← On Purpose with Jay Shetty
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
Stop Waiting to “Figure It Out!” (Do THIS In The Next 48 Hours to FINALLY Take the First Step in Finding Your Purpose)
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This is a iheart podcast. Guaranteed human.
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Lately, I've been trying to be more intentional, even with small decisions like cooking at home instead of ordering out.
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It's simple, but it helps me save
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for things that truly matter. That's why I love the State Farm Personal Price Plan. It lets you bundle home and auto insurance to create an affordable price that fits your needs. It's one of those thoughtful choices that support the life you're trying to build. Talk to a State Farm agent today to learn how you can choose to bundle and save with the personal price plan. Like a good neighbor, State Farm is there. Prices are based on rating plans that vary by state. Coverage options are selected by the customer. Availability, amount of discounts, and savings and eligibility vary by state.
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I used to think building a business meant doing everything on your own, but building Jooni taught me something different. Shopify is the platform we use to run and grow the business, and one feature I love is Sidekick, Shopify's AI co founder. It's like having a partner who never sleeps. It helps with things like analyzing sales, updating products, creating discounts, and even writing copy. So instead of getting stuck in the details, I can focus on the bigger picture. How we grow, how we connect, and what we create next. If you've ever thought about starting a
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business, this is your sign.
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Get started today@shopify.com Jay making space for ourselves is one of the most important things we can do, giving ourselves the time and the room to try new things. Well, it turns out our feet benefit from more space too. That's why I just picked up a pair of Ultra running shoes. The Ultra fit design has more room for my toes, so they're comfortable, they keep me balanced. And seriously, my feet actually feel stronger. I've even started running more because of it. And honestly, I didn't expect to notice it this quickly, but from my first walk it just felt different. Lighter, more natural. I've been wearing them on my morning walks and it genuinely makes getting out there feel easier. Treat yourself to a pair of ultras@ultrarunning.com and use code purpose10 for 10% off. That's a L T R-running.com stay out there There's a question that follows people around their whole lives. It shows up at 2am when you can't sleep. It shows up on Sunday nights just before work. It shows up when you scroll past someone who seems to have it figured out and your stomach does that small quiet thing it does. The question you're feeling is is this it? Not is My life bad? Most of us have lives that on paper are fine. The question is sharper than that. It's. Is this what I came here to do? I want to talk to you today like an adult. No vision boards. No manifest your dream life. No the universe has a plan for you. Because if it does, it's been weirdly quiet about the details. I want to talk about how purpose actually works, where it actually lives, why you probably already know yours, and why you've been pretending you don't. And what to do this week, not someday, but what to do this week to start moving forward. This is the episode I wish someone had played for me 20 years ago. Let's go. Let's start by clearing some rubble. Because the reason most people can't find their purpose is that they've been handed a map to the wrong country. Lie number one. Follow your passion. How many times have you heard this? This is probably the most repeated piece of advice of the last 50 years, and it's quietly ruined a lot of lives. Because here's the thing. Most people don't have a single burning, preexisting passion sitting inside them, waiting to be uncovered like a fossil. They have interests, they have curiosities. They have things they kind of like. And when they look inward, expecting to find a roaring fire and instead find a few small flickers, they conclude something is wrong with them. Nothing is wrong with you. You were just told to look for the wrong thing. Passion is not a starting point. It's what you feel after you've gotten good at something, after you've struggled with it, after you've put in the years and started to see the shape of what you can do. Lie number two. There is one true calling, and your job is to find it. This is the soulmate myth applied to work and passion and purpose. The idea that somewhere out there there is one perfect thing you were meant to do. And if you just search hard enough, you'll find it. And the heavens will open and a choir will sing. Real life is not like that. Most people who appear to have a singular calling actually arrive there through a winding road of small choices, acc accidents, pivots, and things that didn't work out. The calling is a story they assembled looking backward, forward. It just looked like a series of next steps. You probably don't have one purpose. You have capacities. You have themes. You have through lines, and those will express themselves differently in different seasons of your life. The thing you're meant to do at 30 is to meant might not be the thing you're meant to do at 50. That's not failure, that's being a human being who's alive. Lie number three. When you find it, you'll know. You won't actually, not in the way you think. There usually isn't lightning. There's just a quiet sense, often after the fact, that something fits. The feeling of this is it is usually built, not delivered. It comes from doing the thing, not from contemplating it. If you've been waiting for certainty before you start, I've got bad news and good news. The bad news is certainty isn't coming. The good news, you don't actually need it. Nobody who ever did anything meaningful had it at the start. They had a hunch they had enough, and then they moved. Here's line number four. Your purpose has to be your job. It doesn't. Some of the most purpose filled people I've ever met have very normal jobs. They