Suneel Gupta | Everyday Dharma: 8 Essential Practices for Finding Success and Joy in Everything You Do

Srini Rao: Sunned, welcome back to the Unmistakable Creative. Thanks so much for taking the time to join us. 

Suneel Gupta: it's so good to be back. 

Srini Rao: it is my pleasure to have you back here. We had you back when you had your first book, Backable, come out. And you have a new book out, Everyday Dharma, which I think is a real departure from the kind of content that you were writing about before, which I think is always an interesting transition.

But, as you know from our previous conversations, we're not going to start by talking about the book. I know part of the answer to this question based on our previous conversation, but I don't know the rest of it. So I want to start by asking you, what birth order were you and what impact did that end up having on what you ended up doing with your life and your career?

Suneel Gupta: Yeah it's funny. I get asked that question sometimes, but never right out the gate. So I was second and I have an older brother who is 10 years older than I am. So huge age difference and nobody in between. Yeah, was that a mistake? I don't know. My parents aren't talking, but yeah, I was this was an unplanned sort of thing.

And Srini my brother he's a neurosurgeon. He's a medical correspondent for CNN. His name is Dr. Sanjay Gupta. And people I think see him for the brilliant person that he is. They don't often see some of the things that I get to see just cause of our relationship and how deep it is.

He's like a second father to me. He's incredibly warm, compassionate. Honest person and I think that he's always been that way. He's always been a lot of ways this, I think, epitome of what I wanted to be and to be honest with you, that that has been both a blessing and a curse.

The blessing of it is that I've always felt like I've had this model and this mentor. And the curse of it is that I have sometimes forgotten who I was as a result of that and who I wanted to be. To me, it was almost like I felt like being a second rate version of my brother was great.

Hey, why not? That's amazing, right? And I guess when I started to have kids myself, I think when I started to, I think, go inward the way that it required me to go to write this book I started to realize yeah, there is a first rate version of me I just need to figure out what that is.

Yeah.

Srini Rao: I keep thinking about that for my nephew, right? My sister is a doctor his dad, my brother in law is Harvard Stanford working the Obama administration. Like these are some big ass shoes to fill. Yeah. And I wonder if you ever felt that with your brother.

And also, like you mentioned, he was more like a father because of the age gap. But at what given the age gap, at what point did you find that you actually started to connect and bond? Because I feel given your childhood experience, he was probably like out of college by the time you were like in elementary

Suneel Gupta: school.

Yeah, that's right. I have a six year old daughter right now. I have an 11 year old and a six year old, but I was my six year old, my younger daughter's age when Sanjay left the house. We both, in a lot of ways, had an only child experience for a significant period of time. For him, it was from ages 0 through 10, and for me, it was like ages 6 through 16 being in the house with just my parents.

And I think that once I graduated high school, went to college is when things started to change for us. We both ended up spending a summer in Washington, D. C. together. He was doing a fellowship at the White House and I had snagged an internship at the White House and we were both in D.

C. And that was like really, it was really important for us because we were no longer in suburban Michigan together. But we were in this big city, we were hanging out, we didn't have our parents around, it was just the two of us and we started to connect at a much more kind of brotherly level than ever before and as he met his future wife I became very close to her was best man at his wedding, he was best man at mine and the relationship developed from there.

The other thing that changed for us is that creatively, we started to realize how similar we were. In a lot of ways if you look at our backgrounds, very different. He's a physician knew that he wanted to be a doctor from a very early age and went down this path. Mine's been much more pretzel twisted.

I've gone into consulting, didn't like that. I was a speech writer didn't went to law school, went into tech. We've worked in entertainment. I just, I've been all over the place. And so one of the things we realized around that time is that if you peel back the layer of occupation, which is oftentimes the way we're programmed, he's a doctor, he's a lawyer, he's an engineer, and you get into the essence of who you are and what you love, we started to see that there were some real similarities and one of the similarities is that we just loved.

We love the immigrant story. Like we, I and I know that can sound a little bit cliche being sons and daughters and children of immigrants, but we really loved it. We loved telling stories. We found that when we sat down, we were always like me memorializing things that we learned about our family back home in India, what what we're seeing right now from our aunts and uncles.

We would laugh about it. We would learn from it. And that really ended up forging this connection. We decided at some point in time, like. Why don't we start taking these off the wall sort of oddball conversations that we're having when we're at a bar and why don't we start turning them into some creative projects and that's what we did.

Srini Rao: So this is going to sound like a bizarre question, but like at what point did he go from being Sanjay your brother to Sanjay Gupta, public figure that we see on CNN. Yeah. Yeah. And how did that change the dynamic both with your relationship with him and your family in general?

Suneel Gupta: So it, it didn't change the dynamic between the two of us and I'll tell you why in a moment, but it all happened when I was right as I was about to graduate from college.

Literally I'm out there looking for a job. This is 2001 and just to rewind the clock, 2001 was a hard time economically in the country. But it was a really hard time in Michigan. Both my parents had lost their jobs and as auto engineers, it was a manufacturing meltdown in Michigan and I'm out there looking for a job and not really having the like easiest time finding it.

And on the other hand, you had Sanjay who all of a sudden had gone from finishing his neurosurgical program to becoming a medical correspondent for CNN, right? And this is all sort of January, February, 2001. So he's he is catapulted into space and I'm digging around the dirt trying to figure out what's going to happen.

