Ten Percent Happier with Dan Harris - 106: Shiza Shahid, Malala Fund Co-Founder

Episode Date: November 1, 2017

Growing up in a post-9/11 Pakistan, Shiza Shahid had what she called an "activist childhood," where she volunteered in prisons, refugee camps and disaster relief efforts after the 2005 Kashmir earthquake. When the Taliban issued an edict banning girls from going to school, the then-Stanford University sophomore created a secret summer camp in Pakistan for girls, one of which was a 12-year-old Malala Yousafzai. When Malala was shot in 2012 by a Taliban gunman, Shahid co-founded the Malala Fund to promote Malala's story of perseverance and advocacy for girls' education. See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

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I'm Dan Harris. We have a great example this week of somebody who recently adopted meditation and is putting it to use in a fascinating, fast-paced, high-pressure environment. Shazza Shahid is an entrepreneur, she's an investor, she's a speaker on issues around women's rights. She is also a venture capitalist and is perhaps best known for having co-founded the Malala Fund with Malala Yusuf Zai

who was shot in Pakistan simply for attending school and went on to win a Nobel Peace Prize and Shiza had a pre-existing relationship with Malala under some interesting circumstances that you'll hear about when we let her tell her story and has really been with Malala at many key steps in her journey after having survived that horrible attack and Shiza's embrace of meditation and the ways in which she's using it. I found to be really interesting and and also she's just kind of impressive in a number of less ways so without further ado here's schizza.

Thank you for doing this. Appreciate it. It's a pleasure to meet you. It's a pleasure to meet you. You're already making me feel bad that you've accomplished more in your early mid-20s than I have in my mid-40s, but... In my late 20s. You're in your late 20s? How old are you? 28. It is okay.

Fair enough. You still accomplished a lot. Plus, where I come from, people live shorter lives, so relatively speaking, where? Where did you grow up? Pakistan. No, where in Pakistan? Islamabad. I mean, many times. think there are many times. Yeah. I mean many times. I was I

I spent a lot of time in the Islamabad Marriott which then got blown up. My sister got married there. Really? Yeah. It was a very nice place. It was. They had great Chinese food. They did. That's right. They had great Chinese food. I remember I had never been to Pakistan. I didn't know anything about it and then 9-11 happened and I got sent to Pakistan and I just pictured something very basic. I just didn't know what to expect and then I show up and the place I'm saying is the Islamabad Marriott, which you know I had a laboratory chandeliers and fancy food. It was not at all what I expected. And the joke about Islam about is it's 15 minutes away from Pakistan. Yeah, I mean it was carved out of essentially a forest, so it's pretty well manicured. Yes. But it's very sleepy. It's a very small town. Yeah.

Not much to do. But nice. Nice. But when the McDonald's opened, it was the biggest thing that happened there. So many things I want to ask you about because you're up to so many interesting things. But let me just start with the question I always start with, which is how did you get into meditation,

what kind do you do? So I'm still getting into meditation, but I was in New York and I was building a startup called the Malala Fund, which is a now global education nonprofit, and I was exhausted, I was traveling all the time, and I was surrounded by entrepreneurs who were kind of building companies as well, and we would share things that worked for us in having more energy and being able to be more present, and so I started to hear a lot about meditation, and my initial

reaction was that's not going to work for me. I'm way too ADHD. And the earliest types that I tried, I struggled with, especially, you know, focusing on the breath. It never quite worked for me. But I kept hearing about it over and over, and so it was something that was in the back of my mind.

And then this last December, I get very self-reflective in the back of my mind. And then this last December, I get very self-reflective at the end of every year. And I was kind of taking some time and reading more, and I just tried different types of meditation. And it started to stick. I did a lot with sound. I did a lot with body scans, and I realized that those just worked better for me.

And so this year, I would say I've meditated, you know, almost every day. I'm not religious about it, but, you know, if I don't do it for a day, I definitely miss it. And I just kind of find time and use that to do it for a couple of minutes and sometimes it's 10 minutes and sometimes it's half an hour. And I never thought I'd be just sitting and meditating for half an hour. So.

That's incredible. It's a pleasant surprise. I have to say, you must be, I mean, formation of a new healthy habit is a famously hard thing to do. So would you say that you're a particularly disciplined person or did you just find something that was working for you and therefore the rewards reinforced the habit? I'm very undisciplined.

