If you want to find your dharma or inner calling and learn to integrate your ambition, work, and well-being to create a balanced and joyous life, then you'll love today's conversation with Sunil Gupta, the co-founder of the Gross National Happiness Center, where we'll share the ancient wisdom of dharma and ways to incorporate simple yet effective daily habits into your life so that you can find success and joy in everything you do without sacrificing your professional ambition.

And if you like what you hear from me and all the hacks, please give us a thumbs up and subscribe to help the algorithm. All right, let's get into it. Sunil, thank you for joining me again. Chris, it's really good to be back. This whole book you wrote is based on dharma, this concept that's thousand years old or more found in various Indian religions and philosophies.

So I'm curious what it is about this millennia old concept of dharma that you thought was so important that people today need to understand it and even practice it. Dharma is a timeless solution to, I think, the emptiness that so many of us are feeling right now, especially at work.

You know, most of us believe that the number one determiner for our mental health is our job and yet very few people right now can actually say that they are enjoying their job on a day-to-day basis, it seems. And dharma is really this way of how do we bring the joy back into what we do each day.

And what kind of impact do you think that could have on someone's life? Is it just being happy or can it go beyond that? Yeah, I mean, I think it's more than happiness, at least it is for me. You know, I think it's about finding some meaning in what it is that we do.

And I know meaning is a big word, but I think the way that I sort of look at it and I think that when I go back and I look at the way that my ancestors would think about dharma, it's that there are sort of two kind of ways that we can look at success in life.

There's outer success, which is wealth and its status and its fancy LinkedIn profiles. And then there's inner success, which is truly are you enjoying what you do each day? And the point of dharma isn't necessarily to shame outside success or to shame the idea of wanting nice things or having a career that is ambitious that other people respect.

What it is saying though is that we can get all that stuff and still not feel inner success, which is really meaning and a sense of purpose in what we do. And I know that I've experienced that and Chris, you and I have had enough conversations to feel like you, I think at least a certain degree, have experienced that as well.

Whereas like you were getting the outside rewards, you were in jobs that other people found to be interesting, but at the same time, it wasn't really lighting you up. And at a certain point in time, it can be very easy to be walking a path that doesn't actually feel like your own.

So the idea behind dharma isn't to shun, again, the idea of wanting nice things or doing things that are really interesting, but it's more about beginning with inner success. What is it that actually lights you up? And investing in that, even when we are overwhelmed with other things in our life.

And I think that's where I wanted to write a book that really challenged philosophy through the lens of today's day and age, fast paced, overwhelmed, lots of comparison. How do we bring this concept of dharma into what's happening today? Yeah, it's funny. You talked about me and I look back at my history and every job I had, maybe until very recently, I wasn't excited about.

I thought I couldn't do this job forever. And in fact, the reason why I've been so passionate about personal finance in my life was because I thought I have to save as much money as possible because I haven't found a job that lights me up sustainably. Any job I started, it would light me up for a period of time.

Maybe it was six months, 12 months, at some point, I was like, "Hmm, I'm no longer lit up by this. Am I ever going to find something that lights me up? I don't know." And I stumbled into it through a series of trial and error, but it would be great had there been a book that I could have read to be like, "Hmm, this isn't lighting me up.

What would?" And I love that you broke it into practices. So maybe I've pulled a few of the ones that I thought were exciting to talk about and maybe we could talk about a few of them. Obviously, I really enjoyed the entire book. So if anyone wants the rest of them, there is an entire place to get all of those.

But I think at the beginning, the first one is about uncovering your essence. And I'm sure I'm going to butcher some of these names, but I'm going to call it Zooka. And maybe that's a good place to start because I think a lot of us are thinking, "I know what I'm good at.

I know what I'd like to do, but I don't really know what I should do." Yeah. So Zooka is really about your essence, uncovering your essence. And this is the way that my grandfather described dharma to me, which is like dharma has been called many different things. You'll find different definitions.

I think one that comes closest is inner calling, but my grandfather called that your essence. We all have an essence. And the question is, are we expressing that? The key, I think though, Chris, and this is where I got it wrong for a lot of years, which is I always assumed that essence equals job.

Essence equals job title, right? So my essence is to be a programmer. My essence is to be a product manager or to be a lawyer. Those are occupations, but they're not an essence. An essence is more, it's deeper than that. It's I enjoy helping people. I enjoy designing things from scratch.

I enjoy assembling products or growing other people's careers. And the idea is that when you can come back to that essence, it opens up a universe of possibilities because there are always multiple ways to express that essence. And one of the stories in the book is about a nurse named Karen that really felt like her dharma was to be a writer.

That's what she wanted to do. She wanted to write, but she couldn't afford to do that. She couldn't afford to quit her job and she had spent a lot of time investing in the profession of nursing. And she was actually doing pretty well as a nurse, so she was torn, like I think a lot of us are.

She was showing up to the hospital. She was doing the work, but she wasn't emotionally connected to what she was doing every day. Eventually, the way that she ended up finding her dharma was not by quitting her job and becoming a writer. The way she found it initially was by patient paperwork.

Like literally while other nurses and doctors would fill out the clinical details of a patient form and hit print, she started to actually write about the patient. Who were they? What did they love? How did they spend their evenings and what really mattered to them? And she would pour these details into these patient, really clinical patient forms to the point that every single one of these forms almost turned into like a mini novel.

And she would start to pass these forms around the hospital and they would get distributed by others because it really reminded them of the humanity of what it is that they do. Now again, her profession was nurse and that stayed the same. She didn't quit her job. She didn't make any type of lateral shift, but the essence of being a writer was something that she was now bringing into her day to day, right?

And that's kind of the point of this first chapter of Sukha is if we can dig below the occupation mindset that so many of us have been put into and go deeper into the essence of what it is that you love, like ultimately what is that thing that you feel like really embodies who you are, then you can start to find other ways to express what you do.

And in the book, I offer some ways that we can sort of start to get to that. And the metaphor that I love is Michelangelo would look at a block of marble and he would say the sculpture is already inside. I just need to chisel away the layers that are in its way.