The reason that didn't change anything though for us is because honestly, he's always been like a star, right? Like from day one in my book, he has always been somebody who was just. really flourished. Now, the thing about that, though, is that what people don't appreciate when they see Sanjay's story is they say my god neurosurgeon chief medical correspondent at CNN, he's an author, he is a father, he's, how does he make all this stuff work?

And what they don't see is just, he's a relentlessly hard worker. Really works really hard and is able to do that while still being rounded. And that's just a very hard, it's always been a very hard thing for me, but something that I feel like in some ways has come naturally to him I've, as a result, I feel like I've, I was his number one fan from the time I was from the time I could walk and that really just didn't change. So when all of a sudden he became this public figure and people are like, holy shit, this guy's amazing. I'm like, yeah, I know it's been, I felt that way for the past 15 years.

Yeah.

Srini Rao: It's funny because like the whole idea of parenting is my sister and my brother in law went to Mexico for the weekend and they left my 10 month old nephew with us this weekend at my parents house. And this is the first time that I got a dose of like how exhausting it is because he's mobile now.

And I just like I was starting to I've been writing this life advice book for him that I want to give him for his 18th birthday, even though he's 10 months old. Like they're just thinking about who he's going to become as a person. And I'd started writing this little section on fighting with your parents and I was like, this weekend I realized one thing.

I was like, one, being a parent is like a 24 seven job. There's literally no off time. And because my sister was like, now that he's mobile, you literally can't take your eyes off of him. She's like on Friday, she's can you watch him for an hour? And the entire hour is this balancing act between letting him indulge his curiosity.

Yes. And the thing is, the things he's most curious about are the things that are all potential hazards in our house. He's opening cupboards and trying to pull things out. And you're just like, and I realize what it is. It's the reason you're constantly on watch is because you don't want him to hurt himself.

And then, as you become adults, it's just the same. It's a different version of the same thing that causes fights with your parents. One thing that I wonder particularly because you're a second in an immigrant family is how the advice your parents gave you changed. And I'm guessing your brother and I would probably agree that you got away with murder compared to him.

Suneel Gupta: Yeah, for sure. Especially given the way that I performed in school and just it would never have been tolerated. But I think for him, it changed significantly over the next 10 years. My parent you just look at my dad was in his mid twenties as he was starting to really as Sanjay was, as he was raising Sanjay, he was in his mid thirties when he raised me.

Just think about how much you changed in that time you're two, two very different people. And I think what you're saying about watching your nephew explore. And wanting to provide guardrails in some way so that he doesn't do harm to himself. But at the same time allowing that freedom of exploration.

I think that, that is the hardest thing, I think, for a parent, and I'm realizing that now for myself I, there, one of the chapters in my new book is what I call Tula, or what my ancestors, our ancestors called Tula, right? And Tula is really this balance of force versus trust.

Whether that be with your work, whether that be with your relationships, it's how much do you want to push and how much do you want to effort versus how much do you want to let it be. And it's a constant, it's a constant sort of, I think, push pull and trying to find that little moment, that these little moments of equanimity between the two is, is tricky.

But I think when you find it, it's a really beautiful thing. In my, my we moved from Detroit to Los Angeles where we live now. And. When that happened, this was last year, my daughter was 10 years old and she had no friends and move was very difficult on her. And she wanted to find like a hobby, but she loved the water and she decided to take up surfing.

And so a lot of what we do now is I'll go down to the beach with her and I'll watch her surf. I suck at surfing. I've tried and it just terrible, but I bought sure I watched her and I see this balance of force and trust really come to life. Which is You do have to have a certain level of effort in order to ride away in order to get up on a board.

There's technique, there's skill, there's strength. But there's also this notion of if you're just efforting the whole time, you fall, right? Because you're almost leaning too far into the sort of skill of it. And you're not letting the nature of it take its course.

So watching her like literally get up on a surfboard is like this perfect mix of like, how much do I effort versus how much do I just let happen? And that I think is really not just for me, the struggle of being a parent, but just being generally. This ACAS podcast is sponsored by NetSuite, 36, 000, the number of businesses which have upgraded to the number one cloud financial system, NetSuite.

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Srini Rao: Kudos to your daughter. I'm an avid surfer, so I think it's awesome that's what she chose to do and tell her that you'll, she'll be basically badass by the time she's 18 if she keeps it up amazing because you see these little kids in the water and they pull into a three foot wave and they get to experience what it's like to have a barrel.

Whereas when you're my age or your age, you're like five, six feet tall. It's okay, I need a near death experience in order to experience a barrel. Yeah. Yeah I've surfed for a long time, so I totally get that idea. You alluded to this, the pretzel of a career, and I think we talked a bit about your background last time.

But as I mentioned to you before we hit record, I think what struck me most about this book is what a departure it was from the type of content that you were writing in Backable. So talk to me about what sparked the idea for this book. What was the impetus for this?

Suneel Gupta: Yeah I felt even as I was writing my last book, it really felt like I was in a trap that I can only describe now as what Dr.

Tal Ben Shahar at Harvard University calls the arrival fallacy. And basically the arrival fallacy is this belief that you're going to hit this moment where you're going to have accumulated enough success, enough wealth. Enough status where finally this inner void that I think so many of us are trying to fill disappears, right?

You reach this moment of fulfillment. And I think for me, my last book was very much focused on what I now call outer success. How do we, it's called the name of the book is backable. It was all about like, how do you get other people to back your ideas, right? Whether you be inside a company or whether you be somebody who's starting a new business.

