Good Life Project - How to Find Your Calling & Live It | Suneel Gupta

Episode Date: September 28, 2023

What if chasing outer success still leaves us feeling empty inside? My guest Suneel Gupta can relate. After selling his startup, he realized achievements weren’t enough. Rediscovering the Hindu concept of dharma—expressing your essence through work—he found new purpose.In our conversation, Suneel shares insights from his book Everyday Dharma to reveal practical ways we can honor our inner fire through our daily work. How can we live with more meaning and purpose? Suneel shares abundant tools to help you discover and express your calling.You can find Suneel at: Website | Instagram | Episode TranscriptIf you LOVED this episode you’ll also love the solo episode I recorded about discovering what makes you come alive, what we call your Sparketype.Check out our offerings & partners: My New Book SparkedMy New Podcast SPARKED. To submit your “moment & question” for consideration to be on the show go to sparketype.com/submit. Visit Our Sponsor Page For Great Resources & Discount Codes Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

I always come back to my grandfather's porch in New Delhi, where he first talked to me about Dharma and described it as like this inner flame inside of you. And the way that I sort of see this inner flame now is that either it's going to burn you up inside or it's going to light up the world around you. But you get to choose. But I don't think anybody really escapes that choice. And so as we talk about things like purpose and meaning, it can be sometimes tempting to see them as like these really flowery, nice sort of things. But I think the truth is that it can hurt like hell when you've got this thing inside of you that's not being expressed. It can eat away. And I think what it means to live a good life is really to, in some small way, start to bring that out so that you

can start to light up the things that are outside of you. So have you ever achieved a long sought goal only to feel oddly empty inside as if something was still missing? In today's world, it's all too easy to get caught up in chasing superficial markers of success, wealth, status, fame, thinking that they will make us happy. But what if that formula is actually backwards? What if real joy and fulfillment can only be found by first discovering and expressing our unique inner essence, our dharma? My guest today, Sunil Gupta, knows that feeling all too well. After founding and selling a successful health tech startup, he realized that checking off those outer boxes of achievement failed to bring lasting inner satisfaction.

He was outwardly successful, but inwardly empty. So he turned to teachings and stories that he'd heard often as a child, but wanted nothing to do with back then. Focusing on an ancient Hindu concept called Dharma, or what he describes as the sacred duty to express one's inner essence throughout her work, he began to rediscover meaning and purpose and a sense of calling. And this journey led him to uncover everyday paths to integrate our ambitions with what truly matters more deeply down inside. As an author and visiting

scholar at Harvard Medical School, Sunil studies the most extraordinary people on the planet to help discover and share simple, actionable habits that lift our performance and deepen our sense of purpose. His work has been featured everywhere from CNBC to TED to the New York Times. In our conversation, he shares insights from his newest book, Everyday Dharma, and reveals really practical ways that we can honor our inner fire through the work that we do each day, even within the duties and constraints of everyday life that, without deeper inquiry, would make it seem difficult, if not impossible. How can we express our essence more fully

through our work, our relationships, our community? What simple habits can help us live with a deeper sense of meaning and purpose day to day? These are some of the questions that we explore. And Sunil offers an abundance of powerful tools and strategies and ideas to help you discover and live your calling. So excited to share this conversation with you.

I'm Jonathan Fields, and this is Good Life Project. It's also the thinnest Apple Watch ever, making it even more comfortable on your wrist, whether you're running, swimming, or sleeping. And it's the fastest-charging Apple Watch, getting you eight hours of charge in just 15 minutes. The Apple Watch Series X. Available for the first time in glossy jet black aluminum. Compared to previous generations, iPhone XS or later required,

charge time and actual results will vary. Mayday, mayday. We've been new book, there's some interesting parallels, I think. And you have been existing in, it sounds like having a foot in different worlds, the world of business, the world of startups, the world of well-being, but also different notions of well-being, Western well-being, Eastern well-being, and how do these worlds do the dance and come together? I know in the business side of things, founded two companies, as you've described and told the story, those did not have the exits or the ends that you wanted, but then end up founding a third company that does very well, gets acquired. On the surface, from the outside

looking in, this is the dream, right? This is what everybody, especially when you're founding companies, you're all in, you're working generally 24-7. This is your life. And when you're building something that gets acquired, especially by a company that is in a position to continue to do really extraordinary and good work with what you started, from the outside, it really looks like, well, this is everything. This is what you work for. And yet the way you describe it, that's not what your internal experience was like. Mm-hmm. Yeah. I couldn't name it at the time, but now I sort of have looked to the research and have found Dr. Tal Ben-Shahar's work. And what Dr. Tal Ben-Shahar

describes this as is the arrival fallacy. And the arrival fallacy is this notion that one day we're going to hit this threshold where we have accumulated enough wealth, enough status, enough achievement, enough of a bio where all of a sudden we're going to feel fulfilled. We're going to feel this sense of lasting happiness. And of course, what ends up happening is that every time we get to a goalpost, it moves again, right? And again and again. And that happens at sort of in big moments, but it also happens in these small moments as well. You know, that we want to get the next client, the next deal, the next thing. And it leads to these temporary moments of satisfaction. And then all

of a sudden, we're kind of back to where we were before. And for me, I felt like after having failed twice at starting companies, you know, having those have to be like wound down, that once I actually got something that worked, it was going to reach I was going to have like, you know, this feeling of lasting fulfillment, that it was all going to have been worth it. And then I get it. And sure, it is a beautiful moment when it happens, right? We celebrate with the team and, and my wife and I go, I remember we go to a really, really nice dinner. You know, we've been eating like very, very basic food for those years. And like, we were like splurged on a really nice dinner in the city. And, but then like literally within a few weeks, I kind of went back to a base state where I was kind of like, we were like splurged on a really nice dinner in the city. And, but then like literally within a few weeks, I kind of went back to a base state where I was kind of like, all right, now like what's next and what's next after that. And, you know, I think that what I didn't realize at the time, but I kind of realize now is that this sense of emptiness that I think so many of us feel right now, I think it stems a lot from this. It stems a lot from this idea that we're trying to

hit these outside achievements, but realizing that this outside achievement isn't necessarily leading us to inner satisfaction. So then like, what is it that we do? What's the answer to that? Is it to give up our ambition? Because I certainly don't want to do that. And I don't think other people do as well. I like, I want to achieve things. I want to do things, but at the same time, I don't want to be on this sort of hedonic treadmill where none of it is actually leading to happiness. That is what kind of led me back to this, this ancient philosophy of Dharma, because as it turns out, this trade-off of ambition and joy has been something that's, you know, existed for millennia, right? And there have been different bodies and different ways of