In fact, that's one of the reasons I don't have a daily practice that I do at the same time, because that's hard for me to convince myself of. I have to in the moment feel like, this is the right time, and this is how I'm gonna do it today. But I think what happened was the initial times I tried it, the structure wasn't pleasurable in the least. And when I tried it later on

with different formats, in particular with music or focusing on body sensations which can actually be quite intense, there was an element of pleasure. And I think that a lot of people try meditation and they think it sucks and it's painful. And I believe this, I thought, you know, you just have to do it and then you feel the benefits afterwards. What I didn't realize was if you found something that worked and were able to get into the zone, it was actually very pleasurable. And once I found that pleasure in the practice, then it was something that I could keep going back to. And what do you think you're getting out of it?

Get with somebody with the intensity of your schedule and amount on your plate the importance of what you're doing, What do you think you get? I think it helps tremendously with anxiety and with being able to be with yourself without needing to fill it, to fill the space with something, whether that's distracting yourself with television or food or people. I think when you're running around a lot,

you tend to get a lot of adrenaline highs all the time. And that feels good, but at the end of the day, or when that adrenaline rushes and happening can become very difficult to be with yourself. And I think this is something that a lot of entrepreneurs face, because it's always so high stakes. And then when they pause, there's this discomfort and they need to fill that discomfort with something. And for me, meditation allowed me to be with myself and find pleasure and calm without

needing to fill it with something or someone. And then it allowed me to really notice the thought patterns as well and to see how unkind I could be to myself how judgmental and how frivolous and useless a lot of the thoughts that I was having were. And so it allowed me to see some of the things that occupied my mind and the fears that I had, a lot more clearly, and then be proactive about trying to address those. I'm here. You are like nine months in and a great spokesperson already for the practice. That's it. I mean, you just described what this thing does for you. Just to be your less entranced and chanted by this non-stop conversation you're having with yourself where you're just constantly your ego is just giving you terrible ideas, you know,

and you therefore make bad decisions that aren't dealt with down to your benefit. Yeah, you know, I grew up in a religious family, so my parents are practicing Muslims, and they prayed five times a day. And I always thought I was kind of crazy. I was like, you know, if we had to belong to a religion it could not be one of those where it was, you know, two hours in a Sunday, you know, five times a day is an intense amount of prayer.

And I now look back at that and I think of the benefit of pausing five times a day and reflecting and being at peace with whatever is happening and becoming deliberate about what it is that you're trying to create in your life. And I think that a lot of more secular societies are now trying to figure out what do we supplement prayer with or religion with. And for me that was definitely something that was important.

What's your relationship to Islam now and what do you think your parents would think of you meditating instead of praying for a ton today? I mean, I think meditation has roots in most religions, right? For sure. most religions, right? And I think that, you know, the Sufi branches of Islam had deep meditative practices. I'm not an, I'm just gonna jump in for a second. I'm not an expert in Sufi Islam, but I believe they do this thing, they swirl,

they're super dancing. And my understanding of that is that it does put you into a meditative state, the twirling. Yeah, so there's meditative states and ecstatic states as well. I think meditation is pretty universal. I'm quite secular in my belief systems. I think there's value in all religions, and it's kind of what you make of it. But I do think that it's important that we have something

that allows us to be spiritual and to be connected to something that's more meaningful. I love that you went through a process that a lot of people go through, which is you thought about meditating and then thought, well, I can't do that because I can't pay attention to anything that long. I think you said before to ADHD, this is something I hear all the time from people. I would love to meditate, but I can't. My mind's too crazy.

I have a bunch to say about that. One of the things I have to say about that is that everybody's mind is crazy. And that's just the way the human condition is. That's the mind evolution has left us with. But I love that you actually investigated what works best for you. I don't know a lot about meditation with music, but I do know quite a bit just from personal experience about body scan meditation, which is where you kind of systematically pay attention

to parts of the body kind of sweep through the body and feel the sensations that are there. And speaking from my own experience, it's a really powerful and kind of sometimes cut, as you said before, very pleasurable kind of meditation. Yeah, absolutely. I think that there is something to what type of meditation does your personality best react to. And I haven't heard much in this space. I think there's definitely something to different forms for different people. And, you know, for me, focusing on the breath, it's something I can do deeper into a couple of minutes of practice. But it's not something that works for me, or even today works for me instantly. And I wish there was a little bit more information on what types of meditation you could try based on what type of person you are.

Well, like a good venture capitalist, you are identifying and opening a something that needs to be done. And this is absolutely something that needs to be done. I think it's true not only that we, that different people take to different kinds of meditation, but you may take to different kinds of meditation at different times of the day and at different times in your life. So I have maybe like four or five moves that I make and it really just depends on what time of the day it is

and what's going on and where I am. And I think it would be a really useful service It really just depends on what time of the day it is and what's going on and where I am. And I think it would be a really useful service to provide to people that you can come in. You know, maybe we take a look. I don't know what the metrics are. Like, well, do we look at your brain? Do we interview you or do we just have you try a bunch of stuff? But for sure, for sure, you are onto something with that.