How do you get, how do you get people to get behind that? And I enjoyed writing the book and it, it did it did reasonably well and found an audience, but the thing about it was still very fixated on an outer success and wealth and status and achievement. And one of the things that I was realizing, even as I was out there studying hundreds of people who are at the top of their game, I couldn't necessarily, as cliche as it might sound,

,

I couldn't necessarily correlate their success to what we might call happiness or joy.

They were doing great things, but I didn't consider them to be much happier than they were before. I was experiencing that myself I was constantly saying if I could just get that next book, or the next review, or the next job, whatever it was, I would be happier, and I was finding in every case I might be hitting goals sometimes I wasn't, but even when I was hitting them the feeling that I was getting was very temporary I would always sort of return back to a baseline, that I think there's not a single person that I know who is ambitious the way that I am who hasn't experienced this, who hasn't felt like, oh yeah I got that thing.

It didn't really put me into the place that I thought it was going to, emotionally. So I really started to think about, alright, this is all there is then I'm in a, I'm in a, I'm in the wrong path I'm in, I'm taking the wrong journey. I'm getting exhausted, I'm getting burnt out and I'm not any happier as a result of that.

So what am I doing wrong? And that's when I started to return to this body of wisdom that I learned at a very young age when I was taking trips to New Delhi to go meet my my, my grandfather and my relatives, they were all into this body of wisdom called Dharma, which I learned about, but I just forgot about.

And I wanted to return back to that and figure out how do I. How do I use that in today's world? So why is it that this

Srini Rao: arrival fallacy is so pervasive? I've had the exact experience you're talking about with getting a book deal where it's like, Oh, this is the thing that I had been working towards for seven years and it happened.

And whatever sort of feeling that I got from it or whatever, joy was very temporary. Maybe lasted about two months, then it was back to baseline. And then it was, yeah, to your earlier point, it was like, then I realized, wait, now I'm basically the redhead stepchild of an imprint with authors like Ryan Holiday and Simon Sinek and Seth Godin.

Suneel Gupta: I, I, yeah I think it gets conditioned early, right? I think that if you and I were to trace back to our childhood, very well intentioned people who loved us a lot, conditioned us to believe this way and that could be teachers, that could be parents, that could be community.

It starts early in, if you look at sort of previous generations. There was a real belief. Viktor Frankl talked about this a lot in in Man's Search for Meaning and his research about the fact that this trade off of money and meaning and in previous generations, there really was this belief that if you accumulated enough money, you would be able to create meaning in your life and maybe it worked that way at a certain point in time, right?

If I could just, if I could simply just take care of my kids if I could create a sense of. A nice house and have these nice things. That's enough for me. That's meaning what Frankel argued was that was really beginning to shift in the seventies and the eighties.

People were starting to care much more about meaning. And I think what was very interesting about what he was saying was that he wasn't arguing that we had shifted more. It was more that we had just returned. This is something that we've always cared about. It's very at a very primal level. Of course, we want to take care of our kids.

And of course, We want to have shelter and food and all the necessities. But beyond that baseline, what matters more than that is, is being able to experience meaning in everything that we do. And so I think that the arrival fallacy though, really cuts against that.

That we really, we get conditioned to believe that if we hit this moment where we've accumulated enough stuff on paper then that's going to create the meaning that we've been looking for. It's simply not true.

Srini Rao: I think that makes a perfect segue into the start of the book where you start to talk about this idea of essence. And you say your essence doesn't care about power, promotions, or possessions. It only cares about one thing, expression. If essence is who you are, who you really are, then expression is how you show up in the world.

So expand on that for me and take us into the various sort of concepts that you've talked about in the book.

Suneel Gupta: Yeah Dharma is such a big concept it's all, it's about how do we experience meaning in what we do. And I really as former sort of tech study computer programming, I wanted to break it down.

Like I needed to meet, I needed an equation, I needed something right. And what I ultimately arrived on is that Dharma equals essence plus expression, right? Essence is this thing inside of you that. Has always wanted to speak, right? It's always wanted to put itself out there. That could be the storytelling side of you.

That could be the design side of you. It could be the number side of you. But there's something inside of you that wants to speak. And expression is how you actually communicate that, how you share that with the world aside, around you. You find people who are very tapped into their essence.

I meet people all the time who are like, Oh, I don't even need to do any exercises or self reflection. I know who I am on the inside. But they're not able to express that because they feel like they're caught in a job that doesn't tap into that or they're in a situation where they simply just don't have the time to express that because they're grinding it out.

And so what do I do? I know this thing, but I can't share it because I have too many other priorities. And then you find the flip side of it, whereas people don't know what their essence is. So they're in a pattern where all day in, day out. They're expressing themselves and they're getting external feedback.

People are like this is great work, or here's a promotion. But there's something that's deeply missing on the inside. You're checking off the boxes, you're doing the work, you're getting things done, but you feel like there's something very unsatisfactory about all of it. And I would say that I have experienced both, but I think what really drove me to this book was the latter.

The grind that I was in, day in, day out, without actually tapping into who I am and not expressing that in any meaningful way. Yeah. You say that your expression is how you act in the world. Your essence is your calling. The way you show up in your expression is how you take that call. My ancestors had another word for it.