And I think Dharma operates in very much the same way. I can almost guarantee for you and me and anybody who's listening right now, there is an essence that you've already been in touch with at some point in time, right? It could have been when you were a little kid, it could have been last week, but you kind of had been, you've had brushes, incidents with this essence.

We just, it may be buried under deadlines, under drop-offs, under all the other things that we have going on in our lives. And we can start to kind of chisel away those layers. One of the ways that we can do that is through good questions. I think good questions are an amazing sort of way to kind of come back to who we are.

One of the questions that I love the most is what would you do for free? If compensation was not a factor, what is it that you would want to spend your time doing anyway? And that's not to say that like all of a sudden you can flip a switch and go work for free or that you should work for free.

But if you can clearly answer that question, right? What's that thing that I would keep doing even if I wasn't getting paid? Now you're starting to get closer to this thing inside of you that wants to express itself no matter how the outside world reacts. There are a series of those types of questions in the book that help us get closer to that essence.

And these are the chisels. Is that right? These are the chisels, yeah. The other thing that I think is really interesting is what I call the bright spots chisel. The bright spots chisel. And what I mean by that is in my career, I spend a lot of time writing, meeting with people who have succeeded at their highest levels.

But I spend the other half of my time I think meeting with people who are miserable in their careers and helping them come to a place where they can actually do I think their best work, reach their potential. And one of the things that we spend a lot of time talking about is, all right, you don't like your job, but what are the moments, what are the bright spots right now in your day that you really, really do look forward to?

I don't care how small they are. I don't care if they last for literally just a minute, but what are those little interactions in your day that are the bright moments? Because misery in a lot of ways is it can be a very useful tool. It can actually illuminate very clearly the parts of your world that you actually want to spend more time on.

It can be a very useful way to get to the moments that actually bring us joy. And so by identifying these bright spots, you can start to see a pattern. For me, for example, when you and I got to know each other, Chris, I think I was a startup entrepreneur, right?

I was working in tech and I'd spent most of the past 10 years really trying to make that work. And I guess to a certain degree, it was kind of working. I had a startup that had raised some money and it was doing reasonably well. It wasn't hitting a home run, but it was doing reasonably well.

But I think the bigger thing was that I wasn't really enjoying being a startup founder. Not nearly as much as I thought I was going to, right? I liked the idea of being a startup founder much more than I liked the act of being a startup founder. But the day-to-day of what I was doing and managing and trying to build a product and looking at growth charts and figuring out the metrics, I wasn't that into that, to be honest with you.

But there was one part of my day that I always look forward to, and that was when I had a chance to hear customer stories. Anytime when we had a health coaching business, we were helping people lose weight, then any time that I received an email or I got on the phone with a customer or I could hear some kind of story about how this was useful to them, what their life was like before, what it was like during, and what has changed, that to me was like, it wasn't just interesting or validating, it set me on fire.

The idea of hearing that story, the idea of sharing that story, whether that be with teammates or whether that be in investors, I could feel literally my body come alive. And in the days when I had that moment where I could talk, where I could tell stories, I felt alive.

And in the days that I didn't, I felt completely vapid and blank. So what that told me was like, hey, in this job that I know is not for me, I've identified this act of storytelling that I really, really like. That's what convinced me to start sitting at my desk every morning before work to write.

I'm like, if you like to tell stories, you can just write to a page. So I started to write every single morning. Those are the things, those pages ultimately turned into blog posts and then turned into articles and now books. Yeah. It's interesting how we both went through this arc of startup founder.

It felt like an identity that suited us, but also at the same time didn't. And here we are now both creating content as a future role, which is not what we originally intended and in some ways both stumbled on it. When you talk about these questions to ask yourself, I'm curious if it's easier to ask yourself or to talk about it with a partner, talk about it with a family member or a friend.

Do you think one method or maybe it's different per person, but helps you uncover these things better? You know, you and I both, I think the last time we actually hung out, we were like talking about our partners and how like we would be like completely lost in our freaking lives without them.

Right. And I feel, I very much feel that way about Lina. I guess there's two things about that. One is that I have found it useful to spend some time thinking about things alone before I share with anybody, including Lina. And the reason for that is because when I come up with a new idea or a new concept or I'm like, "Oh, you know, maybe this is something that I need to start doing or really focusing my time on." You know, that idea is always sort of like a newborn baby right at the gate.

And if you share it too early with people, it might be a little too fragile. Right. And so the way they respond to that might cut a little bit deeper than you sort of, you know, than you, that it might, if you gave it a few days where you could reflect on it yourself.

Right. And build just maybe a little bit more conviction for it. Right. Here's why I'm into it. And you can start to kind of poke holes in it yourself. So for me, for example, like the idea of writing a book, like, you know, writing a book is not like that is not a great way to make money.

I knew that. Right. And writing a book is not a great way to necessarily, if you want to like be known and get your content out there, like, and get your ideas out there, like you're much better off like writing articles. And so like when I started to think about writing a book, you know, I'm like, all right, I'm going to spend the next two to three years.

Nobody is going to really know what I'm working on. I'm not going to be able to share it with anybody. There's a good chance that it's not going to make any money. Right. Like there are all these sort of things in my head. And I needed to spend some time myself writing about this before I kind of went out and shared it with anybody, including Lena.

But then after I did, that's when I kind of opened it up and I went to a few people that I really trusted and said, hey, like, you know, what do you what do you think about this? But again, I think spending a little bit of time alone, you know, I call it in the book, I call this sort of wandering time, like nonproductive wandering time and really kind of just like sitting with that idea for a little bit.

I think it really makes a lot of sense. There's another hack I think would might be useful here that I have found extremely valuable, which is like, as soon as I found, as soon as I started to get more connected with my essence as a storyteller, all of a sudden, this world of options began to appear.

It was like, oh, you could start a podcast, you could write a book, you could do, you could write articles, you could, you know, you could be on stage like there are all these different ways, of course, you know, stand up comedy, there are all these different ways that you could express yourself as a storyteller, right?