teach, they drive a route, they run a small business, and then off the clock, they coach the kids soccer team, or they write the novel, or they show up for the people in their neighborhood. Purpose is not a job title. Purpose is a way of being aimed at something. You can aim at it from anywhere. Conflating purpose with profession is one of the cruelest tricks our culture plays. It tells you that if you don't get paid for your purpose, it doesn't count. So put all of that down the map you were given is wrong. Let's draw a better one. Here's something that took me an embarrassingly long time to understand. Purpose is not a thing. It's a direction. It lives in verbs, not nouns. When you ask, what is my purpose? Looking for a noun, looking for a label. Like I'm a writer, or I'm a healer, or I'm an entrepreneur. You get stuck because labels are downstream of action. Nobody is a writer before they write. But when you ask, what do I keep doing even when no one's making me? What do I gravitate toward when I have an unscheduled afternoon? What do I do for free and have always done for free? You start getting somewhere real. So let me give you four places to actually look. Not abstractions, specific places. Place number one. The thing that comes easier to you that other people find hard. Most of us discount our natural strengths because they feel effortless. We think, if it's easy for me, it must be easy for everyone. I promise you it isn't. The things you do without thinking. The way you read a room, the way you organize chaos, the way you explain hard Ideas. The way you make people feel seen. The way you can sit with a spreadsheet for six hours without losing your mind. Trust me, I can't. These are not nothing. These are exactly the somethings your gifts are, are the things you don't notice you're doing. So go ask three people who know you well. What do you think I'm unusually good at? Don't argue with their answers. Write them down. Read them back to yourself. There's a clue in there. Place number two. The thing that breaks your heart or makes you angry. Pay close attention to what you can't stop caring about. The injustice you keep returning to the problem that when you read about it, you don't just sigh and move on. You feel something heat up in your chest. That heat is information. It's pointing at something that has your name on it. People who do meaningful work are almost always pissed off about something specific. Doctors who fight for the patients no one listens to. Teachers furious about kids being failed builders who can't stand watching a thing be done badly or when they know how to do it right. What frustrates you, what breaks you a little when you see it? That's not a flaw to manage. That's the compass. Place number three. Your wound. This one's harder, but it's true. The thing you suffered through, struggled with, almost didn't survive. There's often a clue in there about what you're meant to offer. Not because suffering is good. It isn't. But because once you've walked through a particular fire, you become someone who can find others who are still in it, and you can hand them a rope. The person who fought their way out of addiction often becomes a beacon for others trying to do the same. The kid who grew up unseen often becomes the adult who sees other people fully in a way that changes in their lives. The person who lost the parent at the wrong age often becomes the friend who knows what to say at the funeral. Look at your scars. Don't romanticize them, but ask, what did I learn that other people now need to learn? Place number 4. This one might surprise you. Envy. Envy gets a bad reputation, and there's truth to that. We're told it's a low emotion, something to suppress. But honest envy is one of the most useful signals you have access to. See. Envy, when you want to take something away from someone else, that's negative. But envy, when you want to study that someone else, that's positive. Pay attention to who you envy, and for what specifically. Not the surface stuff. The House, the car, the vacations, the deeper layer whose life makes you feel that uncomfortable squeeze whose work, whose courage, whose freedom that squeezes your soul, saying that I want. That I want to be doing something like that. Envy can be transformed to study. Anyone you envy, choose to study them. Envy isn't telling you to copy someone. Envy is telling you something true about your own desire that you've been trying not to admit. So make a list. Five people who make you uncomfortable in that specific way. And then ask, what specifically are they doing that I'm not letting myself do? And how can I transform my envy into study? Now here's the thing. If you do this work, if you actually look in those four places, you'll not find one perfect shining answer. You'll find overlap patterns, a few candidates, some hunches. That's how it's supposed to work. You're not looking for a verdict. You're looking for a direction. A good enough direction. Because the next part is what really matters. Here's the truth that almost no one wants to hear. You are not stuck because you don't know what your purpose is. You're stuck because you do. And you're afraid of what it would cost to honor it. Take a breath. Sit with that for a second. I've talked to a lot of people about this. And nine times out of 10, when someone says, I just don't know what I'm supposed to do. If you press them gently, if you ask the right follow up questions, if you give them enough room, something comes out. They've thought about going back to school. They've always wanted to write a book. They've been quietly daydreaming for years about starting the thing, leaving the job, telling the truth about who they are. They know, you know. They just don't want to say it out loud. Because saying it out loud means it becomes a thing they're either pursuing or. Or actively avoiding. And right now, the fog of I don't know is more comfortable than the clarity of I do know and I'm not doing it. Your outdoor space should feel like an extension of you. But before Wayfair, mine honestly didn't. It felt underused, a little mismatched, and not really somewhere I wanted to spend time. Now it's completely different. I actually find myself stepping outside more. Whether it's morning coffee, catching up with friends, or just winding down at the end of the day, it's become a real part of my routine, not just the space I walk past.