Srini Rao: They called it sukkah. And you say, teacher, doctor, lawyer, these are occupations, but your sukkah is much bigger, broader, and more deeply ingrained than any one job title. And then you go on to say, what do you want to be turns into what do you do? Our identity and our title become intertwined. We become convinced that we're a job and soon with what other people think about it.

I think of it. Yeah. And that is particularly think about people like us who do creative work for a living. A guy realized at one point, I was like, wow like pod, I didn't want to ever be defined by any one project or title. And I think that the one thing that always stayed with me, I, it was something I, I remember correctly.

Somebody had told me this, I think it was Naval Ravikant. I heard him say in a podcast where he said Sam Altman says that whatever you do next should make whatever you did previously look like a footnote in your career.

Suneel Gupta: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And I think that one of the ways that we can create these footnotes of the past is about not being limited by them because I think that there is a tendency to believe that your career needs to follow this linear path where one thing is a building block to the other, maybe and certainly you find a lot of people who find success objectively doing that.

But you also find a lot of people who just broaden themselves and say one thing doesn't necessarily need to lead to the other perfectly, or even in a way that I even understand right now. In the book, I talk about this as the difference between having a map and having a compass. And I think that we have really been led to live in a map mentality where it's like.

X to Y to Z onward right to get to your destination and we map things out for our lives and then we in some ways almost grip and clin like clench to that map. But I think the people who tend to change things for themselves, I think free themselves in a different way, but also I think do really deep creative work lead more with a compass, which is they do take a step and when they take a step, they're all in with that step.

But then they're able to come back to themselves, come back to the center of who they are and say, all right, what is the next best step from here? And maybe that next best step doesn't have a perfect sort of trajectory based on what the past was. It's maybe a little bit off to the other right.

And that's, and I think that's okay. You were asking about the occupation, this occupation mindset. I don't know, Srini, I don't know if you have this, but literally when I was a baby, I literally got put in the center of a living room. This is like a tradition Indian custom, but but everywhere too, right?

All sorts of like customs have this. where they put they put like a scalpel, I don't know if it was like a doctor's scalpel and they put in a little keyboard for accounting and they had all these sort of instruments around me and they wanted to see what I would crawl to because what I would crawl to was my occupation, right?

That's what I was going to be. That's how early we get brought into this. You are your job mentality, right? Like when people asked you as a kid, what do you want to be? They were asked, they were looking for a job title, right? And today when somebody asks you, what do you do? What they're asking for is a job title, right?

We have to summarize it in these statements, but the reality is that we are so much more than that underneath, right? Like for you, you write books, you do podcasts you do some, you do a lot of cool stuff. If somebody was asking you to put an umbrella over all that I don't know what you would answer, but I'm, what I'm guessing is that there's something inside of you that is driving all of that is podcasting is a way of expressing that totally writing books is a way of expressing that.

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Suneel Gupta: unmistakable. Have you ever thought about that? What is that? So

Srini Rao: it's funny. Like at this point, every day as I was fired from every job I ever had until I started to do my own thing. And somebody asked me once, are you passionate about podcasting? I was like, no, I don't even listen to podcasts.

And I told him, I said when I went back and I analyzed it, I said there was one common thread between all the things that I had ever done. And this was right from the get go from the time Evan Williams built Blogger. I had this obsessive need to tinker with technology and see what I could make with it.

And I told people, I was like, that actually is the essence, is using technology to express my creativity, whatever form that takes. That's really what it boils down to. Because like now when I see new technology, my first instinct is, what can I make using this? Which is why AI has been like a I'm like a kid in a candy store now.

Because it's just opened up a world of possibilities and you'll appreciate this. So I, so the ceremony that Sunil is alluding to, for those who don't know, it's called an unoppressed on it. And it's basically it's a baby's first feeding. What my nephew did will blow your mind. So first I was supposed to feed him and he looked at me, he just grabbed the spoon for me and fed himself.

And then they put the plate of options in front of him and he just took the plate and dumped it. And I'm like, I am so proud of you, man. I'm like, it was like, he was letting us know. Nobody's going to tell me what to do or be a man. Okay. And

Suneel Gupta: you just this is your nephew. Yeah.

Srini Rao: You're like, I'm sitting here thinking.

We don't need to teach you anything. You're the one who's going to be teaching us everything.

Suneel Gupta: Yeah. Yeah. I feel that way about Gen Z generally, right? I know you're your nephew's much younger than that, right? Whatever we're going to call his generation I think Gen Z sort of gets a difficult time right

,

now.

Especially in the job market because it's like just suck it up or just do your job. I think that the reality is that Gen Z is asking a lot of questions that we didn't ask. And that our parents certainly didn't ask, which is if I'm entering the job market right now and I'm in my early twenties.

And people are living to 100 in a way that they never did before and I might as well. Plus, I don't know if I can rely on things like social security and we don't know what's happening with the healthcare system. A lot of this stuff is stuff they're seeing. I could be in the job market.

I could be working for 70 years without, without, without really exaggerating that because I don't know if retirement is going to be a real thing. So to ask the questions of not only is this going to be a job, is this going to pay me a salary, but is this something that I actually really want to do?

Is this something that reflects who I am? Does it reflect my values? These are questions like we never asked before. And to be honest, I think we like we, we missed out. And I, it's really refreshing to find like a whole generation of people who are asking those questions. Yeah,

Srini Rao: no, absolutely. I, it's funny cause I've often said if anybody had talked to me at any of these concepts when I was in college, I would have written off all his new age bullshit.