So then the question is like, how do, what do I do? Because like, that's too much stuff. I can't do all that. And so, one of the tools in the book is what I call a Dharma deck, a Dharma deck, which is anytime something like emotionally inspired me, I would literally write it down on an index card.

You know, you go take stand up comedy class, begin writing proposal for book. And I would, over time, have this almost stack of index cards that I felt like were all options, all ways for me to express this essence of being a storyteller. Now, what I would do is about once a week, I would go to a quiet place or take a walk, and I would take that stack of index cards with me, and I would sort them from top to bottom.

The ones that had the most emotional pull for me, the ones that were calling me the most, stayed at the top of the pack. The ones that didn't went to the bottom, bottom half of the pack. And what you notice over time is that there would probably be like somewhere between one and three cards that will always just stay at the top of the pack, right?

No matter what, it's like those are the ones that you don't want to give up. And what I realized is like writing a book definitely stayed at the top of the pack for me, and that's why I decided to pursue it. I love this. It's funny because I think back to my Dharma, which I haven't quite figured out or my essence to say.

I haven't done all the work. I've read the book, but haven't done the work. But storytelling is a similar one. I loved pitching a company. I loved recruiting employees, telling them why we're doing this, what we're doing. There are many hats you wear as a founder. But that one for me was particularly moving for me, which is funny because now I'm similarly creating content down a different path.

But... This is what you're doing. Back to your example with Karen, the nurse, I'm curious. Is there some percentage and there's probably not an exact number of your job that needs to be associated with your essence in order for it to work? So I think to her example, if patient intake forms were 1% or 2% of her job, is that enough to sustain the other 98%, 99% that you maybe don't feel as connected with?

Such a great question, Chris. And I haven't been asked that question before. And the answer is I don't know is the short answer. What I will say is that the difference between 0% and 1% is like astronomical, right? Even having touch points with your dharma each day is I think something that can be a complete game changer for people.

In the case of Karen, this patient paperwork, you're right. I mean, most of her time was probably spent talking to patients, right? But very few of it was actually spent writing these patient forms. The sense that I get from her and from the other stories that are like this, like the assembly line worker who decided that they were going to actually create a record label, once you start having this touch point every day, you start to embody this persona, right?

So for Karen, she may have been doing things that had nothing to do with being a writer. She wasn't sitting down and she wasn't actually doing these patient forms, but she was meeting with patients. One of the things that she was probably doing during that time is starting to think like a writer.

I want to hear your story. And so I want to start asking you questions that go beneath the surface of the symptoms. And I want to start learning more about your life, right? That was sort of her persona as a writer. For me, same thing, storyteller, startup founder, two very different worlds.

But when I started to connect with myself as a storyteller, I started to feel like a storyteller at work, right? In fact, one of the things that I did is I actually wrote on a piece of paper, you are a storyteller. And I kept that in my pocket. And anytime I was sort of like, you know, in a place where I felt like, oh, I feel completely lost right now, or I feel like I'm like not doing what I meant to do, I'd pull out this piece of paper and I would remind myself, hey, you are a storyteller.

Now, did that mean that I like dropped everything I was doing and went and told stories? No. What I mean is that when I went into the next meeting, I could embody myself as a storyteller, right? I kind of had this reminder of like, yeah, this is who I am, right?

This is what I do. And I'm expressing that in a way that feels maybe a little bit different than somebody who's writing novels or writing screenplays. But I can still embody myself as a storyteller, even if I'm doing something that's not completely related to it right now. Yeah. And for people listening to this thinking, how do I take this essence of mine and embody it in my job?

It doesn't actually always have to be in your role. And this makes me think of a particular person. My wife was at Lyft for 10 years and there was a guy named Paul. And he was, you know, always had all energy and could connect with people. And he volunteered and said, "Could I MC all hands for the company?

Could I be the person that gets everyone excited for the meeting? I don't need to do all the presentations, but could I just run the all hands meeting?" And for almost a decade, he ran the all hands meeting and I didn't work there, but I think I probably went to one or two meetings, but it was like he brought that energy.

But that was 1%, 2%, 3% of his job. He had an entire other job. And so, whether you're the person that might volunteer to work the booths at the conferences your company goes to, there are opportunities maybe outside of even your role at any company where you might be able to bring some of this and go from that zero to one.

So I just encourage people to make their manager known. Make it known to your manager what your thing you're trying to do is. There might be opportunities you aren't thinking of. Totally. It's such a good point, man. Because I, again, I think like where we go to and where I went to for a very long time is, well, I need to have a particular job in order to express this essence of mine, right?

I can't tell her, "Oh my gosh, that has nothing to do with startup founders, so I need to quit that job and I need to go do something else," but no, I'm not going to go quit that job. I have a team. We've raised a little bit of money.

I have investors. I can't do that, but I can start to find ways to express that through what I'm doing. There's another story in the book about a woman who's a project manager inside a tech company, and she really wanted to be a teacher, right? And she talked to her husband about it, and they really went back and forth, and ultimately, they found financially, they could not make that work.

They needed her healthcare insurance. She was earning a pretty good salary. They needed that to stay afloat. The family's based in Detroit. And so she was stuck in this moment where she was like, "Gosh, I wish that I could have wound the clock 15 years before, and I could have gone down the path of becoming a teacher because that would have made me really happy." And so every day, that's what was consuming her at work.

But when she sat down with a mentor of hers, she was able to dig down to the essence of what it was about teaching that ultimately made her come alive. Then what ultimately made her come alive was that she loved helping people grow. That's why she wanted to be up in front of a classroom.

That's what she wanted to be doing, working with students. She wanted to be shaping the arc of people's careers. And so the question then became, all right, well, okay, if teaching, obviously teaching is a very clear way to express that, what are the many other ways out there that are ways to express that?

And what she found is learning and development inside a technology company is actually one way to do that. So she started to throw her hat in the ring inside the same company for these opportunities that would allow her to take what she knew already about what the organization did and start to grow other people inside the company.

