully agree with you.

There were a couple of brands in the last couple of weeks that launched fully AI campaigns.

It was rejected completely.

I even see fellow creators who are making brilliant storytelling videos on TikTok with AI, with

VO.

And the comments are just like, oh, I guess we're using AI now.

And I'm, I'm flabbergasted because the storytelling is brilliant.

That's beautiful.

But all the comments are like, why are you doing this?

And I'm like, oh, interesting.

Not me, we're not making them yet, but friends of mine.

And I'm like, oh, interesting.

Like, what's going on here?

So I think that's not going to go away.

And I think the big question I keep getting asked at conferences when I'm especially talking about mindfulness and consciousness is, will AI ever have a soul?

And my answer to that is, I don't know, but I just hope that the people using AI have a soul.

And I think that's what I would encourage marketers and creators to do, that it's soul plus AI.

It's not AI.

Because you just told me, and I won't share what it was, but you just told me about a beautiful story your friend made into a movie.

And that story is only a great story because it was real life.

And so now more than ever, art imitating reality is all we have.

And it's what we've been fascinated about.

It's why we love true stories.

It's why we love stories that are based on a true story because art imitating reality is what captures humans and AI can't do that yet.

So that's what we've got to focus on is soul plus AI.

And that soul is art imitating reality.

And that reality means observe real life more rather than expecting AI to figure it out.

because that's your unique superpower as marketers.

Everyone can ask AI, what would you do for my campaign?

But AI doesn't really know how to mirror reality yet.

It doesn't still have that.

It doesn't have raw emotion and ability to transfer the pain of poetry.

It can write a poem, but the poem is pretty basic and average.

It still doesn't have that.

And so that's our superpower, soul plus AI.

So I think we need to use AI.

We will use AI.

AI will exist now forever, just like social media.

Let's just not lose the soul before it and the algorithm.

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I want to open this up just a little bit.

I think we're going to let folks ask you a a couple questions real quick, and then we can close out with one more.

Yeah, let's go right there.

So, you're surrounded by a lot of people that work in agencies.

So, we're trained to please people and to never say no.

So, can you talk to us a little bit about the power of work-life-life balance and

its importance to mental health?

And maybe give us some tips to not feel because when I say no, I feel selfish.

No to who?

No to anyone, whether that be family, whether that be bosses, work, clients, all those sorts of places.

But I also do know that when you help people, you do feel really good.

So how do I help myself to say no to others and say yes to myself?

It's a great question.

How many of you feel like a people pleaser?

Yes, all of us.

Good.

How many of you don't feel like people pleasers?

Oh, very honest.

It's all the bosses in the room.

Classic.

Yeah, it's all the people at the top.

Got it.

You know, it's such a great question.

Such a great question.

I had to learn that the hard way too, even from a service point of view.

So at one point in my life, I was so deeply focused on service that I would burn out very often.

I would run out of energy very often because I'd say yes to helping anyone.

Someone called me at midnight.

I was there.

I would fly there, drive there.

pick up the phone, whatever it was.

Today,

unless it is really serious or whatever, and i'm saying this half joking but if someone calls me up and goes hard this crazy thing happened to me night can i talk about it i'm like sleep on it we'll talk about it in three days because half the time the emergency is not really an emergency and if it is of course take it seriously but but those emergencies are rarely that and everything feels like a 10 when you don't really look at the scale of what zero to 10 is.

So if 10 is the worst thing ever could happen, ever,

write down underneath it what that is for you.

So, whatever that is for you, like 10 out of 10, the worst day of your life, what would it be?

Write that down.

And then, zero out of 10, what would that day look like if that was the best day of your life?

And now, when anything happens, look at it on a scale of one to 10.

And now, all of a sudden, things that you think are a 10 are actually a five.

Things that you think are a 10 are actually like a three,

because now you have a scale to look at it on.

Because in that moment, a stubbed toe is a 10 out of 10.

In that moment,

right?

In that moment,

getting late to a meeting is a nine out of 10 because the brain just goes, the mind just goes crazy.

It just makes everything feel extreme.

And so make your own zero to 10 scale.

I'm not the one to tell you what a 10 is and I'm not the one to tell you what a zero is.

No one can do it for you.

So make that scale.

And then anytime something comes in, ask yourself, where does it really sit on that scale?

If it's a true emergency, amazing.

If it's not, where does it land?

Give yourself that.

So if it's eight and above, you're going to say yes.

And if it's six and below, I'm going to say no.

And that gives you a really clear metric for yourself that I can't tell you.

You may say stubbing my toe is a 8.9,

you know, but it's up to you to decide.

So that's the first step.

The second part of it, I'd say, is if you really want to help people,

if you really care about people,

it's all about how long you can do it for, not how quick you can do it.

So when you really.

Thank you so much for that sound effect.

That was amazing.

I will pay you later.

That was amazing.

That was so good.

That sounds good.