And one of my friends is that's like podcast that you would have considered new age nonsense. But there's a part of me that always wonders like at 20, am I Like open minded enough and the whole, what do you want to be when you grow up? I like, I always found that question so absurd.

I'm like, how could you possibly know how you want to spend the rest of your life when you've only lived a fraction of it?

Suneel Gupta: Yeah. Yeah. And yet you were asked to declare a major. Yeah. And it's I read this stat the other day that like by certain love, by certain time a hundred percent of college students at campuses have declared a major, but like 70% don't know what they want to do.

It's the mismatch it really is this mismatch that I think that a lot of us find ourselves living in where it's like, the way we present ourselves to the outside world is with this clarity of here's who I am, here's what what I do, here's where I intend to take my career, but internally, we feel anything but clarity, or I don't know, I'm not sure I, am I going to be doing, am I going to be interested in three years, To do the things that I'm doing right now, I don't know.

And that's why I find sort of the way you have looked at your career stream like refreshing, which is if you go to a level that's beneath occupation, and you go to expression for you being able to tell stories through technology, it starts to free you. In a way that we don't feel free when we're in an occupation mindset you are basically saying that there is some consistency to your life, which is this part of you that's probably always been true since you were very young and will continue to be true.

But the way that you express that to the world could change and that's totally

Srini Rao: okay. Yeah, no, totally. And I've said this before, like when the guys said podcast movement had their first conference, they wanted me to be one of the keynotes, and I was, yeah, I'll do it on one condition.

They're like, what's that? I'm like, I don't have to talk about podcasting. .

Suneel Gupta: Yeah. They're

Srini Rao: like, oh, I don't know. It's, yeah I did end up being, but it was the point was that I was like, that's just podcast is a way that I express myself. Like it's like I'm a storyteller and this just happens to be one medium in which I do

Suneel Gupta: that.

Yes. Yes. Because it can be so easy when people put you in a box to believe that box is right. Do you believe that? Okay. Everybody here now is introducing me as Srini, the podcaster. Okay. I guess that's who I am. I'm a podcaster now.

Srini Rao: Yeah, absolutely. Let's talk about this idea of bhakti, because you said bhakti is the practice of full hearted devotion.

You can think of bhakti as the opposite of distraction. While distractions take us away from our dharma, bhakti brings us closer. And I think there was one phrase in particular that caught my attention, and this was this idea of being full hearted, not full scheduled. Yeah, because I think that when we think about devotion bhakti, the definition of bhakti is really, it's about devotion, devoting yourself to something.

Suneel Gupta: And the frustration that I know I felt and I see so many people feel is there's this thing out there that I really want to do. I really want to be a part of that, but I simply cannot devote myself to it, right? I'm getting pulled in too many directions. And yet, when you look at people who have, I think, achieved the top of their game at these creative crafts and these different pursuits, a lot of them were working full time jobs.

Toni Morrison, who is the novelist that I talk about in this chapter the most she she had two kids. She had a full time job. Kurt Vonnegut was a car salesman. Philip Glass, the composer, was a plumber. The list goes on and on. And I think what you begin to realize is that Being committed to something, being devoted to something does not mean that you have to be fully scheduled with that thing.

What it does mean that is that even if it's for minutes or seconds every single day, there's a real full hearted commitment to that thing. Like I think about it sometimes even the context of my wife and I, like my wife and I are like our schedule is a is a freaking jungle now. Like it's We are trying to figure things out.

We have two kids, they have school, they have activities. My wife works a full time job. I'm I'm grinding it out a lot of the time and we're trying to make, we're trying to figure it out. But what we have is we make sure that for about a half hour before the kids wake up in the morning, she and I sit down together and we have a cup of coffee together.

We put away our phones and we have a cup of coffee. And it I love my wife and I think she, I believe she loves me. We have a very committed, devoted relationship, but that doesn't mean that we're spending every minute of every hour of every day together. That doesn't work that way. But what we do have is this present.

full hearted time together, even if sometimes it's only for a few minutes every day. Yeah.

Srini Rao: I think that makes a perfect transition into the next study, which is prana is the animating force behind your dharma. It's an energetic current that buzzes inside of you, making you feel alive and engaged.

When you tap into your prana, you feel lit up, energized and creative. And you say your time is a limited resource. Your prana is limitless. There are so many, only so many hours a day, but there's no ceiling to the creative energy. You can bring to a single hour and I remember Danny Shapiro even writing about this in her book still writing like the power of what you can do in one

Suneel Gupta: focused hour a day.

Yeah, because I think again, we get programmed to believe that if you really want to commit yourself to something, it's about the number of hours that you put into it, right? And look, that's important. It's not that doesn't matter, but what we don't think about nearly enough. I know I didn't, is what is the quality of energy that you want to bring to each of those hours, right?

What is it that you want creatively, imaginatively, how do you want to spend that time? So for me when I first started out writing I was a CEO and founder of a company and it was taking all my time, but I just knew if I didn't spend 15 minutes each day writing I was just, I wasn't going to operate.

I wasn't going to be happy and I needed to start spending that 15 minutes. to the point of like prana and energy where I spent that time also made a difference, right? If I was already in the grind of my day and I was like sneaking some time in during the lunch hour to write when I was already fixated on all these other things.