And so she did and flourished, became a huge rising star inside the company, started to speak on stage about how to develop and grow other people. Her career completely bloomed and she never had to leave the company. She never had to shift her industry. She didn't have to lose her salary or the healthcare insurance.

I think that what I love about your show, Chris, is that in some ways, I see your audience as people who feel, I know when I listen to your show, I feel sort of stuck with something and you offer sort of a way to kind of get unstuck. And that way is not necessarily always the most complex thing, which makes it beautiful, right?

Because of the beauty and the simplicity of it. This might sound really simple, right? Like the idea of, well, connecting with the fact that she wanted to help people grow doesn't seem like an earth shattering insight. And that's the beauty of it. It doesn't have to be, right? There's something inside of you that you can connect with and once you do, it just opens up all sorts of possibilities.

You asked me for other sort of tactics. There's another one that I really love, which is like what I call the magazine walk, magazine out walk. And what I love to do is when I feel like I'm trying to explore what it is that makes me come alive, what's my essence, I'll go to a magazine aisle, whether it be in a bookstore or whether it be in an airport store, and I'll literally very carefully, slowly walk from one side of the magazine aisle to the other.

And I will try to tune out what it is that I feel like I should be picking up, right? Like I should be picking up the Wall Street Journal because I should be staying on top of the business news or I should be picking up Harvard Business Review because I need to be staying on top of what's written in that.

And I kind of tune that stuff out and I emotionally connect to what's actually really pulling for me. Like what magazine covers are really sort of grabbing my attention. And slowly, and it's a very slow exercise, one by one, I'll pull out the magazines that are really vying for my attention emotionally.

And if I then lay those magazines out on a table, I'm like, "Oh, okay, well, it's pretty clear," right? And for me, like when I started doing the magazine aisle walk, I was living in Detroit at the time and I would literally go to this local library and I would walk from one side of the magazine aisle to the other, inevitably, it would end up being a combination of like storytelling oriented stuff.

So it'd be like script writing, movies, books. But the other that really surprised me was spirituality, right? And to me, I've never really been like a big spirituality guy, but I realized that there was a lot that was pulling at me. Articles by Ram Dass and Maria Popova and Ryan Holiday even, the stuff that they were writing about like stoicism, philosophy, and spirituality was pulling me in a really, really deep way.

One of the reasons I ended up writing this book is because I was like, "Wow, a combination of like getting into this ancient philosophy and also being able to tell stories that bring that to real life in the modern day, I couldn't think of a better way to spend my time." Yeah.

Well, I'm very fortunate you have. And we talked a lot about exercise to spend time on, time you spend on work, thinking about time, but I want to move to prana because it's not always about time. So maybe let's jump in here. I mean, prana, the definition of prana is like this extraordinary energy.

This is like almost think of like a tank of energy that all of us have, but we don't always know how to access that. And one of the reasons for that is because when we think about investing in a project or investing in an idea, the thing that we are so conditioned to think about is like time, right?

How much time am I going to give something? And ultimately what tends to matter most when we look at sort of great projects that have come alive across all of these different industries wasn't really time, but it was heart. How much heart did you really give that? That's why you see movies like The Clockwork Orange that were written in a few days, right?

Great Gatsby, all these great works. They were written in a fraction of the amount of time that you might think because all of a sudden there was this creative burst of inspiration and they were to sit down and just like really, really bang it out. And that's just kind of proof that like what we're really trying to optimize here for is heart and not time, right?

And so it's much better to be fully like full hearted with your dharma than it is to be fully scheduled. And you know, the example that like is very similar, I know like you've had like people talk about meditation on this show. You know, I went and spent time at like, you know, a monastery and what I was kind of surprised by, I guess I'm surprised now to have been surprised, but at the time I kind of expected that these monks were like sitting around and meditating all day.

And the truth is they weren't, right? They were meditating for three or four hours a day, but the rest of that time was spent like working the land, doing all the stuff that they needed to do, doing the duties that they needed in order to make the place actually function, right?

But their life was dedicated to meditation. The point being that just because you're dedicating your life to something, just because you care about it doesn't necessarily mean you're spending every waking hour doing that thing. What is more important is that you're finding ways to really bring your best prana, your best energy and your best heart to those moments.

So, you know, for me, like, you know, writing for a half hour every morning is way, way better and produces much stronger longterm results than if I was actually spending two hours in the afternoon writing, it's just, it's just literally the degradation of my brain. It's literally the degradation of my creative horsepower.

I mean, I can sit down and I can write, but it's not going to end up being any of the pearls that ultimately make it into the book. Like 99% of what I write ends up in a trash bin, right? And so what I'm looking for is like these little pearls in this, you know, in this piles of horseshit that I write each day.

And it turns out that like the little pearls are much more likely to appear in that half hour morning session than a two hour writing block in the afternoon, right? I know that about myself. And so for me, my dharma is to write and to tell stories, but it's not like I spent all day every day like doing that.

I mean, I've got kids, I've got, I've got other, I've got other work that pays the bills, you know, there's, there's, there's a lot of other things going on, but I have to make sure to have this commitment. The second thing about that then is like, how do we, how do we then like condition ourselves so that we have the right energy at the right moment, right?

And for me, this was sort of a big breakthrough, which is that like, I've always sort of looked at rest and recovery as something that you did in long periods, right? So I would, I would take myself to a breaking point. I would take myself to the red and then I would say, I need a vacation, right?

And my wife and I, we would plan this. We'd be like, Hey, like we have this one week vacation scheduled. I would literally look at three months between now and then, and I'd kill myself, right? But the problem with that is I would literally return back from vacation with less gas in the tank than before that three, three month period even started.

Right? And, and the science kind of bears this out. I mean, most people actually return from vacation and say they're more stressed one week after they return than one week before they left. Right? Point being like vacations are like a wonderful, can be a wonderful thing. They're great for reconnecting with family and seeing new places and spending time with friends, but they're actually not, they're actually not as effective an instrument for dealing with burnout than we may assume.