That was so experienced.

I'll give you a hug.

Okay, we're a hug yeah

we need your sound effects on the podcast when i like say stuff like just need like reactions all right that's fantastic on my solo episode

but but it's it's something

that's what i'm gonna do the rest of the time

it's something i had to realize that if i really care about someone it's how long i can do it for not how quickly i can solve the problem And so, if saying no is helping you get sharper, more refined, more defined the next day and the day after, you're actually going to be more useful to that person forever, even to your boss, to your family, whoever it may be.

I've often said to my family, because I live away from them, I no longer have the luxury to spend a lot of time with my family.

I live in LA, my family's in London, so is my wife's family.

But I've always said to them that I'm going to show up for the amount of time that I can give you 100% of my presence.

So sometimes I can't give people all of my time, but I can always give them all of my presence.

So I'd rather be with someone for 10 minutes, if I can give them 100% of my presence, than be with them for an hour and give them 10% of my presence, which is what a lot of us do.

We try and trade time when no one wants time.

They want presence.

How many times have you just spent three hours with someone and then gone, I didn't feel like we spent time together?

Because we're using the wrong language.

You were never dealing in time.

You were dealing in connection and presence.

So you'd be better off.

The fact that we all live in these 30 minute hour meetings, it was just made up by someone who made the calendar.

Like, who made that up?

Meetings could be 17 minutes if you wanted them to be.

They could be six, they could be three, but we all think a meeting.

Our minds blow.

The whole room.

We all think meetings have to be 30 or an hour.

And I'm like, sometimes I talk to my team.

I'm like, I do not need to talk to that person for 30 minutes.

I just don't.

And so we've got to recognize that actually you can become more efficient and effective if you choose not to people please.

So your goal, by the way, I love making people happy too, but sometimes the goal of pleasing people is better served when I don't people please because I can actually think about the longer term effect of what does it really mean to make them happy.

So I hope that helps.

I'm Dr.

Scott Barry Kaufman, host of the Psychology Podcast.

Here's a clip from an upcoming conversation about exploring human potential.

I was going to schools to try to teach kids these skills and I get eye-rolling from teachers or I get students who would be like, it's easier to punch someone in the face.

When you think about emotion regulation, like you're not going to choose an adaptive strategy which is more effortful to use unless you think there's a good outcome as a result of it, if it's going to be beneficial to you.

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It's easy.

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We got time for one more question from the crowd.

Pick somebody.

And

the back.

Yeah.

Oh, yeah.

There's

the black t-shirt.

Hello, hello.

How are you doing?

Hey, how are you doing?

Not too bad.

I'm glad you can see me up here.

Nice to meet you.

What's your name?

Ricardo.

Nice to meet you.

Nice to meet you.

So, as somebody who is interested and has been intrigued by just the Buddhist practices, also been reading up on some of the Vedic scriptures, such as the Bhagavad Gita.

You had mentioned that you served as a monk or lived as a monk for a couple of years.

So I just wanted to know during that time living as a monk, what was one of the most influential things that you learned?

Don't do it.

Don't do it.

I have to.

What was the most influential thing that you learned during that time that still sticks with you today?

Yeah, thank you.

Great question.

And if you want to be a monk, and you're not married and don't have kids, go do it.

It's just striking the amount of married men that come up to me and go, I really always wanted to be a monk and i'm like yeah i was gonna ask they're not gonna accept you uh it doesn't work like that um

that's a great great great question uh

i would say it was something that wasn't even necessarily taught but it was a way we lived

and so when you live as a monk i lived as a monk for three years

You have two sets of robes.

You wear one, you wash one.

You sleep in a communal space.

And some rooms that we slept in could sleep 30 people, sometimes it could sleep 200 people.

You don't have a space that's yours.

You put a little yoga mat on the floor.

If you're in India, you'll have a mosquito net to protect you from getting eaten at night.

And you'll just have a bed sheet because it's not that cold most months.

And if it's cold, you'll have a bigger blanket.

If you're anywhere else in the world, we had a traveling sleeping bag sometimes, like a camping bag.

What's really interesting is you don't get to decide what you eat.

You eat what you're given.

So So what ends up happening is you end up becoming really flexible and really adaptable because you don't have a place that's yours.

You don't have a bed that's yours.

You don't have a room that's yours.

You don't end up having much that's yours.

And you start realizing that it's actually liberating when you learn to live.

with consistency and stability in how you wake up and look outwards rather than look at all those things to make you feel secure.

So it's a really interesting, fascinating thing where like you're almost training yourself to wake up with stability from within because outside of you, everything's unstable because you can't control it and it's not part of your life.

And while now my life is extremely controlled on the outside,

I still see that value in how useful it was to have that skill on the inside.

Because when things aren't going my way externally, that's what I turn to.

So that doesn't mean we shouldn't design our homes to be really curated and intentional.

I think that's a really healthy way to live.