That wasn't good energetic time. I wasn't giving my dharma quality time. I was just giving it time. What I started to do, I think like you do this as well, Srini, is I really started to block out the early morning hours, right? And just said, 15 minutes. 15 minutes a day, I'm gonna write. A lot of it's just gonna be tick and scratch, and it's not gonna make any sense, but 15 minutes a day, I'm going to write.

And it's about this quality of energy that I really want to bring to it. The other thing that I'd say is I was one of these people who really wore hustle and grind as like a badge of honor, right? And so if I came home at the end of the day and I really felt like I had really done really hustled hard, I would almost feel this sense of accomplishment.

And as a result of that I was burning out in a way that really just wasn't, it wasn't healthy for me. But what I'll also say is it was not healthy for the business. By Thursday, Friday of any given week, I was not operating at the capacity that I needed to be operating on, right?

I was and not only that, I probably wasn't the type of person that other people had as much of a pleasant experience being around because I was probably quicker to judgment quicker to reaction. I wasn't being the type of person that I wanted to be. What I learned to do through writing this book was take what I call rhythmic renewals, where Basically, instead of waiting for long vacations, or waiting for long weekends in order to reset myself, I'm resetting myself constantly throughout the day.

I practice what I call the 55 5 model, which is that for every 55 minutes of work, whenever possible, I take 5 minutes of just focused, deliberate rest. And that could be listening to music. It could be just closing my eyes for a moment and breathing. It could be taking a walk in nature. But five minute breaks built in.

And literally, man, for the first time in my life. I am feeling as much energy at the end of the day as I do at the beginning of the day simply by taking these five minute breaks throughout.

Srini Rao: So there's something else that you said in that same chapter where you said, if the inside of our heads were a soundtrack for most of us, it would be a song about worry played on repeat.

This doesn't just make us anxious. It drains us of energy. It's hard to be present folks who are creative when Alice in Chains is playing in the background. You'd the thing is, I've heard so many versions of this, right? Ryan Reynolds and Van Wilder says worrying is like a rocking chair.

It gives you something to do, but it doesn't get you anywhere. But that's so much easier said

Suneel Gupta: than done. Yeah. Yeah. I, and then the mistake that I made with worry is in some ways trying to push it out. Cause I think what would happen is that I would get a worrying thought and I would be like, I I don't have time for you right now.

I'm focusing on this other thing. Go away. And I think most of us. tend to do this, which is that especially if we wax more optimistic and a worrying pessimistic thought comes in, we say nope, no room for you here. And we try to push it out. But basically there are mountains of studies that show that when you try to push out a worrying thought, It grows from a whisper into a conversation and eventually into a shout, right?

It starts to scream at you and it gets louder and louder. And yeah, if you look at the inside of our heads about 80%, over 80% of the thoughts that we had today are gonna be repeats of the thoughts we had yesterday. And the majority of those thoughts for most of us are worry related.

Like what's gonna happen with this? It's uncertainty, it's a little bit of fear. What I've learned to do is instead of try to push those thoughts out, what I tend to do is I tend to spot them, especially if there's one that's playing on repeat over and over again. And what I try to do is I try to hear it out.

I call it, I call this the worry break. I take a little worry break. Which is I'll literally write the thing down. I'll say, oh, I'm worried that this whatever, this review that I was waiting on for my book is actually not gonna come through. I'll write it down. I'll say, I'm worried that's going to happen.

And then I'll literally set a timer. In my case, I do somewhere between three and five minutes. I set a timer, and I say for the next three minutes, I'm just going to worry about this. I'm literally just going to stare at this piece of pairing, and stare at that worry, and I'm just going to worry about it.

I'm going to let it have its, I'm going to give it its air time. And this may sound like a recipe for anxiety, like you might think that what you're doing is giving it, if you give it more air time, you give it more of a voice, it's going to grow even louder. But counterintuitively, the opposite happens.

And I've seen this play out over and over again. If you listen to that thing inside your head, if you just hear it for a moment. It won't necessarily make that worry go away. It may not solve your problem. Non obviously, what it does is it actually turns the volume down on that worry, so that you can be more present with the other parts of your day.

Srini Rao: Absolutely. I think that it makes a perfect transition to this idea of what you call upekka, where you say you're not distincting yourself from the sting of the world. You're embracing the unpleasantness with an inner evenness. And then you go on to say that when it comes to Dharma, difficult roads can lead to brilliant destinations.

If you run from the pain, you also separate yourself from the possibilities. Yeah

Suneel Gupta: I'm certainly somebody who tried to carve a path where I was trying to work around pain. Uncomfortable situations I like comfort and I am not one of these people who is masochistic where I was like, I'm going to go into the pain just to go into the pain.

What I realized though, is I don't have to be that way in order to be able to deal with difficult things to do hard things and to do things that make me uncomfortable. I don't have to love it, but I have to be able to find space to be able to find comfort in the discomfort, right?

And it's sometimes the hardest thing that I think we can do. But at the same time, I don't think it's, I don't, I think it can be simple. And again, Viktor Frankl, who I talk about a lot in this book. And Viktor Frankl, neurologist, but also Holocaust survivor. He said that of his time in a concentration camp, what he realized is that between impulse and response.

There is a space and inside that

,

space lies our freedom, right? So somebody aggravates you, the quicker you react to it, the less free you are, the more time you're able to give yourself, even if it's just a beat, right? Even if you're able to give yourself that distance, that is your freedom lies there.