What tends to work much, much better is when you can actually have frequent focused recoveries throughout the day, every single day. In fact, like average, like average high performers, whether it be in business or be in music or be in sports, they're taking somewhere around eight breaks every single day, right?

Eight, about one an hour throughout a work day, which like I know sounds extraordinary, but when I started to put this into practice, I used what I call the 55/5 model, which is like for every 55 minutes of work, I'm taking five minutes of focused recovery. Right? And that five minutes can be doing anything, like literally anything.

It can be sipping on a cup of coffee, it can be doing pushups, it can be taking a walk to the mailbox and back, like doing whatever it is you're doing, but you're not multitasking it. You don't have your phone with you when you're doing it and you're like, you're like getting some like quasi rest and quasi sort of work done at the same time, those five minutes are deliberately nonproductive.

You're focused on rest and people have a very hard time with this. I know I did. And the reason for that is because what we feel like we're doing, again, we're in a time based model, is that we're shrinking the amount of time, productive time we have in our day, right?

You already feel squeezed as is. If you're shrinking five minutes from every hour and you're working, let's say nine hours a day, you're shrinking your schedule by 45 minutes, which is significant, right? We could use that 45 minutes. But if you give this a shot, what I can almost promise you based on experience from myself and from watching others put this into practice, is that five minutes is going to make the other 55 minutes far more productive, far more effective, far more imaginative.

You're going to be far more collaborative, like all the things that we associate with success. You will have more of that in the next 55 minutes than you did if you were just waiting to the end of the day to finally like unload and burn yourself out because it's just clearly not working.

As I read this and as you talk about it, I think about how Google has this speedy meetings feature where you can say set these meetings to 25 minutes for like a 30 minute meeting is now by default 25 and an hour meeting is by default 50. But it takes the ability to turn the meeting off at 50 because so often it's like, "Oh, I know no one on this call scheduled the next 10 minutes so we could just run over." And then I was thinking about, I remember when I had a Zoom account that was free and it's like, "Oh, there's that timer." And it's like, "This meeting is going to run out and we are going to turn it off." And I've been in meetings like that.

So if anyone out there knows of a way that I could hack Google Calendar and Google Meet to just actually shut the meeting down at 50 minutes to force everyone to end, I would love to see that feature in action because I find it hard. I can schedule the five or 10 minute break, but it's really hard to actually take it.

Yeah. It's funny because I'm on all these different platforms now for virtual stuff and you are too. And I noticed like on Microsoft Teams, when they set the meeting for a certain length, they will actually say, "Five minutes left in the meeting," and then they'll have a countdown timer.

Now, I don't think it actually shuts off at that time, but the fact that there's actually a bit of a countdown timer, I do find to be somewhat helpful. It's like, "Hey, this is the meeting you called. These are the people whose schedule you're dealing with. Everybody is assuming this one thing.

Let's put a little bit of a countdown timer in the last five minutes." I find that to be somewhat helpful. But I agree with you, man. I was the kind of guy who, if I had two extra minutes in between meetings, I would go to my to-do list and I would grab like, "Oh, what can I knock out?

What can I knock out quickly?" And to be a little bit of an energetic hit that I would get from that. But the problem was that throughout the day, like clockwork, I would end up slumping. At the end of the day, I was far less energized than I was at the beginning of the day.

And that hurt because there were some times where there was key meetings, key moments that were in the afternoons. I remember when I was raising money, even, and I was out there pitching investors, yeah, some meetings were in the morning when I was fresh, but there were a lot of meetings that were in the afternoon.

And so I know that looking back, I would perform with far less quality, I would be far less compelling in those afternoon meetings than I was in the morning. And part of the reason for that is because that morning I was spent grinding. And then I would walk straight into that meeting and I would take all the baggage from that grind.

And then I would take time to kind of reset myself. Maybe if you look at people who I think are like, if you strap for time, who do this very well, and they don't have five minutes, I think one of the most important things you can do is to provide some type of transition for yourself in between two big moments, right?

And again, if you only have 30 seconds, even if you have 10 seconds, it is deliberately saying I'm going to be nonproductive for a period of time. And the difference between zero and 10 seconds, whether it's closing your eyes and taking a breath or literally getting up and stretching, doing something will be like game changing, right?

If you're having these transitions throughout. And it's different for everyone. For me, the afternoon meetings and the afternoon pitches were actually really great because I didn't have anything to worry about. If I go into a meeting at eight, I'm all these things, what came in overnight? What emails do I have to respond to?

But by the afternoon, I've been able to catch up on all the other stuff. So I think it really depends on a per person basis. Sometimes my wife asks, "Why were you up till two in the morning last night?" Because we both have to get up, we have kids, we got to get up at six to seven, the kids are up, we're up.

And I was like, "Well, I just had this bout of energy. And I felt like I could get done in two hours what I would normally take 10 hours to do." And so I can catch... Now, the hard part is forcing yourself to use that time you saved to actually recover.

But sometimes when I find this prana, I'm like, "Let's capture it when it's there." And sometimes it surprises me. That's a really good point, man. We can't always count on prana. It's tough to predict when your prana is going to be really high. There are patterns for sure. For me, I remember when I was at the office day in and day out, I would try to work out in the middle of the day.

I had a newborn at home. The mornings were very tough. And when I went home, I wanted to spend time with the family. So I try to work out at around 12 o'clock. And then I would end up scheduling meetings at one o'clock, two o'clock, three o'clock, four o'clock.

But what I found is that after I finished working out, I felt really good. I felt really creative and awesome. And I was like, "All right, well, why am I scheduling a mundane meeting at one o'clock in that case? I should be scheduling a block of time, at least a half hour, where I can get back from the gym and I can go to my desk and I actually can write down a few things that are really important.

I can spend some time doing some deep work." And when I did that, that changed things as well. I mean, it's a great point. Figure out where the pockets of your day are where you tend to have your highest prana. But then also, sometimes it'll just happen spontaneously. And when it does, try to give yourself enough flex where you can capture it.