sort of, you know, dealing with this and offering tactics and really practical methods. Dharma for me was the practice of my ancestors. And it was something that I completely rejected as an Indian kid growing up in the United States. I wanted to have nothing to do with Eastern philosophy. Like I wanted to be as white and as American as I possibly could. I'd literally put like white baby powder on my face at times before I went to school to try to fit in a little bit more. But when I got to a point in my life, when I felt completely burnt out, completely lost the way that I think a lot of people feel right now, that's when I started to go back to these, this philosophy that's really kind of existed for

thousands of years and helped a lot of people through, I think, a very, very similar predicament, which is how do I start to find meaning in the work that I do? Yeah. And that's certainly a place that so many people have found themselves over the last three years. I think your case was exiting a company and realizing I did all the things, I checked all the boxes, and I don't feel the way that I thought I would feel. But for so many others, the last three years have shown them that, wow, I've actually devoted 10, 15, 20, 25 years of my life to a particular path and a particular set of expectations. And maybe I've checked most, if not all of the boxes that I was working towards. And yet I'm finding myself in this place where it's not giving me everything that I thought I would feel. You know, Dan Gilbert wrote this

great book that kind of started out the happiness book lineage, you know, a chunk of years back called Stemming on Happiness, where he described something he called effective forecasting, which is our ability to actually predict how we think we'll feel in some future. And I remember reading that and him describing the research that shows we are awful at actually trying to predict how we think we'll feel in a certain future state. In fact, he showed the research says we would get a more accurate answer if we found somebody that was 20 years older and asked them how they felt than if we actually just tried to figure it out for ourselves. I'm curious what you

think is happening in our wiring that leads to such a big disconnect between our ability to actually figure out how something will make us feel and to actually feel it. The way I sort of describe this in the book that has been an effective model for me is really the difference between outer success and inner success. So if we think about outer success as wealth and status and achievement, then inner success is joy and its meaning and its purpose, right? The squishy, what we might consider come out of the squishier things. And the way that I had sort of gone wrong in my career and in my life has been almost putting these two things at battle with one another. You know, there are times in my life where I'm like, I'm going to optimize for outer success. And then I burn out and I'm like, well, I'm just gonna optimize for inner success. And what that means for me is I want to like, you

know, I want to kind of like distance myself from work, or I want to start to like really kind of, you know, quietly quit, even though that term wasn't even around back then, but I've certainly done that. But I play these two things off of one another. Whereas I think we can have both. But I think the misperception that I had, the fundamental thing that I got wrong is in believing that somehow outer success is going to lead to inner success. That somehow I'm going to get enough of that, that I'm going to feel this feeling inside. It never worked that way. So again, is the answer then to renounce outer success? I don't think so. But I think the answer though can be to reverse the flow. To start with what really like matters to you, or at least expressing

what matters to you through what it is that you do, right? And this alignment of who you are with what you do, sometimes we feel like we have to like abandon our life entirely in order to transform the way we live. What I hope this book shows more than anything else is really the stories of, you know, the grocery store clerks, the plumbers, the nurses, the people who were, you know, in positions where they couldn't necessarily quit their job. They couldn't abandon their salary. They had people who were relying on them, but they still found little ways to start living their dharma. And it may be worth like defining what dharma is. Yeah, let's do that.

Dharma is one of those words where, you know, it does get tossed around sometimes, and it can mean different things to different people. If you look at like the definition of dharma in the Bhagavad Gita, which was like one of the first places to really put it into contemporary sort of thinking, they define it as your sacred duty, right? And then the question is, duty to what? Duty to whom? And, you know, the way my grandfather really described this to me is it's a duty to the fire burning inside of you. He called this your essence, right? You've got something inside of you that really wants to get out. We all do. And then the question is, how do you express that? And when you're expressing your essence, you feel alive, you feel creative, you feel lit up. And when you're not, you can feel lost. You can feel really depleted,

you know? And I think so many of us are feeling that way right now. You know, the number one, for a lot of us, for many of us, the studies show the number one determiner of our mental health is actually our job. It's actually what we do each day. And yet the vast majority of us, the studies show the number one determiner of our mental health is actually our job. It's actually what we do each day. And yet the vast majority of us aren't actually enjoying our work. And that's a big problem. The purpose of the book is really about how do we start to find our Dharma again? And then I think more importantly, how do we live it when we are in a life where we have lots of other duties, when we have aging parents, when we have kids to take care of, we have bills to pay, we have back-to-back meetings? How do we live our dharma then?

Yeah. I mean, it's such an interesting question. And I love that you focus on not extracting yourself from the real world in order to actually try and figure this thing out. You know, I know a lot of the references that you draw from Dharma come out of some Hindu traditions. I look at Buddhism also, and I always thought it was fascinating to me that in Buddhism, there are two distinct paths that are defined. There's the monastic path for those who do want to withdraw themselves

from everyday life, but there's also a householder path. There's a very specified way to say, no, actually for many of you, maybe most of you, like the path is to stay in the real world, to stay with the daily duties, with the family, with the work. But here's a way that you can do that too. And there's a really interesting overlap between that and the ideas that you share. Interesting that you bring up the Bhagavad Gita also, like the story of Arjuna, where it's really having a conversation with God about like, there's this thing that I feel like I have to do, but I don't want to do it. And this involves great battles and violence, including towards people that this particular person cares about. And yet it's profound in that the conversation leads him

to effectively say, and yet still, this is why I'm here. This is my dharma and this is what I have to do. Even if there are so many things inside of me that are saying, I don't want to do this. And the fact that that scripture, that text, really an epic poem was written so long ago and is so relevant to everyday life today. It's so powerful. Yeah. Yeah. You know, it's the script that I grew up reading and always struggle with it because it does take place on a battlefield. And I'm like, wait a second, we're supposed to be sort of peace loving, you know? And like I grew up, most of my family's vegetarian, like they wouldn't, they wouldn't harm a thing. Like, and yet there's this pretty gory sort of battle taking place. When I guess I, I mean, there's so many different interpretations of the Bhagavad Gita.