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And that shift really came down to
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a few key outdoor seating that actually feels comfortable, lighting that makes the space feel warm at night, and storage that keeps everything looking clean without effort. And if you haven't tried Wayfair yet, I'd honestly say it's the easiest way to upgrade your home without overthinking it. Everything from outdoor furniture to decor is in one place, and with over 20 million 5 star reviews plus their Wayfair Verified program, you can feel confident in what you're getting. Patio season is here, and these deals won't last. Head to Wayfair.com right now to get your outdoor space ready for way less. That's W A Y-F-A-I-R.com Wayfair Every style, every home hey, it's Jay Shelley. You know, recently I was thinking about how far we've come with staying in touch. It's hard to believe that the first phone call ever happened over 150 years ago. Just think about that one moment that started billions of conversations. The other day, I called a friend that I hadn't spoken to in months. We spent a few minutes just catching up, talking, laughing, sharing what's going on in our lives. That short conversation reminded me how powerful a single call can be. It doesn't take hours to make someone feel seen. It just takes picking up the phone. Those moments felt simple, but they stay with you. And you know, over all these years and phone calls, AT&T has been there, connecting people in meaningful ways. This is more than a story of technological innovation. It's a story of human connection. So today, call someone you care about. One conversation can mean everything. Connecting changes everything. AT&T what if your day didn't start with chaos but calm? Hatch is built on a simple belief. Small, intentional bedtime rituals can change how you show up tomorrow. Most people try to fix their energy by doing more during the day, but real change starts the night before. Hatch Restore is a smart sleep clock designed to help you unplug and create a consistent bedtime routine. With soothing audio and gentle light, it signals your body and mind to wind down naturally. Then, in the morning, it wakes you with a gradual sunrise. Instead of a jarring alarm, it's grounded in sleep science and designed to support your natural rhythm, not disrupt it. When you rest better, everything improves your focus, your patience, your presence. Ready to upgrade your sleep? Shop Hatch Restore on Amazon this Prime Day. Or visit Hatch Co to learn more. So let's talk about what's actually in the way. Obstacle 1 Identity. You have built a self. That self has a job, a role A story, a set of people who know you a certain way to pursue your purpose often means threatening that self. It means becoming a beginner again. It means people in your life looking at you sideways. It means your mom not understanding what you do at parties anymore. Most people will not pay that price. They'd rather stay legible to the people around them than become someone strange in pursuit of something true. That's the trade, and nobody can make it for you. Obstacle 2. The fear of being seen. The moment you put your real work into the real world, you become visible in a way you weren't before. People can judge it, People can ignore it, which is sometimes worse. The thing you made, the thing you actually care about, can fail in public and you have to keep going anyway. Most people would rather not put it out at all than risk that. So they keep their work in a drawer. They say they're still working on it. Some people are still working on it for nine years. Obstacle 3. The fear that it won't be enough. There's a quiet, terrible fear underneath. A lot of avoidance. The fear that you will finally try the thing you secretly believe you were meant to do, and you will discover you're not actually that good at it. That the thing you've protected as my real dream will turn out to be the ordinary, like everyone else's. Here's the honest truth about that. Yes, you might find out you're not great at it yet. Almost no one is great at the start. One of my favorite quotes from Zig Ziglar is, you don't have to be great to start, but you have to start to be great. Skill is built, but there is something so much worse than finding out you have to work to be good at the thing you love. And it's reaching the end of your life having never tried, having to wonder what you would have been. Don't pick the worst one. Obstacle 4. Comfort. This is the most boring obstacle, but the most powerful. Your current life works. Maybe it's not exciting, maybe it's not what you wanted, but the bills get paid. There's a rhythm, you know where the coffee is in the morning. Comfort is the single biggest killer of purpose. And because comfort doesn't feel like a problem, misery would push you to change. Joy would draw you forward. But comfort just keeps you slightly numb, slightly distracted, slightly entertained for years and years and years, until one day you're 70 and you're trying to remember what it was you wanted to do. And it's still not too late, by the way. I want to say this gently because I'm not trying to scare you. I'm trying to wake you up. Time is doing a thing, whether you participate in it or not. The years are passing. They have no plans to stop. The question isn't whether you'll get older. The question is who you'll be when you do. So. Before we talk about the practical part, I want you to sit with this question. Don't answer it out loud, just hold it. If I'm honest with myself, do I actually not know what to do? Or do I know? And I'm afraid if the answer is the second one, you don't have a clarity problem. You have a courage problem. And courage problems are solvable. They are solved one small step at a time. Okay, let's get