You can't change your career at 35, you should have had it figured out by then.

Oh my god, you're not married at 38?

What the hell are you doing with your life?

Who comes up with this stuff?

I have no idea.

But this stuff plagues so many people that I speak to.

So many people open up to me and say, Jay, I just don't know how to change.

Is it possible?

What do you think this guy was before he became who he is?

He used to be a PE teacher, right?

Sports teacher at a high school.

How about her?

She was a telemarketer for two weeks.

How about her?

She applied to be a funeral director.

It's incredible.

What happens in society is that we're clouded by the noise, the noise of family expectations, the noise of our parents, the noise of our brothers and sisters' expectations.

I grew up in a family where you can either be a doctor, a lawyer or a failure, right?

Those are my three options.

Anything else would just count me as a failure.

I would have failed.

So basically I failed, right?

I'm standing up here in front of you all as a failure.

I lived as a monk for three years.

I committed career suicide.

I turned down two amazing corporate job offers when I graduated from business school.

I shaved my hair, I wore robes and lived out of a gym locker for three years.

And I did that because I thought I was going to do something meaningful, help impact the world.

And it was one of the best experiences of my life.

But more than becoming a monk, what that trained me to do was drop out with the rules.

People told me, if you come back in three years, you'll never get a job.

They told me, if you become a monk, people are going to think you're weird forever.

No girl's ever going to talk to you.

People told me, they were like, well, when you come back to real life, will you even be able to talk English?

And people were just really weirded out.

I'm just like, okay, I think monks speak English.

And there was so much different noise that I was hearing when I made that decision.

And the funny thing is, from having not been a monk for four years now, I'm in one of the most incredible periods of my life that I could ever have asked for.

And so much of that is based on the fact that I decided to do something different.

So many of the times our expectations are driving us in a certain scenario.

We focus so much on life and what we want to be, as opposed to who we want to be.

Because we've always been told that life and jobs and careers are like boxes and containers.

There's only a finite number of options.

There is no formula.

There is no pattern.

If you know what you're passionate about, if you know what you're good at, and you invest in that.

People say, follow your passions.

I say, forget that.

Invest in your passion.

If you're passionate about something, go and become the best at it.

Go and do a course on it.

Go and learn from the best.

Go and find a mentor who's going to make you incredible at that trade.

Not only will you be criticized and grow, you'll be able to find new things about yourself that you never knew.

Don't trade who you are for who you think the world needs.

Because the world needs you to be you.

And I mean that.

you