The one that gives me sort of the most comfort at least is, is that the battle is really a symbol and a metaphor for what's happening inside of you, right? It's you being torn for these different parts of you. And the parts that are being torn is the sense of duty and responsibility and how it balances out with Dharma. That's where it gets really, really important for me because sometimes you mistake something like Dharma or even the word purpose with what you do. And Dharma is not what you do. It is who you are. And it's how who you are gets expressed through what you do. So jobs for us, you know, we can kind of identify with them. That's who I am. But no,

your job is actually a vehicle, a way for you to start expressing a little bit more of who you are. One of the stories in the book that, you know, I've been sort of, I think, attracted to the most because it's very, I think, relevant to where we are right now is a nurse named Karen who wishes that she could have rewound the clock and pursued her path as a writer. That's what she wanted to do. But when she was in college, her parents really pushed her hard to go into medicine. So she goes down the nursing path and becomes pretty successful as a nurse. But there's always that inner fire that never got expressed, that never was able to come

out. But the way that she starts to express it is through patient paperwork. She finds a way to start writing. Most nurses would just type out the clinical details, like here are the bios, here are the measurements, and then hit print. Karen started to use that as an opportunity to really express this essence as a writer. And she would write about who the patient was, who do they love, what do they love to do, who do they care about. And she'd almost write these really beautiful mini novels for each patient. And this paperwork, this mundane paperwork, started to get passed around the hospital from doctors to nurses because it reminded them of the humanity of what they did. So all of a sudden, she is coming alive. Her title, by the way,

has not changed at all. She is still a nurse inside a hospital, but every day, she is now bringing the spirit of being a writer to her job. I love that story. I think also because it really illuminates how often we don't understand that there may be paths available to not just discover what this thing is inside of us, but also to let it out without having to just wholesale change course to cause major disruptions and blow up everything that we've built up until the state, which as you said earlier, a lot of people can't for purely practical reasons. We're supporting

families. You have responsibility, whatever it may be. You describe what you call, you sort of describe as these four different chisels to help. It's almost like you're chiseling away that which hides the essence. Walk me through these because I think they're really powerful for our listeners. Yeah. So one of the intimidating things I think about concepts like dharma, the reason that it took me so long to kind of circle back to this thing that I had learned as a kid is because it can feel like it's a lot of work, right? Like it can feel sometimes if you're overwhelmed, it can sometimes feel like it's a lot of work, right? Like it can feel, sometimes if you're overwhelmed,

it can sometimes feel like understanding your purpose or your meaning is like one more thing to add to the list, right? The comfort for me came from this idea that dharma isn't actually something that you need to go out on a big search and find. It is already something that is within you. If you're listening right now,

I can guarantee that you have been in touch with your essence. You've been in touch with your dharma before. How long ago that was, it depends, but it could have been when you were a kid. It could have been last week, but we are in touch in some way with our dharma and our lives. Michelangelo would look at a block of marble and he would say, the sculpture is already inside. All I need to do is chisel away the layers that have hidden it. And dharma is very much the same way. It's something that's already inside of you. And sometimes to chisel away, we can do this through these simple practices.

And there are lots and lots of ways to chisel away. But I included four sort of paths that really have helped me in my journey. And the first path is really what I call the bright spots chisel. What I mean by that is if you look at sort of your day and you look at your work right now, whatever that is for you, whether it's working a job or in a community, you look at your job, starting to identify the brightest moments of your work, even if they're temporary and fleeting, can be a very powerful thing. When I work with teams and I work with leaders who seem to be burnt out, a lot of them will

come to me and say, look, I'm miserable right now. I don't like what I'm doing. Then one of the first things I will do is challenge them to look at what are the bright moments though of your day. And almost always people can identify those. They might be small, they might be fleeting, but they're there, right? And those can actually be really, I think, very empowering portals for us to get a glimpse of, okay, that is something that's probably tied to my essence. That's probably something that's tied to my dharma. Like for me, for example, I followed the crowd into tech. Tech is not an industry I'm truly passionate about. I can say that now. There was a while where I would fake like I was, but I'm not. And I spent over a decade working in Silicon Valley because that's what all of the cool kids seem to be doing, moving to Silicon Valley, working in tech, working in startups. And that's what I did. And I followed the crowd, but it wasn't my dharma. And at a certain point in time, I felt so disconnected from who I was. But with the bright spots, what I started to identify was like, there were these little moments in the day when I was really

engaging with storytelling that I really liked. When I was hearing a customer story, I could feel myself come alive. When I was sharing a story with a team member or whether an investor, I could feel myself coming alive. And that's to me started to get me to the point of, okay, I need to start spending more time with this thing. That's when I started to take 15 minutes in the morning before my job started. And I just started to write in a blank journal, right? And that those lines, while most of them went into the waste bin because they were terrible, there were little pearls and those little pearls started to form paragraphs and eventually articles and then eventually books. And that was my path into writing. And that all came from the bright spots of a job that I didn't really like. So that's number one. Number two is what I call

the possibility chisel. And what I mean by that is like, we can sometimes sort of feel like once we sort of identify an essence or identify a thing that we love, we can go almost like very quickly into, I should go do this then. Right. So for me with storytelling, I was like, Oh, I should go be a writer right away. One of the things I've learned to do is to resist that temptation and start to like then expand into all of the possibilities that are out there. So there's a project manager named Mila that I talk about in the book, who was working inside a big company and realized that she really wanted to be a teacher. She really wanted to be a teacher, but she couldn't afford to necessarily go do that because she had a family, they relied

on her salary, they relied on her healthcare insurance, and she didn't have the financial flexibility to quit her job and go do that. So she felt trapped. And then one day a mentor asked her like a really specific question, powerful, very simple question. She says, what go beneath the title of teacher and into what she loves about teaching. Right. And when she really went to that place, what she realized is she just loves helping people grow. Like that's her essence. Right. And yeah, teaching was one way to express that essence, but there are many others as well. And that's where we get into this possibility chisel, which is like, what are all the other possibilities that you can express this thing that you feel like you can only express maybe through this one dream job? Usually when people come to me and say, look, I'm stuck in a place, but I really wish I was that. I'd say, well, okay, describe that dream job for me. Let's get to the essence of what you love about that dream job. Go beneath the title, go beneath the salary. Let's

get into the day to day. What do you really love? And then once we get to that place, what are the other possibilities out there for expressing that? One great way to, I think, expose yourself to these possibilities that I love, this is going to sound strange, is what I call the magazine aisle walk, right? Which is literally like when I go to a magazine aisle, I love it so much because it's basically like the collective Dharma of our planet in one place. Like you, like it's in, it's everything, right? It's magazines about like goats and idiosyncratic things, but it's also very empowering because like it means this thing inside of you, however unique it is. Like it, like if you've got magazines about goats, like you can still

express that. Right. And so what I like to do is I like to go down this magazine aisle and I like to just pull magazines off the rack that are really calling my name. And I try to turn off the part of my brain that's telling me you should grab something. And I try to really stay true to like, what do I really like? What's really captivating me? Like I know being somebody who writes for business audiences, I should probably read the Harvard Business Review, but I don't want to read the Harvard Business Review. Like I'm not, I'm not that interested in it. What I'm more interested in is reading articles about like spirituality and about wellness. You know, I pick up Men's Health Magazine. I'll pick up anything that I see that has like Ram Dass in it. I'll pick up anything with like Ryan Holiday and