And in some ways I think that is the foundational principle of basically everything else. Because if you don't have that space, If you don't have a little bit of room to breathe between things that sort of are difficult and the way that you respond to them, then you're not able to put the tools that you've learned into practice.

Like you've, you may be somebody who reads lots of books and listens to a lot of podcasts, so you have this toolkit that you're constantly building. But if you're not giving yourself the space to be able to utilize those tools especially when things get a little bit tough, then there was no point of having learned those things in the first place.

So for me, I think that is where the comfort lies and practically speaking, it doesn't have to be complex. Often if I'm in a tricky situation, something that really is bothering me I'll literally just put my hand, my right hand over my heart, right?

I'll just place it over my heart and I'll just take it. I'll just literally take one breath, right? And that's it. That's it. And sometimes when I do that. That can make the difference between behaving in a way that I know I'm going to regret or behaving in a way that's going to be a poor decision and the absolute opposite of that, behaving in a way where, oh my gosh, all of a sudden I was able to tap into a tiny bit of wisdom here and bring that to the situation or I didn't do something or say something that I was going to regret.

It's like clockwork for me. If I can take that moment and find a little bit of comfort in that uncomfortable moment. I'm so much better off for it.

Srini Rao: Yeah. Absolutely. So let's get into the final two concepts, which are Leela and Seva. And the thing that caught my attention the most in the section on Leela is that you say that ambition is something you want, whereas an expectation is something you feel entitled to.

Ambition is an acknowledgment of desire, whereas expectations are an illusion of control. Ambition is thrilling and can be inherently playful, whereas expectations suck to find out what an experience is. So this is like this, I probably asked a hundred people this question and I still haven't quite gotten the answer I was looking for and it's like finding the sort of balance between ambition and fulfillment seems like one of the hardest things for anybody who is driven or motivated.

Suneel Gupta: Yeah. Yeah. And I think that the difference really does lie with expectations. I think expectations are such a joy killer, right? Because when I think that we. There, there are a lot of good things, by the way, with like goal setting. I think goals can be a really nice thing because they can drive you, they can I think you can wake up on any given day and know what you're after, and there's a lot of clarity that comes with goal settings.

There's a difference though between, I think, goal settings and expectations, right? There's, it can become an inner expectation that you almost feel entitled to this thing because you're putting in the work, you're putting in the effort. I think as soon as you get into that space it can almost be impossible to experience any sort of happiness from the work itself, or I think even from the result, right?

And so the tricky balance that I think you're after with all these people you asked the question of is how do we retain our ambition? How do we retain our sense of ambition, right? And still at the same time, enjoy the experience along the way. And the reason I suspect that it's been so hard for you to get a quality answer for this is because I think that we have been so ingrained to believe that in order to get top results, in order to do great work, we have to suffer.

Along the way we have like great artists, suffer great people who do great things, suffer like that's what we've been told again. That doesn't mean that you're like, yes, they faced uncomfortable moments and yes, you do have to do difficult things. But do you have to suffer as a result of that?

I don't think that's true. I think the alternative path, which I find to be much like not just much happier, but potentially even better for the outcome is to figure out where the happiness lies in the experience. Where does the play lie in the experience? And the chapter that you're alluding to, one of the people I talked to is Phil Phil Jackson.

And right. Phil Jackson was like, Great at this because literally inside his locker room, like his locker, even as an NBA player, was make work your play and play your work. That was the saying that he had hanging up and people thought he was a hippie for it, right? But then he became a coach and he brought that mentality of blurring the lines between work and play Into this really arduous really disciplined difficult at times like thing, right?

Which is professional basketball and he was able to he was able to grow some of the greatest athletes to ever play the game Through this mentality of like, how do, like, how do we blur the line between work and play to the point where now it starts to feel like they're actually one and the same? Yeah, absolutely.

Srini Rao: I think I, I know without question, when I'm enjoying a piece of writing, regardless of the outcome it going it, I probably not a coincidence that those tend to be some of my most resonant pieces.

Suneel Gupta: Yeah, and like it's hard man. Like it's hard. This is hard I wrote a book on this and I still fall back into the mentality of gotta hit this goal gotta hit this target I think the thing that I've realized is there's nothing wrong with having those goals and there's nothing wrong with having those targets.

Again, those are the things that make us come alive in a lot of ways on a daily basis. But what I have to also remind myself of is if I am expressing my essence, if I am in my dharma and I'm doing things that really matter to me, then in some ways I have already won, right? Because it is a gift. To be able to share your creativity, to be able to share your voice, this thing inside of you with the outside world, that is a gift.

I think it's a gift of the human experience. And everything that comes after that as a result, which by the way, there are many rewards and many riches that come from expressing yourself authentically, right? And we see that over and over again. A lot of your guests on your podcast. But the reality is that even if they didn't hit those targets, even if they didn't hit those levels of success there was a joy, there was a joy and a reward that came from just doing the work.

And once you can put yourself in that place, I just think the sky's the limit.

Srini Rao: Speaking of rewards, I think that makes a perfect transition to the final concept, which is what you call SEVA. And you say the irony of SEVA is that it asks you to de prioritize personal benefit, yet the people who practice selfless service are often showered with status and rewards.

And then you go on to say rewards will get you going, but they won't keep you going. Durable power comes from service.

Suneel Gupta: Yeah. Yeah I I think Seva is probably the chapter in the book that I struggled with the most because it's such a deep concept. Seva means selfless service and and it's Mahatma Gandhi may have said it best.

