Self-help guru and internet sensation Jay Shetty is taking his approach to the world’s top CEOs and celebrities…
Jay Shetty has a story he wants you to hear. He tells it on speaking tours, when people come on his podcast, or when he goes on chat shows like Ellen or Jada Pinkett Smith’s Red Table Talk. Now he’s written a book – a combination of memoir and self-help advice called How To Think Like A Monk – which begins with the same tale.
Here it is: an 18-year-old Shetty is at Cass Business School in London. He’s obsessed with the rags-to-riches stories of CEOs and self-made entrepreneurs, and spends all his free time watching them give talks at the university. One day, his friend tells him there’s going to be a talk by a monk. Shetty is apathetic, but he agrees to go if his friend promises they can go to the pub afterwards. This monk, a man called Gauranga Das, is the exact opposite of what Shetty values at the time. He’s an old Indian man in robes who has shunned material wealth and status. But his speech is so captivating, his selflessness so life-changing, that Shetty talks to him afterwards, then follows him round the UK on his speaking tour, spends his next few summers in an ashram in Mumbai, and ends up training to become a monk himself, turning down graduate job offers.