Maria Popova, like people who I think are really great spiritual writers, I'll pick up anything with like Ryan Holiday and Maria Popova, like people who I think are really great spiritual writers, I will pick up. But that to me is a great way of really kind of coming back to yourself, walking down a magazine aisle and picking up the covers that are going to pull your name. The third chisel is what I call the Dharma deck chisel, which is like, as you're starting to come up with ideas, ways of like, I'll write down the idea. Like for example, start a podcast. When it's storytelling became clear, it was my essence. I had these like start a podcast, start giving speeches, start writing articles. Like there were all these ideas I had and I would write each one on an index card. And on the back of it,

I would just like a sentence or two on like, why I think that this is like captivating me. Why is it captivating my attention? And then once a week or so, I would sort this deck from top to bottom, right? So I'd just take a quiet, I'd take a quiet walk or I'd go off and I'd leave my phone behind. And from top to bottom, I would sort them from the cards that were captivating me most went to the top, the cards that captivated me least went to the bottom. And what I realized over time is that one or two of those cards remained at the top of the pack, right? Like they were the ones who were just like persistently calling my name. And I knew that that's where I needed to go next. So that's the Dharma deck chisel. And the fourth is what I call a Picasso chisel, right? Then Picasso famously said, the meaning of life is to find your gift and the purpose of life is to give it away.

I think that the crux of that wisdom is really to kind of ask yourself, what would I give away? What would I do for free? And that's not to say, by the way, that you need to go do your work for free or be uncompensated. But if you can answer that question, what would I do for free? That is almost a very direct lens into this thing that you care about so much that is going to free you from all the external validation of the world, right? And free you from the compensation that you have. And then the question is that, like, how do I now start to make a living from that thing? Right. And I think that's just such a better path. It's a system or effective path than basically saying what's going to pay me, right? Like pay me the big bucks and then trying to back into purpose. It's a little more direct to sort of say, all right,

what would I do for free? And then how do I actually make a living from that? I have found that flip to be very effective for my life. I love that you have, you basically described for just incredibly accessible tools that anybody can basically say, okay, I can try this. I can try this. I can try this.

I can try this. And it's all based on this fundamental assumption that this is a process of liberation, not transformation, that the thing that we're going after, it resides within me now. And it always has. not transformation, that the thing that we're going after, it resides within me now and it always has. So I don't need to become or change into something else, which I think a lot of people perceive as a greater amount of effort. And there's a certain fear and a sense of grief that I have to leave behind, like who I've always been, whereas the sense that, no, there's actually a thing that's always been a part of me, but it's obscured.

And my work is simply to remove the things that are obscuring it and then center it and then really just give it some love in my life, in my work. Beautifully said. The Apple Watch Series 10 is here. It has the biggest display ever. It's also the thinnest Apple Watch ever, making it even more comfortable on your wrist, whether you're running, swimming, or sleeping. And it's the fastest-charging Apple Watch,

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Flight risk. You know, the idea of revealing that also, and this can be something that somebody can stumble upon this fairly quickly, or this may take months. This may take years. You know, once you start to get a sense for it, and I completely agree with you, by the way, of the idea of not placing the filter of, but will this support me in the world first, but circling back to that, because it stops you from thinking unconventionally about all the myriad of ways that this thing that you discover might actually be able to support you. But it also, I'm curious what your take is on this. My sense has

always been that your dharma, like using your certain rubric here, may or may not actually be the thing that is going to pay your rent, cover your mortgage. If it is, if you can figure out a way to actually center it on a level and derive value from it on a level where other people will compensate you so that you actually can make it your main thing. That's fantastic. But maybe it's not, but that doesn't mean that you just jettison it from your life. You know, maybe it's something that you're doing on the side. Maybe you're volunteering, maybe you're a companion or a caretaker and that is everything to you. But if you held up that filter, but will it be the main thing that earns my living? You'll deny the fact that it's real and important to you and just walk away from it. Yeah, yeah.

I wholeheartedly agree with that. And one of the chapters in the book that has been most meaningful to me is this idea of bhakti. And bhakti is full-hearted devotion. But when we think about devotion to something, sometimes we can confuse devotion with time, right? We can say the more time we give to something, the more devoted we are to it. But what we miss sometimes is that it can be far better to be full-hearted with something than to be fully scheduled with something, right? The more heart that we can give to a person or to a craft or to our dharma

matters a lot. You know, Toni Morrison was a single mom. She had two kids. She had a full-time job. But, you know, she realized that like writing was something that she had to do. Like she had to do it. She had to mother her children. She said, there were two priorities in my life. I had to mother my children and I had to write. The amount that she was writing was very little each day, but she treated it like a loving relationship. And you know, my wife and I talk about this, like we have two kids. We have an 11 year old and a six year old. And at 6.30 in the morning, the house goes fr freaking berserk, right? But my wife and I wake up just a little bit before that. And from 6.15 to 6.30 every morning,

we have coffee together. We put our phones aside and we just have a cup of coffee together. We're completely giving each other the attention, full attention, being loving with each other and that and those minutes that we have. And what we've realized over time is like that more than anything else has become the cornerstone of our relationship. Yeah, like every couple of years we get we get lucky and we get to go take a little trip together. And every once in a while we get date night in but like that 15 minutes is really where it happens. And the same, I think, is true for our dharma, right? Treating it like a loving relationship, as opposed to, I'm going to wait three months, and then take a week off and be with it for a while. You wouldn't treat somebody that you love that way. You would want to stay connected to it in some way. So I think having these touchstones

is really, really important. The other thing that I think is like, you know, to me, as I was delving into more and more Dharma stories, and what I started to realize is that if you look at people who are like, so busy, the ones that are working like two or three jobs, like, and they're just like, it's paycheck to paycheck. There's also a notion of how do we start to bring our Dharma into our duties, right? And Karen, the nurse is a good example of that. But there's so many others. I mean, like if you look at Eminem, for example, right? Kind of a wild example. But Eminem was like, he was working in an assembly line. He was working in a factory, actually not too far away from where I grew up in Detroit.