He said that the best way to find yourself is to lose yourself in the service of others. And what I found is on a practical level if I am. doing things, if I'm doing work for my own benefit, because I want to achieve a certain thing or be seen a certain way or accumulate a certain amount of wealth, I'm on a fast track to burnout.

It just is. It's, it I'm going to burn myself out very quickly. It's a fuel for sure, but it's the wrong type of fuel. It doesn't last very long. But if on the other hand, I can really find like a genuine audience, like a genuine group of people that I'm looking to serve and looking to write for and in my case to tell stories to and relay some of the insights I'm learning from other people who are much smarter than me.

If I can do that in a good way, it might in some way shape sort of their days, right? It might in some ways lift sort of the way that they see about things to a way that is healthier for them. Then then I'm in my dharma. And as soon as I lose that place, as soon as I'm like, no, I need to be a bestselling author.

Or I need to sound really smart on Trini's podcast. I lose that entirely. It becomes about me. I am when it becomes about me. I'm not nearly as imaginative. I'm not nearly as expressive in the way that I want to be. And I put myself on a fast track of, Just not enjoying it wanting to stop.

Srini Rao: It's funny you say that cause it's thinking, it just reminds me of my philosophy for choosing podcast guests. Like I have turned down really well known people because I'm like, yeah, that will increase our download. And I will sacrifice metrics in service of a good story that I think would benefit

Suneel Gupta: our listeners.

Yeah, it's because your essence is storytelling, right? In a lot of ways, that's what I see for you and I think that why sacrifice which you, which your podcast is all about. Unless it's expressing this thing that is you. Yeah.

Srini Rao: Absolutely. I think I could talk to you all day about this.

So I want to finish with two final areas. One is this quote where you say, life is a series of two way doors disguised as one way doors. If you walk through and realize it's the wrong direction, you can always come back through. You may lose some time, but you're no longer left wondering what's on the other side.

And that really struck me because I think that it reminds me of Annie Duke's concept of decisions with low and high reversal costs. And she's so many things are reversible that we

Suneel Gupta: think are not. Yeah. Yeah we put so much gravity behind decisions sometimes, right?

And it, I have, I worked in a corporate consulting gig that I enjoyed for less than one year and stayed for nearly five because, and I was in my twenties at this time. I didn't have kids. I wasn't married. I was I had a lot of flexibility in my life. But the problem. Was that I felt like my next decision my next choice had to be perfect, right?

It had to be it had to be Exactly the thing that was gonna be the perfect fit for me and in a lot of ways I was treating it like this one way door decision because if I felt like at least Psychologically that if I walk through that door, I would never be able to walk back through and it's just not true And I think the vast majority of our decisions are not one way doors.

They're two way doors And when we can start to see them that way for what they truly are, it doesn't necessarily make decisions easy, but it makes it much easier than I think we sometimes make them out to be, right? Because we know it can be liberating to know that if you can walk back through, then why not give it a shot, right?

And so I'm constantly now like the one way door, two way door is a metaphor that is permanently stuck in my mind anytime I'm making a decision for my career. Anytime I have an impulse to do something, my heart's telling me one thing, I will say, okay, is this a two way door? And if it's a two way door decision and my heart's telling me to do it, I most always cases will just go because again, I know that if it doesn't work out, I walk back through.

Absolutely.

Srini Rao: This has been amazing. So I have one final question for you, which is how we finish all our interviews. And it's always interesting to see how people answer this question when they come back a second time. What do you think it is that makes somebody or something unmistakable?

Suneel Gupta: I think my grandfather had this metaphor that I love and he basically said we as humanity are almost like a sitar, a giant sitar and sitars string instrument, Indian string instrument.

And we as humanity are almost like a massive sitar with billions and billions of strings. Like you, Srini, you're one string and I'm another string, right? Every single one of us represents one string. And the thing about it is that when we are in tune with who we are and we're playing that string in tune with who we really are, not only does that sort of have effects for our lives, but we bring the rest of the world into harmony, right?

That has an effect for everybody around us. I think that the idea of being unmistakable is really about tapping back into who you are. And I know that's cliche because we say that kind of thing all the time. What may, what sometimes gets missed is that who we are is not something that you have to go looking for.

You don't have to read books. You don't have to listen to podcasts. Those things can help sometimes in terms of figuring out who you are. But what the real work is in removing the layers. That have been in its way, right? Because there is an essence about you and I guarantee like You have been in touch with that essence before the busyness of priorities and demands and all the things of life can easily cover those things up.

Michelangelo had this brilliant quote, which is like he would look at a block of marble and he would say, the sculpture is already inside, it's already there. All I need to do now is chip away the layers that are in between it and the outside world. That's my job as a sculptor. And I think I'm very much so that's what it takes to be unmistakable is to not go searching necessarily, but to in some ways pull out your chisel and start chipping away at those

Srini Rao: layers.

This has been amazing. I can't thank you enough for taking the time to join us and come back and share your story, your wisdom and your insights. Where can people find out more about you the new book and everything else you're up to?

Suneel Gupta: Yeah, man, just go to cinealgupta. com and it's s u n e l g u p t a.

And and you'll find a link to the book there and you'll find some other material that might be useful and and be in touch with me too. You'll find my contact information on there as well. Awesome.

Srini Rao: And for everybody listening, we will wrap the show with that. This ACAST

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