• Finding his purpose didn’t end up looking like Jay Shetty thought it would. An encounter with a monk led him on a journey away from the “good life” and into a life of decidedly less luxury. Instead of a high-powered corporate career, working towards higher pay and a fancy lifestyle, Jay Shetty became a monk.
• “From the outside, being a monk looks like it’s fundamentally about letting go: the baldness, the robes, stripping away distractions,” Shetty writes. “Letting go opened our minds.”
• In Chapter 5 of his new book, Think Like a Monk, Jay Shetty explains that monks spend their days in service helping out wherever and however they are needed. Each day during his time as a monk, the monks rotated between different chores and responsibilities to show their willingness to help rather than gravitating towards the tasks and responsibilities they preferred to do over ones they didn’t particularly like.
• Despite the equal share in responsibilities the monks practiced, this didn’t take away from their individual talents and abilities. One person might have been drawn to cooking, while another may have been drawn to tending the animals or gardening.
• “We could experiment with new skills, study them, see how improving them made us feel,” Jay Shetty writes. “Exploring our strengths and weaknesses in the self-contained universe of the ashram helped lead each of us to our dharma. Everyone has a psychophysical nature which determines where they flourish and thrive.”