And he was constantly looking. He was everything that was around him was grist for his mill, right? The sounds of metal clanking was grist for the mill of his music, right? And his music, he started to kind of bring into the factory as well, like he the beats and, and the ways that he would use his time at the factory to kind of come up with rhythms and rhymes, like, it was all sort of fitting together. And then there is a way to do that. One of my best friends, Rich, had this like really heartbreaking thing happen to him where he actually did do the dream.

He moved to Italy and became a painter. And we were all like, wow, man, like you're, I'm in a consulting firm. Like I'm like, my soul is being sucked and you're living the dream. But his mom got sick and he had to come back to the States and his father had long passed and he became her primary caretaker and he made a vow that he was going to be that person. So he ends up getting a job at Trader Joe's. He's working 60, 70 hours a week. And basically his entire artist life went by the wayside. He was like mixing and mingling with global artisans in Italy. And now he's like unpacking freight trucks, but he started to bring his Dharma to his duties and his duties to his Dharma. And the way that he did that was he started to

look for little opportunities, even inside Trader Joe's where he could start to paint for them, right? Like, like he noted, he would notice like certain walls were a little bit barren. He'd go to the manager and say, Hey, what if I painted something for you here? And he would get compensated for that. And so he started to bring his Dharma to his duties. And then he even started to bring his duties to his Dharma. Like he would start to notice the way that like people looked inside the store. He would notice the shapes and objects. And he started to bring that back to his painting into his studio. I think that we can, again, the framework is that we have our duties and we have our dharma, right? And even just aligning those things just a little

bit more, right, will make a huge, huge difference because what you're doing is bringing just a little bit more of who you are into what you do. And even if we move that one centimeter at a time, it liberates us. Yeah, I so agree with that. And often if we move that one centimeter at a time, it liberates us. Yeah, I so agree with that. And often that feedback mechanism of dharma to duty, duty to dharma, often one provides, it's this seamless thing where one provides the grist for the other, which then fuels the other. And it creates this spiral, which it would seem on the surface, but you're dividing your time, you're fragmenting yourself. But really what's happening is you're figuring out how to use distinct blocks of time in a way where one complements the other, where one nourishes the other and lets the other one

out. And that example of your friend Trader Joe's, I think it's so fascinating on so many different levels. Fundamentally, what you're doing is painting a picture of possibility with all of these different examples also that says, this is real. This is possible even when life gets hard, even when circumstances change in the blink of an eye that you didn't see coming and you were living it one moment and now you're not, but there's a way to potentially get back to it, or at least a lot more than you think might be possible. Which also points out one of the topics you talk about is the notion of comfort and discomfort. This is something that many of us spend our lives running from. It's like, give me the easy button for whatever

it is, relationships, work, fitness, health, accomplishments. What's the fastest way to get from here to there? What's the hack? And in fact, there's a certain value in not just meeting discomfort or adversity along the way or challenge, but also in realizing that it genuinely can contribute to the process of you feeling fully realized and fully expressed. Yeah. For me, I was one of those people who ran away from the discomfort. And I was one of those people who sort of assumed that if I started, if I could just find my purpose, I could just find my calling, then I would be free of this, the discomfort. And in some ways I found the opposite to be true because difficult roads lead to beautiful destinations. And when I was starting to

actually live my Dharma and express myself and storytelling and writing, the obstacle started to mount. But the difference being that I was starting to view it under a different lens and that I was actually starting to find much more purpose in the day-to-day, and I was able to get through that. But more importantly, I think this chapter that I call, it's called Upeka. And Upeka is this art of finding comfort in the discomfort. I was starting to get these practical tools that I could use in these moments of discomfort by studying the way that people have done this in the past. And the metaphor that I love, it really stems from Viktor Frankl's work, which by the way, like for every chapter, it's an Eastern philosophy, an Eastern way of living that is really echoed in Western science. And Upeka is definitely one of those

chapters where Viktor Frankl, neurologist, Holocaust survivor, wrote a lot about what was the main thing that he learned from all of his research and all of the experiences that he had, trauma that he had. And what he said was that in between impulse and response is a space. And inside that space lies our freedom. So these impulses can be annoyances, it can be irritations, it can be bad emails, it can be somebody cutting you off on the road. And the way that we respond to that in between that impulse and response is a space. And inside that space is our freedom. And I love that because I think it's the foundation for really everything. If you don't have space between

something that, that bothers you and the way you respond to it, well, then you can't put any of the tools that you've learned into practice. You can listen to the podcast, you can read the self-help books, you can get the tools and the practices, but if you don't give yourself the space to really draw upon those, then you end up living a life where you're, you're, you're acting on your emotions too quickly. You're regretting things way too often you're making decisions that you that you wish you would have done things differently we took not han vietnamese monk you know nobel prize winner like you know he would surprise audiences when he would get up in front of like these you get to the podium and he would say i'm an angry man and people would be like what do you

mean you're an angry man you're like you're like a symbol of peace and he'd say no I'm an angry man. And people would be like, what do you mean you're an angry man? You're like, you're like a symbol of peace. And he'd say, no, no, I just like anybody else. I had anger inside of me, a lot of anger inside of me. And, but what I've learned is that I can't remove those inner explosives, right? I can't like rid myself of the anger, but what you can do is you can lengthen the wick. You can lengthen the fuse, right? So when the fuse gets lit, there's some time, the length of the fuse before it actually hits the bomb. You can do things to lengthen that fuse. And ultimately, I think that that's

the practice. We're not trying to get or shame these really real emotions. And I think particularly, you know, right now, there's a lot of reason why people might be angry at things. And I don't think it's the right thing to do to shame those emotions or try to push them out. But what I think we can do is we can go to when something irritates me, you know, is really, really important. And for me, I like that home base to be physical, meaning I just like literally putting my hand on my chest, putting my hand over my heart and just tapping a couple of times is a way for me to find a little bit of space in that moment. I was talking to our mutual friend, Mitch Joel, about this. And he said that one thing he likes to do, he likes to wiggle his toes, right? So it's something that no one would even notice,