There are a bunch of other things we can talk about as it pertains to meditation, but I do, I wanna hear a little bit more about what you're up to professionally, and you've made some, you talked about the Malala fun. Can you tell me about that? Sure, so I go back to how it all began. So I grew up in Pakistan as you know, and was born into a pretty modest,

self-made traditional family. And my parents made the revolutionary decision to send me to a good private school. It wasn't that good, but it gave me upward mobility. I got to give things like the SATs and learned English well. But I was growing up at a time when Baga's son had a lot of challenges. I mean, traditionally, it's, it has a second high school, we're not of school in the entire world. It's ranked the second worst place to be born a woman,

but at the time that I was growing up, there was rising violence, terrorism. It was a post-9-11 world. And I, at a young age, became very passionate about trying to make a difference and understand what was happening around me. So I kind of grew up in this weird activist childhood. I was volunteering in women's prisons, in refugee camps, in post-disaster relief.

You probably recall there was a very big earthquake in Pakistan and I was quite involved in helping earthquake victims afterwards. And then I became very active in protesting the then military government. And. And. And. That was there for that, I remember.

The lawyers in the street. Yeah. So I would, you know, sneak out to protests. Sneak out. Yeah, my father was, well, for one, they were legitimately concerned about my safety. And for another, my father had joined the Navy. He had lost his father when he was very young.

And to essentially get an education, he'd joined the Navy, the cadet college is very young. And so we were essentially not allowed to protest because of his job, because he served the government. But they were very, they didn't stop me. They told me not to do it, but when I would sneak out and they would find out, they would let it be. So that was my childhood, and I ended up.

Like usual parents, or I'm sorry to interrupt, just want to point out that Pakistan has a very conservative society. My understanding, you'll correct me if I run a foul of the facts here. But in my, from what I can glean having been there many times, very conservative, very religious, patriarchal. And so to have parents who allowed you to do what you were doing, that seems unusual.

Yeah, they, yeah, I was a third, the youngest child, so they were mellowed by the time I was growing up. My siblings were older, they'd left for college, so they definitely did some things that were very forward-thinking, like putting us in private schools when they couldn't afford it, and when we could have gone to the military school, which was still pretty good compared to what most children were getting access to. And then, you know, they practiced what I called the Neville-Linton neglect. You know, they didn't overparent me at all. They were like, she's fed, she's going to school, she's safe, she's fine. And, you know, in the US, you see a lot of very active parenting with, you know, four-year-olds in private schools and violin classes. And I think what that allowed me to do is because I was on my own, I could figure out what I wanted to do and get out there and be a lot more entrepreneurial.

But when I was 18, I applied to college and I'm getting a scholarship to Stanford. I didn't really know what Stanford was. I just knew there was one school in backstab and I could picture myself going to and I should probably have a backup. So, you know, applied nightly to the U.S. ended up getting, you know, fluoride to go to Palo Alto. And that was the first time I was really exposed to entrepreneurship and tech and I realized that the challenges that I was trying to solve on the ground in Pakistan, brick by brick, school by school, you could do a lot of that sometimes more scalably with technology and entrepreneurship.

I also realized that while I was in the bastion of innovation. The people around me were not exposed to deep poverty. They didn't have the perspective of the world that I did. And so very often, they were innovating for their own friends. They're on social circles. So it was, you know, food delivery apps and dating apps and drones that deliver your tacos. I didn't make that last one up.

And so I thought maybe there's maybe my opinion has value here. So I became very interested in this intersection, but at the same time things in Pakistan were getting worse. And there was an insurgency in the north of Pakistan in the Swant Valley, and a group affiliated with a Taliban took over. They became quite violent. They began to blow up girls' schools. And in January 2009, when I was a sophomore, it's Stanford declared an all-out ban on girls' education. And so here I was at Stanford,

getting this incredible education and girls close to where I had grown up were being told they couldn't go to school. And I thought, you know, maybe there is something I can do to raise awareness because people didn't really know this was happening. Journalists were not able to gain access very effectively to the area to report on what was happening.