Yep, I definitely do that a lot. We talked a lot about breaks. There's one break that you referenced in the book that I thought was super interesting and it's a worry break. Yeah. So this one surprised me as well. I ran into a leader who had a sand timer on his desk.

A lot of what I do for work is I go out and I study people who are at the top of their game and I try to unpack their habits. And in this case, what he had a reputation for was being very, very calm, even though he worked inside a very cutthroat culture.

People loved working for him and he had exceptional results. The board loved him, the rest of the C-suite loved him. So I wanted to figure out what it was. Was he naturally like this or were there some hacks, some things that he put into practice? And I noticed a sand timer on his desk and I asked him about it.

And he said that what he would do is every time there was a worrying thought, something that was nagging at him and it wouldn't go away, what he would do is he would go into his office and he would shut the door and he would take this five minute timer and he would flip it over.

And for five minutes, he would focus on nothing but that one worry. So I was like, "Okay, that's pretty interesting. What if it's something that you don't really have control over?" He's like, "It doesn't matter. I'll spend five minutes worrying about it anyway." And I was like, "Well, I got to be honest with you.

This is like, this doesn't sound great to me. It sounds like a recipe for anxiety more than anything else." But as I dug deeper into it, what I realized is that there's a lot of science behind this practice of taking a worry break. And the reason for that is because when we have a worrying thought inside our head, what we tend to do, a lot of us will tend to try to push it out or compartmentalize it and to basically say, "Hey, I don't have time for you right now.

I'm focusing on this other thing." When we push things out, what they tend to do is they tend to grow louder. So what started as a whisper will grow into a conversation and eventually it will grow into a shout, right? It wants to be heard. It's kind of like kids in that way.

Worrying thoughts want to be heard, and if they're not heard, they're going to continue to get louder and louder and louder. There's a saying in positive psychology that you may have heard, which is like, "What you resist persists," right? And so counterintuitively, while we may think we're doing ourselves a service by trying to push these thoughts out because they're not positive, we're actually giving them a lot more runway inside our head.

They're actually becoming louder and louder. Counterintuitively, one of the things we can do is we can actually say, "All right, I'm going to give you a fixed amount of time. I'm going to sit down and I'm going to give this nagging worry five minutes of my time. And for that five minutes, I'm going to stay true to it.

I'm literally going to do nothing but worry about this one thing." And strangely enough, what will happen at the end of that five minutes is that it won't be that the worry went away. You may not have a problem for this. It might not even be something you have control over.

But what it will do in almost all cases, I've noticed, is it will actually turn the volume down on the worry so that now you can actually get on with the other parts of your day because it felt heard, because it wasn't something that you were trying to push out.

You gave it its due time and now it settles a little bit more. I love this. It's almost like you can exhaust the worrying where you're like, "Well, I don't have anything else to say to worry about it and maybe the next time it goes away." On a higher note than worrying about the worst in the world, let's talk about elevating things to be a little happier, a little more exciting.

Let's talk about Leela. Yeah. Yeah. Leela is really think of it as the blend of work and play. How do we start to think of work a little bit more like play? It sounds probably cheesy. I know the first time I thought of Leela and I started digging into this really ancient practice.

I'm like, "Well, it sounds very lovely, but it doesn't sound quite practical." You work hard and then you play hard. That's the mentality we've been brought into. But then I started to see these really top performers. People like Phil Jackson, NBA coach, but it was also a player who literally, as he was a player, wrote in his locker room on a piece of scotch tape, "Make work your play and play your work." That was the mentality that he brought into the NBA as a coach.

Look at what he did. One of the most winningest coaches of all time. He raised greats like Kobe Bryant and Michael Jordan. Those guys, when they talked about Phil Jackson, they would talk about that philosophy in particular, and they would say that is the thing that they ultimately ended up learning the most from him, which was to blur the lines between work and play.

Because when you do, you can actually reach even more exceptional results. In all the concepts in the book, I really tried to find where it was echoed. These Eastern concepts that were over a thousand years old. What was happening in the world of science, and what has happened in the world of science that provides some grounding for these?

In all cases, I could find something. In this case, for Lila, it really came from Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi and his work around flow. If you look at the state of flow, what he was really talking about in many cases was being able to feel like even though you were working, there was a notion of play that was associated with it.

One of the things that Csikszentmihalyi made a distinction of is people who tend to be exotelic versus autotelic. Exotelic means that they are focused purely on the goal, the result of the work they're doing. But the people who are autotelic were the people who were focused on the process and enjoying the point from here to there.

The assumption that I think a lot of us make is that the people who achieve the top of their game are exotelic by nature. By the way, we're kind of a blend of all of them. We're not one or the other. We kind of tilt one side or the other, but the assumption that we, I think, make sometimes is that people who achieve the medals, people who get to the very, very top are the ones who are exotelic.

They're the ones who are focused on the prize. That's what they really want and they will not rest until they get it. What Csikszentmihalyi, I think, did an exceptional job of in his body of work around flow was showing how there was just as many people out there who tended to tilt autotelic, who tended to focus much more on enjoying the process, getting some joy out of that, because when you got joy out of something, you wanted to keep doing it over and over again.

One of the techniques that we talk about in this chapter is what I call high-quality habits. The business that I had started before really focused on health habits. How do we build health habits into our life? One of the things I realized is when we're trying to get somebody to lose weight and they loved bread and they loved pasta, but they decided to go on a carb-free diet, it would last for a short amount of time and sometimes you would see people who got exceptional results quickly, but it very rarely lasted, almost entirely on all cases that we studied.

We work with tens of thousands of people. They would end up yo-yoing back to the condition they were in before. On the other hand, when we found people who adopted what I call a high-quality habit, which is a habit that they want to do over and over again, they actually love the habit.

For example, drinking two glasses of water before every meal, which is a habit that some people can get really into. It can be really fun. You can put little mixes into your water, electrolytes. You can have cool-looking bottles. It can become part of your persona and there's a lot of fun that can come from that.