but if he's like in an irritating conversation, he'll literally wiggle his toes. And that'll be a way for him to kind of come home base before he actually responds to the situation. But your home base can be anything. It can be a physical gesture. It could be something inside your mind as well. You might go back to like a, you know, for you, you live at the Rockies, you know, Jonathan. So it could be like you at your favorite spot, like on the trail, right? But some kind of mental image that lets you, that allows you to give that space before you actually react. That is one way that we can find some comfort in these really, really uncomfortable situations we find ourselves in. I'm so agree with that. And I love the notion also of the fact that we don't have to go and sit in

a mindfulness meditation for a half an hour. That we can create all these little mechanisms and little touchstones, maybe nobody else knows that we're doing them. And yet it creates an anchor in us that literally just kind of says to us, okay, take a breath. Expand the space is functionally what it's telling us to do. And trusting that as that space expands, as we extend the wick, that we'll figure out a better way to respond rather than react in a way that's healthier, that's more constructive. And that also circling back to really the core of the conversation, lets us step into whatever it is that we're moving through, whatever the discomfort is in a way that honors our dharma, that centers it rather than moves us further away from it, which I think is so often what the reactive mode does to us. I know it does for me. I know it does for me.

And I think, you know, for me, the distinction between curiosity and furiosity has been really important. You know, what I've realized is that it's just impossible for me to be curious and furious at the same time. Like those two states cannot coexist, at least non-judgmental curiosity and being furious cannot exist at the same time. So if I can put myself, even in these uncomfortable situations into a moment of being curious does a lot for me. And sometimes it's as simple as like, if somebody is being like annoying or being a jerk, you know, almost just in a very curious way, asking myself internally, of course, just what could have possibly like happened to this person that has sort of pushed them into this, into this path, right? Like, for example, like, you know, like somebody who is like sucking up all of the air in a meeting, right? And you're trying to get a word in edgewise and you can't like, maybe that person had like, you know, like siblings that were always trying to out-compete and outshine one another. Maybe that person had impossible to please parents.

I don't voice or try to, you know, try to find the answers to these questions necessarily, but I allow myself to be a little bit curious about them, like non-judgmentally, I try to be curious about them. When I can put myself in that state of curiosity, you know, I noticed that my furiousness really doesn't have a place to go. Yeah. I mean, because to no small extent, curiosity is also the bedrock of compassion, right? And it's really hard to, if you can truly access compassion, almost everything that we're reacting to in somebody else is a representation of some quality that exists within us also. And the more curious we get about that, the harder it is to say, well, if I'm raging against them or angry

at them, then what in me am I actually raging against as well? And maybe I can open myself, my heart a little bit. I remember talking to Sharon Salzberg a couple of years back. We were in New York City at the time recording, and she was telling me how on the way to the studio, she was walking down the Upper West Side of New York City. And people just pass all the time when you're walking up there. And literally, she was just sort of like, as each person would pass, she would just quietly think to herself, may be well, may be healthy. So she's doing a meditation, a loving kindness meditation, just random lines to strangers on the street as they pass by. And she didn't know anybody. She very likely would never see any of them again, but it put her in a mode of being constantly open about people and

also having a benevolent intent towards them that allowed her to access that on a more ready basis when it was really needed. And I thought that was just such a cool and simple example of how to actually like manifest that in real life. I love that. And I've learned so much from Sharon over the years too. One of the metaphors that Sharon and I bonded over in the past is the idea of like holding a hot mug of tea. And just if you squeeze the mug of tea, you're going to burn your hands, right? Ultimately drop the mug. And it's so counterintuitive sometimes to the way that I think we may be conditioned, which is that when a situation is hot, when a situation is like, you know, rigid

or tight, our instinct can be to try to squeeze it tight, right? To really try to like, you know, grip it and handle it and, you know, deal with it. But oftentimes, loosening just a little bit and having a loose grip on the mug allows you to handle it much better because your hands aren't burning, your attention can be much more in the game. And that's been a hard, that's honestly been a hard thing for me because like grit and hustle is for a long time, all I knew, you know, for somebody who worked in business and tech, every time I would look at any type of, you know, self-help book, or I felt like I was listening to a lecture. It was all about like grit hard and hustle hard.

And, and I did, but the fact is that like, if you look at some of the qualities that are associated with grit, it's always being on, it's being relentless. It's, you know, like all those are also some of the same qualities that are scientifically associated with burnout. All right. And so like, yes, they're grit and hustle are admirable qualities. And yes, there is a place for them. But if all you're doing is gritting, if that becomes your way of life rather than a tool, then you're putting yourself on a path that is not

going to be able to effectively deal with situations because you're exhausted. Yeah, no, I completely agree with that. A very mixed relationship with grit also. A lot of the early research that was done on that was actually based on tasks where the outcome was defined in advance. And they looked at what did it take to get to that defined outcome. The reality is in most of our day-to-day experiences, whether it's entrepreneurship or relationships or whatever it is, the outcome is not defined. You define it along the way. And it's much harder to actualize the qualities of grit in that type of context. And like you said, very often, especially when you have so much ambiguity around

what the outcome is, it just, you end up deep in burnout long before you would ever even get to a point where you understand what the defined outcome is that you were really even striving for. I mean, entrepreneurship is the perfect example. You have an idea in the beginning, you have assumptions, but you don't have anything until you have product market fit. And then you're actually like, what is the business even? And you end up pivoting countless times to figure that out. So maybe grit gets you to the very first well-defined thing, but the reality of what most of us aspire to is not that. It's much more amorphous than that. And grit, in my mind, becomes much more fraught in a lot of real-world contexts. Tell me how to fly this thing. You know what the difference between me and you is? You're going to die.