And those in the insight had always been so isolated that they didn't really have the networks and the connections to get the word out. And so I ended up going back to Pakistan and I created a secret summer camp in Islamabad. And I snuck out about 27 school girls from the swamp alley to Islamabad. And I essentially had two goals. One was teach these girls to tell their stories effectively so that they can advocate for peace on their own behalf. And the other was make sure that the military politicians, journalists hear these stories

firsthand so that they know what's happening from a school girl's perspective and will The other was make sure that the military politicians journalists hear these stories firsthand, so that they know what's happening from a schoolgirl's perspective and will be moved in Irvinge and reestablish law and order. So Malala was one of those schoolgirls. She was 11 at the time that I first connected with her and 12 when she came to my summer camp. And then she was shot three years later. And I had graduated from Stanford by then. I had taken my first job out of college at McKinsey.

I'd asked them to move me out to the Middle East. We should tell people what McKinsey is. So McKinsey is, you know, regarded the top business consulting firm. And I had no idea what it was before. Very hard job to get. It's a hard job to get. It was, you know, something I didn't really know

was a thing until I was graduating. And I looked around for jobs. And I realized, you know, I was a non-profit sector, it doesn't value talent very highly. And I felt that if I could get a strong business training and then maybe a fancy business school degree, then I could combine my two worlds of impact and business and do something at the intersection that Stanford had taught me to explore. And I was a year into my time at McKinsey when Malala was shot. And so of course I was personally very upset and went in to be with her and her family.

And Miraculousy she recovered and suffered no brain damage. And I should recover. I started to get phone calls from people from friends in America and around the world who had heard this story and they wanted to help. And so I went to Malala and her family and I said, you know, I think people want to help you. What should they do? And they turned to me and they said, you know, we're fine.

You should tell them to help other girls who are trying to get an education. And so that was really the beginning of my own realization that what Malala had been through could be more than a day in the new cycle and that she wanted to continue to make a difference. And there was an opportunity to take this and try and change the world in a positive way. Hey, I'm Aresha and I'm Brooke. And we're the hosts of Wunderys Podcast, even the rich, where we bring you absolutely true and absolutely shocking stories about the most famous families and biggest celebrities the world has ever seen. Our newest series is all about

drag icon RuPaul Charles. After a childhood of being ignored by his absentee father, Ru goes out searching for love and acceptance, but the road to success is a rocky one. Substance abuse and mental health struggles threaten to veer Roo of course. In our series Roo Paul Born Naked, we'll show you how Roo Paul overcame his demons and carved out a place for himself as one of the world's top entertainers, opening the doors for aspiring queens everywhere. Follow even the rich wherever you get your podcasts. You can listen ad-free on Amazon Music or the Wondery app. So tell me more about what exactly the fun does.

Sure. So how it began was really, you know, I was 22 and Milalo was shot. And I started to help her think about there was, you know, there was interest in her story. And I wanted to help her think about, you know, there was interest in her story and I wanted to help her make sure that she told the story in her own words on her own terms. So I essentially started to advise them on, you know, being very careful and deliberate about what they said next and help them put in place for lack of a better word, a storytelling plan. And we ended up putting out two books that became bestsellers and then a film that did really

well and started actually recovered to be really thoughtful about going to a few specific places and talking about a few specific policy issues on girls' education such as when 300 girls were kidnapped in Northern Nigeria, we thought that would be a really important time to go and lend support and lend visibility. And so I was really helping construct this plan of, you know, what, of how she shared her story and what issues we had a voice on that we thought we could authentically represent and bring deeper compassion and awareness to. And then as that story started to resonate, it was really striking how many people were

moved by it. And it was something where, if you were a girl in Afghanistan, you identified with Malala, and if you were the parent of a kid in the Upper East Side in Manhattan, you were like, you should go to school, don't you know Malala? Got shot for going to school? I just had this universal appeal. And it really struck a chord. And so then the question was, okay, people are inspired. What are we asking them to do? And that's where the idea of the Malala fund was born. And I had no intention of doing this full time.

I was just kind of doing this on the side and helping. And Malala and her father said, we're not gonna do this unless you drive it initially, because in those early days, they felt that I understood their culture and I understood the West, and there was this deep relationship of trust. And so, so I quit McKinsey,

Moved to New York and created this organization. And so what it does is it does three things. One is storytelling, so whether that's Malal's story or the stories of other girls who are fighting for education. So really giving an emotional personal connection to the broad faceless issue of 130 million girls who are out of school in the world. The second thing it does is it does advocacy around girls education policy. So pushing governments to guarantee 12 years

of free high quality education to all girls. And then the third thing is grant making. So providing grants to innovative organizations around the world helping girls get access to an education. A lot. Yeah. How big an organization do you have? Well, it's growing very rapidly.

And I think the impact of the work has really been in getting other people to the table to collaborate for girls' education innovation. And two and a half years after I started the organization, I was with Malala at the Nobel Peace Prize ceremony. She was 17 and became the youngest ever Nobel Peace Prize winner. So it was really a transformative journey for me. I was 25.