People who were able to adopt that habit, we saw end up having lasting results because they were eating less. They were having more energy throughout their day and it was something that they just wanted to continue with. I think the same is true for our dharma. There are certain things that we want to bring into our lives and we're like, "I don't really want to do that, but I feel like I should do that," and those habits very rarely stick.

On the other hand, finding something that you really actually enjoy doing, something that you want to do over and over again, I think it was Kevin Kelly and I quote him in the book. I always butcher his quote, but he's like, "We spend so much time in our lives trying to figure out better ways to do tasks." What we need to be doing is we need to be spending time in our lives figuring out what tasks we want to do over and over again because we actually love it.

When you can find those things, when you can find those habits, you're on a clear path to sort of blurring this line between work and play. In the health example, I'm sure cutting carbs would probably be more effective than just drinking two glasses of water. In the short term.

In the short term, but I guess in the long term, if you bring it back, the water is more helpful. Yeah. I mean, this is exactly what would happen is we would see people because the platform that I started was called Rise and you were matched with a health coach, so you had one person that you were working with.

The number of people who were like, "I'm cutting carbs and this is what I'm doing," or the people who had cut carbs and then gained it all back, it was almost cliche to talk about because it would happen all of the time. People who went on paleo and lost like 30 pounds and they felt fantastic and then ended up gaining it all back.

We saw that, I guess, way more often than the people who were actually able to keep it off. Now, I think the point of this all isn't to knock on paleo. The point of it is if you're suffering as a result of paleo, if you really like carbs as something you enjoy and you're denying yourself that, then that is not a high quality habit because it's not something that you want to put on repeat.

For that reason, it makes it much, much harder to stick to. You're basically cashing in on your willpower every single day, which is a very hard thing to do and it becomes even harder when you have other things going on in your life. You're busy, work picks up, things are happening at home.

It becomes even harder to keep a high quality habit. On the other hand, something like water, again, to your point, it's not the kind of thing you're going to shed weight with very quickly, but it's the kind of thing that you can keep in place over time so that people that we saw that not only lost the 20, 30 pounds that they were looking to lose, but actually kept it off, were the ones who adopted these really, really simple habits that they actually really wanted to put on repeat.

So dieting, sports, how does Leela fit into a more traditional workplace? I think Leela fits into traditional workplaces when we can start to find the little things throughout the day that actually give us some joy and also help us find our dharma. For me, for example, with the storytelling, finding little pockets, little moments of the day when I was actually sitting down and I was actually writing, and I would do this just for five minutes every day, five minute pockets throughout the day.

I was sitting down and I was starting to spend some time actually writing these ideas, and that was these little pockets of joy. That was a habit that I want to put on repeat. The other one that I feel like is really helpful was when I talk about Toni Morrison, who's a single mom, she had two kids at home.

She had a full-time job, but she really wanted to write. For her, the high-quality habit started when she started waking up a half hour early before the kids were up, and she'd have her cup of coffee, she'd watch the sunrise, and she would just brainstorm and daydream about what are the ideas that I would want to bring to life through a novel.

She would really just start to write these ideas down. It's not like a book happened immediately, just the same way that if you were drinking water throughout the day every day, you're not going to lose weight immediately. But those mornings, that high-quality habit ended up being the thing that ended up being sort of like all the inspiration that she ended up turning into her books, became a Nobel Prize-winning author as a result of those mornings.

What is that thing for you that you feel like you enjoy so much, and again, it's not like something that you feel like you have to do, but you actually kind of want to do, and how do you then start to build that into your day in some small way?

Would that be in the morning? Would that be sprinkled throughout your day? What's that thing that you feel like you can put on repeat? Yeah, it almost feels like if Sooka is finding your essence, Leela is bringing your essence into your daily routine so that it feels more like fun.

Yeah, well said, man, because I think that we talk a lot. Whenever I think there are conversations about purpose and meaning, sometimes we can tend to focus on finding what that thing is for you, and maybe not enough time talking about what it is that we need to do in order to fit this into a busy, overwhelmed, fast-paced modern schedule.

I think Leela is one of those answers. I think it tees us up perfectly. I wanted to last talk about Kriya, which is that if you don't actually take action on all of this, what is there? Maybe let's close there. We didn't hit on all of the principles. We didn't hit on the I don't even know how many rituals and tactics you put in the book, but there were so many.

Obviously, there will be more that people need to go find elsewhere, but this felt like a good way to wrap it all up. Yeah. I mean, there's over 30 rituals in the book. I kind of look at this as sort of, in some ways, like a menu. There are things that are going to work for some people, and there's things that are going to work better for other people, but being able to sort of test these different things in your life, I think, are the ways, the paths that we can use to, I think, figure out what it is that makes us come alive and express that.

With Kriya, with action, nothing happens unless we have movement, right? We can sit behind a desk and we can talk about purpose all day, but how do we put purpose into action? The thing that I love about sort of like Kriya is that there are really some great tools today that I think I had to kind of figure out how to ...

When I started to put them into practice myself, it really started to kind of change things for me. One example of that is the two-way door versus the one-way door. You may have heard Jeff Bezos talk about this because he talked about it in a couple of his shareholder letters.

But basically, the premise is that oftentimes, when we are thinking about a decision, taking action on something that we want to go do, it is very easy to confuse that as a one-way door, meaning that if you go through and it doesn't work, you're not going to be able to come back through when it's actually a two-way door, right?

You go through, doesn't work, you're able to come back to where you were before, right? You may have lost a little bit of time, but you probably gained a lot of information and a lot of experience along the way as well. The bigger point is that oftentimes, we treat these decisions with such weight and with such gravity that if we do it, it's like we're walking into an abyss where we have to make it work when the reality is that there will be other options.

Other doors will open, plus you will always be able to walk back through. For me, running for office was that thing. I felt compelled for a while to want to move back to my hometown outside of Detroit and run for office. I was really, really scared about it. I was scared for a lot of reasons, but one of them was I felt like if I did that, I was going to torpedo my career.