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people who we may recognize as like Jimi Hendrix to Dr. Martin Luther King to Toni Morrison. But every once in a while, I pulled in like a figure from the East as well. And Mahatma Gandhi was one of those figures who really grounded this chapter. And, you know, I get it because Gandhi is one of these figures who sort of every time I bring him up in front of a classroom, you know, I get it because Gandhi is one of these figures who sort of every time I bring him up in front of a classroom, you know, I lecture at Harvard Medical School and I've done this a few times. I can kind of feel like the collective eye roll in the room because it's kind of like, oh, come on, man. Like he's like, we're talking about this guy who is like, holy, you know, how is he relevant to what's happening in Western society today. But I think people are surprised often to find that Gandhi was very timid, was very shy, had a very, very difficult time. He was an attorney by training who was so embarrassed, so shy in front of a courtroom that he literally sweat through his clothes during his first court case and abandoned the client right there and then. He ran out of the courtroom and could never be hired after that as an attorney. And that's the reason, one of the reasons that he fled India and went to

South Africa was to go to find work. And that's when he started to get involved in apartheid and everything that was happening at that time. And then came back to India and brought those practices with him. The reason I bring it up is because when Gandhi was asked about a fulfilling life and how do we start to live this life, he said, people would often ask him, how do I find myself? How do I find who I am? And he would say very clearly that the best way to find yourself is to lose yourself in the service of others. To find some way to start giving to other people and to start serving other people is in some ways, maybe the most effective chisel

of all. We talked about Michelangelo in the block of marble and the sculpture inside. Sometimes that can be the most effective chisel is when you start to serve other people, you can start to come back into who you are. It also though, is a way for you to come alive in a brand new way. You know, I think like when I look at people who are exceptional at, I think being in front of crowds or, or having like genuine conviction that comes from a good place, it's often not because they're kind of coming from a place of ego, but they do in the book, what I call the spotlight switch, which is that before they do anything, even though it might seem like the spotlight is burning brightly on you, they sort of switch that to who am I really trying to serve

in that moment? And they make sure that the spotlight is on that person. In other words, it's about them. It's not about me. And I use this all the time, Jonathan. I mean, I'm like pretty decent, like in these conversations one-on-one, but I'm actually pretty scared to get up on stage and, you know, speak in front of large crowds. But I do it a lot because, you know, as a writer now, I'm out there sharing my work. And one of the things that often gets me worked up before I get up on stage, like gets me really nervous is, oh my God, like I'm about to get out there and they're all paying attention to me. And like, it's, you know, the spotlight is on me. And one of my pregame routines, one of the things I do right before I got on stage is I literally imagine, I like make a little click, click noise. And I literally imagine the spotlight

shifting away from me to the crowd. Like it's to them. It is about them. It is not about me. And I can feel the anxiety start to leave my body. Like I can literally start to feel myself calm. My nervous system starts to reset through that very, very simple exercise. It sounds like almost too easy and too simple, but it's literally the path that even somebody like Mahatma Gandhi took for becoming somebody who was too shy to speak in front of a small courtroom to literally leading hundreds of thousands of people with his riveting words and, and, and, you know, speeches. Yeah. It's funny. I do. I do my version of that. Like before I can go out to keynote, I literally, I'll find anything that I can write back on the green room. It could be like a post-it note. It could be a whiteboard, whatever it is, like a little piece of paper. And I'll literally just write serve on it just as a cue to me to get out of my head and say, I'm not here to perform. This is not about whether I get a standing ovation at the end of it or whether people room and they're giving you 60 minutes of the day, that's 60,000 minutes of humanity that is being invested in that moment. And it can't be about me. It's got to be about giving them what they need in that moment.

Because like you said, it really does shift something energetically when you do that. It just changes the quality of what you're doing. And my sense is whether it's speaking, whether it's making art, whether you're leading a team in a company, people feel that. People sense it and they respond to it and to you differently. And in a way that often allows you to continue to do the thing more authentically. Yeah. Yeah. I love that, man. Jimi Hendrix, he was asked by a journalist, why do you play? What are you looking to do when you get up on stage?

And he said, well, you know, I would love to like turn the audience on. Like, that's kind of my goal. And this journalist was kind of like, all right, well, so, but Jimi, what ends up happening if that doesn't happen? Like, what happens when you look out at the crowd and nobody's responding to you? And he's like, well, then I'm kind of serving the music. You know, if I'm serving them and even if they're not responding, I'm still serving this music that I'm playing. And so there's this notion of like, if you're serving something, you put yourself in a place where it's not about you. I think for so many of us,

when we make it about ourselves, we put ourselves on a path of burnout. When we make it about ourselves, we put ourselves in a place where it's do or die. And I felt that way when I was up on stage. Sometimes I was like, oh, it's do or die. I got to really knock this one out of the park. In your place of service, it kind of in a very healthy way lowers the bar a little bit because you can end up having more fun with it. That's actually, by the way, one of my favorite chapters in the book, which is about work and play. And it's the chapter that follows Seva, but it's called Lila. And Lila translates into high play. When I started to look at sort of the Western science that really grounds this idea, what it really took me to was Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, author of Flow.

And what Csikszentmihalyi said is that we have these two sides to our personality. We have our exotelic side and our autotelic side, right? You're not one or the other, you're shades of each, but there tends to be one that sort of is more in the driver's seat than the other. The exotelic side of you is really focused on the deadline, focused on the achievement, focused on the goal. And your autotelic side is very focused on the experience itself. You know, what do you like the day-to-day and even the process behind it, right? As boring a word as that is, you're kind of more fixated on that.

And what the assumption was, I think, in high performance, you know, in performance research was that like, it was really exotelic people who were leading society, right? It was the people who were like, had the goals, and they had it set, and they were like, driving away at chipping away at these goals. And I think it was really groundbreaking about Csikszentmihalyi's research is he was saying like, of course, that that does happen. Like there are exotelic people out there. But there is just as many people who are autotelic by nature who are fixated on the experience itself like enjoying what it is that they're actually doing you know it's kind of like um alex low the mountain climber you know he was like you know he's he's obviously like putting himself out there in these very very dangerous situations and someone says like hey like what what's the secret to all that and he he said he, he said, look, the best mountain climbers are the ones who are having the most fun. Right.