practical. If you've followed me this far, you're probably either nodding along or you're a little uncomfortable. Or both. Good. Now, here's what to actually do. Step one. Stop trying to find it. Start trying to test it. You're not going to figure out your purpose by thinking harder about it. You're going to figure it out by doing things and noticing what happens. Action produces clarity. Clarity does not produce action. So pick one of those directions you noticed in part two. Not the perfect one, not the right one, just one. And design a small experiment around it. Not a five year plan, not a complete career change. A test. Something you can do in the next two weeks that lets you find out a little more. If you think you might want to write something, write something. Not a book, a single piece. Publish it somewhere, substack or something like that. See what it feels like. Send it to a few friends. If you think you might want to coach, mentor someone for free for one session, see what happens in your body when you do it. If you think you might want to start a thing, do the smallest possible version of it. In tech, this is called a minimum viable product. The products that we all use today were not fully fledged the first time you used them. They were test versions. Get one customer. Solve one person's problem. See if you want to do it again tomorrow. The point of an experiment is not to succeed. The point is to gather information. You learn more from one small attempt than from a year of journaling about whether you should attempt it. The 1% test. Most people stay stuck because they think pursuing their purpose means burning down their current life. The amount of people that come up to me and say, I think I'm going to quit my job, do not quit your job. Do not sell your house do not move to Bali to find yourself. Just start building what you want to do alongside the life that you have to do. You don't need to burn anything down. You need 1% of your week. 1% of a week is about an hour and 40 minutes. That's it. Can you give one hour and 40 minutes a week to the thing that might be the thing? Of course you can. Anyone can. Even you, with the kids, with the job, with the chaos. You can find 1 hour and 40 minutes. What changes when you do it consistently? Everything. Because in six months you've put in 40 hours. In a year you've put in 80 hours. You will know things at the end of a year, of 1% in that you do not know. Now you will be a different person. The work doesn't require you to bet everything. The work requires you to bet something and keep showing up. Step 3. Build evidence. Not declarations. Don't announce. Don't post about your new chapter. Don't tell everyone you're a writer now. Just write quietly. Disappear for months. Build a body of evidence that you do this thing before you tell anyone that you do this thing. Declarations create pressure, guilt and shame. Evidence creates identity. People often ask me, jay, how do I build confidence? Confidence equals competence plus evidence. Building skills, using those skills and gaining evidence that you have that skill. As the famous quote goes, you become what you repeatedly do. But I'll add in the dark, without applause. By the time the world notices, you've already become it. That's the order. Don't get it backwards. Step four. Find your people. Probably not the ones you have. Look at the five people you spend the most time with. Are any of them already doing some version of the thing you want to do? Are any of them the kind of person you're trying to become? If the answer is no, that's not a small detail. Your environment shapes you more than your willpower does. If everyone around you is running in circles, your impulse to run in a straight line is going to feel weird and lonely. And eventually you will conform back, because human beings are tribal animals and we can't help it. You do not need to abandon your current people. You don't need to leave all your friends behind. But you need to add new ones. Find communities online, in person, anywhere where the thing you're trying to do is normal, where it's not impressive or weird, just what people do. Within that environment, your aspiration stops feeling like a fantasy and starts feeling like a Tuesday. STEP 5. Get familiar with discomfort, because that's the whole game. I want to be straight with you. The path toward your purpose does not feel good most of the time. It feels uncertain. Feels like imposter syndrome. It feels like nobody's clapping and you can't tell if you're getting anywhere. Feels very often like you've made a terrible mistake. You haven't. That feeling is not a sign that you're on the wrong path. That feeling is a sign that you're on a path. And any path worth walking has that same feeling for a long stretch of it. The people who get to where you want to go are not the ones who felt great about it the whole way. They're the ones who learn to keep walking, even while feeling bad. That's the whole secret. It's not glamorous, but it's true. Let me leave you with this. There's a version of you that already exists. Not as a fantasy, as a possibility. A version of you that is doing the work, walking the path, becoming the person you were quietly meant to become. That version is not far away. That version is not waiting on a sign. That version is not waiting for you to feel ready. Because that version knows you're never going to feel ready. And they're moving anyway. The only thing standing between you and the version of yourself is the next small action. Not the whole life, not the perfect plan. The next one thing. The text you've been meaning to send, the page you've been meaning to write, the conversation you've been meaning to have, the application you've been meaning to fill out. You know what it is. Whatever came up in your mind just now when