I'd spent 10 years in Silicon Valley, I'd been working as a startup founder, I'd developed all these relationships, and I felt like I'd finally found a way to financially make a place like San Francisco work and here I am, I'm going to torpedo all that and move back to Detroit and run for office, and I really wanted to.

I really wanted to get involved, but at the same time, I felt like it was going to blow everything up. It wasn't until I really started to think about it as like, "Hey, listen, this is not a one-way door. You go and you lose. There will be other doors that will open, and if they don't, for whatever reason, you will always be able to walk back through.

What you will have lost may be a little bit of time, but what you will have gained is a lot of wisdom, and you'll never regret not having done this thing that you were emotionally pulled to do." That is ultimately what got me through. It wasn't some burst of courage.

People would always say, "That's a very gutsy thing to run for office and to leave everything behind and go do that and move your family to Detroit," and I was like, "Well, I thank you for saying that, but not really." For me, it really came down to this idea of I actually don't have a lot of courage here.

I am very scared, but I'm also grounded in the idea that if this doesn't work, I'm not going to be in a place of complete pointlessness. I can come back through the door because it is a two-way door. I can always move back to Silicon Valley if that was what I chose to do.

I can always go back into working into tech. It may take a little while to find something, but I will. I have to have some belief in that because it's true. Ultimately, the other thing that might happen is it may open up many other doors for me, which is what happened.

I went to Detroit, I gave it my all, I knocked on over 10,000 doors, election results come back in, and I lose. As a result of that, everything had changed. I had learned so much about myself in that process. I learned about what I cared about. I learned about what I want to spend my days doing that at the end, I was like, "I don't want to move back to Silicon Valley.

I want to start getting on stage the way that I was during the campaign. I want to start speaking to audiences. I came up with the idea for a television show, which I'm now making with American Express." All that stuff happened when I was on the campaign and as really as a result of doing that.

Again, the thing that I would encourage anybody who's listening right now to take a decision in your life. Just take a decision that you're thinking about, something that maybe you're afraid to do, and ask yourself deep down, "Is this a one-way door, or is this a two-way door?" Because there are some one-way doors out there, but the vast majority of decisions out there are not one-way doors, they're two-way doors.

If it's a two-way door, the only thing I would say is lower the bar a little bit. Don't feel like you need to have this abundance of courage or guts in order to go do this thing that you want to do. Instead, ground yourself in the fact that even if you do it and it doesn't work out, you're going to be okay.

You can always walk back through. Yeah. I think far too many people think decisions are not reversible, and I watched a great talk on speed when it comes to building products and building companies. It's like, if a decision is reversible, just make the decision. It's like almost default to a decision, and then you can come back to it later.

But another tactic you mentioned that I really liked was to make it to do less hard, less to overcome, make it to learn. Please share that a little bit. I spent, like so many people, every January 1st coming up with, "Here are my to-do lists for the year. Here are my big goals." Like many people, I would abandon that list, stop looking at it sometime in February.

What I found to be much more gripping and I think compelling for me was when I started to think of it less as a to-do list but a to-learn list. What are the things that I actually want to learn how to do right now? Here's where I want to grow.

For me, even though it's a little bit hard sometimes to quantify that, it makes it just far more exciting. For me, for example, I wanted to learn how to develop a television show. When I write that down, all of a sudden, now it opens up all of these ways that I can do it.

But I think the most important thing it does for me is it makes me less afraid to fail. Because we all know that failure is a wonderful teacher and success can be a really lousy teacher. If my to-do list is I need to have a show up and running by the end of the year, well, all of a sudden, I'm jammed with fear and insecurity to the point that I actually don't want to look at that goal anymore.

But if my goal is to learn how to develop a show, well, then I know that I need to put myself out there. I know I need to actually start doing the work. I know I need to start meeting with people. I know I need to start getting into the nitty-gritty of what it takes to actually pull something off in Hollywood.

But it no longer makes me so afraid of going out there because I know I'm going to probably fall on my ass a few times while I'm doing it and that's okay because I'm actually satisfying this to learn objective, which is I want to know how to create a television show.

I think especially even going back to the beginning of this conversation on your finding your essence, just learning more things can help you explore. And so, I think back to one of the reasons I partnered with Masterclass was that I found it to be such a great tool to go watch videos, be like, "I like storytelling.

Do I like stand-up comedy? Let's go learn what it takes to actually do this professionally." You know what? I don't think that's me. Like, you know, I like telling jokes, but I don't think it's a career. And so, I think the more you can expose yourself to learning other things, the more you can kind of come up with ideas of what ignites you and what doesn't.

And it's so much easier than like that would have been a much easier thing to do than like do a stand-up routine, which is a loftier goal. Maybe I would learn more from it. But even just learning how the industry works was a much easier goal to accomplish, you know, from the safety of my own living room.

Yeah. Yeah. Totally. So, I feel like we didn't even brush the surface. There's a lot more there. Where can people kind of get the rest? Yeah. So, the book is out. It literally just came out yesterday. And you can find it. You can find it everywhere. It's on Amazon.

It's on Barnes & Noble. So, wherever you get your books, it is available in print and audio as well. And it's called "Everyday Dharma". Awesome. Did you do the audio or who's reading? I did. I did the audio. Yeah. Yeah. And, you know, it's funny. I recorded it at this booth in Santa Monica.

And a lot of what's inside the book are, you know, the stories of like my ancestors. Like I tell the story of my grandfather and our first conversation about dharma. And it was just a bizarre experience, Chris. I mean, it's funny because I started to cry during the actual reading, you know.

And the sound engineer is kind of in my ear and I got my headphones on and I realized like he's crying as I'm reading it as well. So, like if you hear me kind of breaking up, like during the audible recording at a point, it's because I'm weeping. Well, I feel like now I got to go back and listen to try to find those moments.

But thank you so much for writing it. I love all the tactics. I think anyone listening to this show, you know, knows that one of my passions is not just learning about how to make change, but the specific actions and tactics and in the case of your book, you know, 30 plus rituals.

So really love that. Really enjoyed the book. Thank you so much for sharing it and joining me today. Chris, this is awesome.