And so like, there's this, this blurring of work and play that tends to be this auto telex side of things where you're working and you're, but you're kind of playing as well. And it's a little bit indistinguishable from one another, which sounds a little like anti to what we've like learned. Like we separate work and play with the idea that if you try to fuse these things together, your performance is going to go down. Like you have to take it seriously in order to get great results. But what Csikszentmihalyi showed

is that like, that's not necessarily the case. And in fact, the people who tend to sort of blur these lines between work and play, not only are they having more fun, but they're actually getting even better results. Yeah. I mean, that always fascinated me. I remember going deep into his work and then also into the work of Kanders Erickson, who sort of like studied excellence and expertise and sort of coined the phrase deliberate practice, which then became really popularized by Malcolm Gladwell as the quote 10,000 hour rule, which we know now is like a complete, it's not actually what the research was all about. And I had, you know, like sadly Erickson is no longer with us. I was very fortunate to have the opportunity to sit down with him and ask him some questions because I was really curious because he describes this deliberate practice as being hyper-focused

on iterating on a very specific type of action or goal or outcome and is very open about the fact that he describes this as, this is not fun. This is grueling. This is intense. It's effortful. And then you take the research from Gisemi High. These are people who are completely losing a sense of self. They're losing a sense of time. They're utterly absorbed in the thing itself, which is fundamentally the qualities of play. Flow and play, a lot of similarity is there. And I always thought it was interesting how you have just really different theories, but fundamentally one is about living a good life and one is about being the best at whatever it is that you actually are hyper-focused on being,

but maybe they're not actually that separate. And maybe not. And I think that there's probably great case studies in both camps. For me, I kind of came to this early when I was running my company. I'd started a company called Rise and we did one-on-one health coaching. And we would usually start working with people when they got to that point of real desperation with weight loss. Like they needed to fix something in their life or they were, or they were going to, they were going to, you know, get diabetes. Like they were, they were told by a doctor, you need to do something. And what we would do is we kind of unpack like what they had done so far, what were the, what were the habits that they had tried to

bring into their life. And in so many cases, what we found is that people had gone and done like paleo, right? They'd gone and done like some really rigid diet and they had gotten great results, but those results didn't last very long, right? And so then they ended up sort of bouncing back to where they were before. And now they were coming to us saying, all right, what do we need to do? So we work with like tens of thousands of patients. And what we continually came back to was like Kevin Kelly from WIRE described this very well. He said that we spend a lot of time trying to figure out how to do our tasks better,

right? But we don't spend enough time trying to figure out which tasks we want to do over and over again. We actually enjoy doing over and over again. We actually enjoy doing over and over again. So paleo wasn't going to work for people because they hated it. They freaking loved carbs. And I love carbs. They love pasta and bread, which meant that if they were on paleo, every day was a slog. Every single day was a slog. But what we aimed to do was to find some habits that they actually didn't mind or they actually could embrace. For us, one of the most effective

tools, this will sound so embarrassing. I mean, this is to me, I always like, how is a business built off of something like this? But one of the most effective habits that we would help people build was drinking water before every meal, right? Just simply having a glass or two of water before every meal, not only did it hydrate you and make you feel more energy, but it also reduced your hunger, right? starting to have fun with. They would get specially designed bottles. They would put little locale flavorings in their water. They would do things to make the experience fun and enjoyable. Did they get the results that paleo would give them as quickly as paleo? No, absolutely not. It was much more of a slow burn over time, but the results stuck. And the reason they stuck is because it was a habit they actually enjoyed doing. So I continue to come back to that when I think about deliberate practice versus play, which is like, I think that you can definitely like put your nose to the grindstone and make it work. But I think you're taxing your willpower in a certain way throughout the distance. And the

question is, how long will that last versus you can find what I call in the book, these high quality habits, these habits that you actually enjoy doing. They're getting you a little bit further to your goal. Even if they're not getting you there right away, they're getting you a little bit further subtly towards your goal, but you want to keep doing it. I think that that ends up getting you to where you want to be and keeping you there. Yeah. So agree with that. Once the structure of the scaffolding, the accountability of the thing that forces you to do a thing that makes you better, but that you really don't like, once that falls away, it's over. Whereas if you do something that's 70% as effective, but actually you really enjoy doing it and your mind is engaged with it, you'll do it for life. So it's playing and playing the long

game simultaneously. So one of the things that you sort of circle back around to is this notion that win or lose acting, acting really for your Dharma brings you closer to yourself and unlocks a new sense of possibilities in your life. Like this is like the central theme that you keep coming back to. And you talk about other mechanisms, other, there are essentially eight different paths. We talked about some of them in this conversation, but you know, like fundamentally the notion that there is something that, that exists within all of us that is worthy, that is important, that we don't have to go in search of, but we actually just have to reveal to ourselves. And then the more that we can center that in our lives, in our

work, in our relationships, in whatever it is where it requires effort, just the better everything else gets is a powerful idea that I think, and I think this is a great moment for that idea. So it feels a good place for us to come full circle as well in this container of good life project. If I offer up the phrase to live a good life. What comes up? To live a good life, I think means to express yourself, express who you are. Because I think that the way that I look at it, at least, I always come back to sort of my grandfather's porch in New Delhi, where he first talked to me about dharma and described it as like this inner flame inside of you. And the way that I sort of see this inner flame now is that either it's going to burn you up inside or it's going to light up the world around you, right? But you get to choose, but I don't think anybody really escapes that choice. And so as we talk about things like purpose and meaning, it can be sometimes tempting to see them as

like these really flowery, nice sort of things. But I think the truth is that like it can hurt like hell when you've got this thing inside of you that's not being expressed. It can eat away. And I think what it means to live a good life is really to, in some small way, start to bring that out so that you can start to light up the things that are outside of you. Thank you.

Hey, before you leave, if you love this episode, say that you'll also enjoy the solo episode that I recorded earlier this year about discovering what makes you come alive, what we call your sparkotype. You'll find a link to that episode in the show notes. And of course, if you haven't already done so, please go ahead and follow Good Life Project in your favorite listening app. And if you found this conversation interesting or inspiring or valuable, and chances are you did since you're still listening here, would you do me a personal favor, a seven second favor and share it maybe on social or by text or by email, even just with one person. Just copy the link from the app you're using and tell those you know,

those you love, those you want to help navigate this thing called life a little better so we can all do it better together with more ease and more joy. Tell them to listen. Then even invite them to talk about what you've both discovered. Because when podcasts become conversations and conversations become action, that's how we all come alive together. Until next time, I'm Jonathan Fields, signing off for Good Life Project. The Apple Watch Series 10 is here. It has the biggest display ever. It's also the thinnest Apple Watch Series X is here. It has the biggest display ever. It's also the thinnest Apple Watch ever, making it even more comfortable on your wrist,

whether you're running, swimming, or sleeping. And it's the fastest-charging Apple Watch, getting you 8 hours of charge in just 15 minutes. The Apple Watch Series X. Available for the first time in glossy jet black aluminum. Compared to previous generations, iPhone Xs are later required. Charge time and actual results will vary. Mayday, mayday. We've been compromised.

The pilot's a hitman. I knew you were going to be fun. On January 24th. Tell me how to fly this thing. Mark Wahlberg. You know what the difference between me and you is? You're going to die. Don't shoot him, we need him!

Y'all need a pilot? Flight Risk.