I said that, that's it. Don't override it. Don't reason with it. Do that one thing. Not because it will change your life, though it might do it because of who you will be on the other side of having done it. Someone who acted on the quiet voice. Someone who didn't betray themselves one more time. Someone who, at the end of all of this, will be able to say, I tried. I actually tried. That's it. That's what doing what you were born to do actually looks like. Not lightning, not destiny, just one honest action. Then another, then another, then another. Until one day you look up and realize you've quietly become the person you were always going to be. If only you'd been willing. You are willing. You always were. Today's a good day to prove it to yourself. There are a few models on purpose that I love. One of them is ikigai, the Japanese word for the Reason for being. It says that purpose is found at the intersection of what you're good at, what you love, what serves the world, and what makes money. Where I want to place our emphasis is these three paths to purpose. One, as we talked about earlier, was passion, being a byproduct. Sometimes you already know what you want to do, what you're good at, what you value. Could be organizing, it, could be painting, it could be building, creating. The other ones are fascinating. We talked about pain. A lot of the times you find your purpose because you want to remove someone else's pain could be a pain you went through yourself. It could be a pain that you experienced along your journey, and you want to make sure that other people have the pathway to navigate it to deal with that challenge. I've seen people create incredible charities, businesses, organizations that solved the pain they themselves experienced, whether it was to support people who went through a miscarriage, to support people who don't have food and water or are homeless, to support people who dealt with the burnout and stress of a corporate job. What you want to do in the world doesn't have to be the biggest or the best or the first. It just has to be truly yours. And I think we're living at a time right now where. Where our pursuit of being first, biggest, and best takes away from your truth. The greatest thing about your purpose is that it is more likely to come from you being yourself than you pretending to be anyone else. Albert Einstein famously said, everyone's a genius, but if you judge a fish by its ability to climb a tree, it will spend its whole life believing that it's stupid. We are all fishes trying to fly. We're birds trying to swim. We're trying to be what we think we should be. We're trying to be what we see others being, forgetting that being yourself in your authentic story, your journey, all your quirks, is exactly what the world is looking for, what some part of the world is looking for, what a group of people is looking for. How many times have you ever seen someone on the Internet and just thought, I really relate to that person? And if you ask them, they'd say, when they put that out, they had no idea it was going to resonate with anyone. The Bhagavad Gita famously said, it is better to be a bad version of yourself than pretend to be a good version of someone else. It is better to do your duty imperfectly than to attempt to do someone else's duty perfectly. When we try to become that which we are not, I want to clarify this point. We think anything we can't do is because we're not good at it. But often it's just inexperience. So don't confuse inexperience with weakness. Try everything. Give it a go. Shadow someone, pick up the phone. Ask questions. Learn. But recognize that your purpose is just making you a better version of who you were meant to be and getting you closer to who you are, not trying to make you someone else. Remember, I'm forever in your corner. I'm always rooting for you. I hope you'll share this episode with a friend who could benefit from it, or maybe share something that you've learned with a partner. I can't wait to see you on the next one.
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If you love this episode, you'll love my interview with Kobe Bryant on how to be strategic and obsessive to find your purpose.
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What I try to do is just try to be still and understand that things emotions come and go. The important thing is to accept them all. The future won't wait and neither should you. That's why American Public University offers Master's programs in designed for momentum, affordable, high quality and flexible. So you keep moving forward with career relevant programs in business, healthcare, education, IT and more. You can gain skills you can use right away and the confidence to power your next move. American Public University made for what's next? Learn more at apuapus.edu
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lately, I've been trying to be more intentional, even with small decisions like cooking at home instead of ordering out.
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It's simple, but it helps me save
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for things that truly matter. That's why I love the State Farm Personal Price Plan. It lets you bundle home and auto insurance to create an affordable price that fits your needs. It's one of those thoughtful choices that support the life you're trying to build. Talk to a State Farm agent today to learn how you can choose to bundle and save with the Personal Price Plan. Like a good neighbor, State Farm is there. Prices are based on rating plans that vary by state. Coverage options are selected by the customer. Availability, amount of discounts and savings and eligibility vary by state. There's nothing like escaping to your happy
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