But learning adaptability and flexibility can be a really important skill to help us deal with when things don't go to plan.

And when I was a monk, like things generally never went to plan because

you're not in control.

And so learning how to deal with not being in control.

Again, I'm not recommending that your whole life should not be in control.

That is not the point.

The point is we all have moments in our life that none of us can control, and knowing how to respond to those is really, really helpful.

So I hope that helps.

Thank you so much.

Last question.

Again, you have a room full of creatives, marketers, storytellers.

Maybe just challenge us with

what's one thing,

one question

we should ask ourselves

tomorrow, tomorrow morning, every meeting that we go into, what's one beat we should take and one question we should ask ourselves to sort of reset just a little bit?

So if I had this right now, I'd give it to all of you.

And if I didn't care so much about the environment, I'd give it to you as well.

But

I would print out for you a piece of A4 piece of paper and on it, it would have 30 circles.

This is something called the 30 circles test.

So imagine an A4 piece of paper and there's 30 circles on it.

I would then tell you you had 30 seconds to uniquely use and complete 30 circles.

The timer would start, the countdown would go down, 20, 10, 9, 5, 4, 3, 2, 1.

I'd say stop.

I'd know straight away who cheated in school because you'd still be scribbling.

I'd then really ask you to stop, but then I'd ask you what you did.

I've done this everywhere.

These are the top five answers.

The first is I wrote the numbers 1 to 30

in the circles.

The second is I wrote the alphabet A to Z and then ABCD to finish it off.

The third is I did squiggles and loops and whatever, like doodling.

The fourth is I did emojis, pizzas, footballs, soccer balls, whatever that is.

And then the fifth is we call it norts and crosses.

You call it.

Tic-tac-toe?

What's it called?

What was that?

Is it called tic-tac-toe?

I think so.

Yeah, noughts and crosses.

X's and O's.

Right, right, yeah, yeah.

Tic-tac-toe.

Yeah, we call it norts and crosses.

So, so, yeah, noughts and crosses.

So, so that's the other thing that people do.

Pretty much no one does anything different to that, pretty much.

People think their doodle is something special, but it's just a doodle.

And then I've done this same activity with.

By the way, we've done this with executives at every major company.

I've then done this activity with 10-year-olds.

And some of the 10-year-olds come up with some amazing stuff.

One kid, he drew this thing around the 30 circles, put a little tag on top,

and put some lines on.

And when I asked him what it was, he said it was a bag of tennis balls.

This other young girl that I really,

this one I'll never forget, she did all this intricate line work on some of the circles.

And when I asked her what it was, she said it was a chessboard from a bird's eye view.

I was like, wow.

And she was like, yeah, my mum made me watch Queen's Gambit.

I was like, that's good.

I was like, we'll talk about that.

That may not be the right inspiration for a 10-year-old.

And then this one, probably my favorite one out of all of them is this girl did all this intricate line work, curves, shades, all this stuff in 30 seconds.

And when I asked her what it was, she held it like this and she said, bubble wrap.

Wow.

Now, what happened?

I'm talking to some of the most creative executives in the world, biggest marketers in the world.

I've done this activity.

I usually do it in smaller groups.

What do we learn?

We learn that the human brain has become so logical by the time we get 20, 25, 30, 40, 50 years old, that we hear 30 circles, 30 seconds, task done.

And that's what we're going after.

These 10 year olds don't even know what that means, right?

They don't care about the time.

They're just laterally thinking about the idea subconsciously.

They're not going on trying to be creative.

They're just not worried about finishing in time.

And even if they are, they kind of are thinking about it in a completely different way.

So my question to you is: how can you start looking at your life and your role through the fresh eyes of a child?

How can you look at a problem the way a child would look at a problem?

When a child's asked what a washing machine is, they think it's a time machine.

When a child is asked what an iPhone is, they think it's a portal that someone could reach their hand through and they can reach their hand through.

Now, think about how many amazing marketing ideas you'd have if you looked at something through fresh eyes.

Whereas, when we're all looking at the latest TikTok trend and the latest Instagram trend, and everyone's doing the same thing, it's like we're looking at things through the task file of what's working today.

Whereas all the ads we all love and the reason you probably became a marketer is someone blew your mind because they created something that felt like they were being childlike, not childish.

And so I would encourage you all to think about how to think about

how do you think a child would interact with whatever you're doing.

And if a child doesn't interact with the product you use, how can you look at it through the fresh eyes of a child to not look at it for what you have learned to believe it is, but whatever it could be?

Thank you so much for hanging out with us tonight.

I'm gonna let you get out of here and then I'm gonna close out.

But thank you, Jack.

Thank you for your questions, everyone.

So nice to meet you all.

If this is the year that you're trying to get creative, you're trying to build more, I need you to listen to this episode with Rick Rubin on how to break into your most creative self, how to use unconventional unconventional methods that lead to success, and the secret to genuinely loving what you do.

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