And after that, I realized that, while I believe deeply in the importance of philanthropy as a driver for social change, I was witnessing once again that the fastest growing solutions, whether that was in education or health care or financial inclusion, they weren't being driven by nonprofits, they were being driven by entrepreneurs. And so that drove me back to the West Coast where I launched what I'm working on now, which is an early stage VC fund that invests in mission-driven technology startups. And so are you still with them, Ola-Lafan?

I'm co-founder and I'm a close friend and advisor and cheerleader for the organization. The organization's thriving has a great team and is all grown up, really. So... I mean, it's quite remarkable to have started an organization, see it get to maturity and be able to leave with confidence that it will continue to exist. Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. You know, my husband likes to joke that the first time I met him on a very first date, I was early in the days of the Malala fund and he said,

what does success look like to you? And I said, well, we want to make a dent on girls' education and I promised Malala and her family, I would do this until we had momentum. And so then later on that night, he was still pushing me on this. He said, what does momentum look like in an ideal world? And I turned him and I said, you know what? If

I do my job really well in 20 years, Milalo will win the Nobel Peace Prize. And she won, I think it was about a year later. So, you know, it was a great privilege to be a part of that and to see her doing so well today. But then to really be able to go out and invest in, you know, the other Milalo,, other changemakers that have big ideas to change the world. But knowing that if their solutions are backed by market forces that allow them to scale, because the nonprofit space while I believe in its power and its importance, I think that it can really struggle to scale solutions. So tell me what kind of company is you're investing in now? So we're investing in anything that we think has the ability to scale rapidly and has an underlying focus on purpose and mission.

So we just invested in a company called Lucy that is, it's a marketplace for new parents and it helps new parents book anything that they need in terms of support services other than the primary care physician. But the reason this is so interesting to me from an impact standpoint is becoming a mother in particular is still the number one reason that women are in 77 cents on the dollar. The US economy was designed with mothers as the greatest subsidy. It wasn't designed for two people to be working and almost always the woman's career suffers. And the fact is we don't know how to redesign the workplace

for working parents. We know we should be doing certain things like providing maternity and paternity leave and flexible work, but we don't know entirely how to redesign it based on different needs of different parents. So out in the valley, you now have companies like Facebook that pay for things like egg freezing, and that's a $40,000 to $60,000 procedure. It's great because some women want to delay having children, but not all women. And it's a painful procedure and it doesn't always work. And so this challenge of how do you provide the right support system, but do it in a way

that doesn't as you that all women need the same thing. All women don't need to work from home. Some women need to get out of the home and be in the office because they have kids running around distracting them at home. And so how do you scale a new kind of workplace that is designed for women and for men who are parents? I mean, I see this a lot with my wife who's a extremely accomplished physician, but finding the amount of flexibility, professional flexibility in order to also do what you want

to do as a mom is just incredibly challenging. And I think this is a huge problem in our economy, for sure. And flexibility is just the name of the game, but a lot of employers aren't set up to provide that flexibility. That's really tough. Absolutely. Absolutely. So all of that to say, we would invest in anything where we think it's first and foremost exceptional founders

who have what it takes. Second, it's something that's scalable and has the right market forces behind it, the right business model. And third, where we think there is a fundamental impact or mission. And I think, you know, the broader conversation here is, you know, my generation wants to work for companies

that give them a sense of purpose and meaning. They want to buy products that represent their values. And I think that we're seeing the shift in capitalism, which essentially is young people saying, you know, several things about how the economy is designed today work fine, but several things don't. So why should companies only be responsible to shareholders and not to other stakeholders? Why should wealth only be created for investors and not for all the people that participate in making

a company successful? Why shouldn't a company successful, why shouldn't a company be more sustainable if it can be? Why shouldn't companies be thinking about diversity from an early stage versus, you know, and this happens a lot in Silicon Valley when there are 300 people in and they realize that they don't have women with a seat at the table. And so I think it's this broader conversation of what is important to my generation and to us in this moment in time,

in evolving the way that we do business, and the way we invest, and the way we consume, and the way we work. We hear so much of late about the experience for women in Silicon Valley. What did you, as a young woman in a position of real, in the traffic out there in the mix, doing interesting, important things, have you bumped up into problems? You know Silicon Valley is a very homogenous ecosystem when it comes to who controls the wealth. And, you know, it's something like 93% of partners and

ventrathons are male. And when you're investing, you know, I just spoke about how when we invest, we invest in a team. And so it matters more than in other industries who has a seat at the table. My network has a lot of women and people of color because I'm a woman of color and because that's been my experience in life. And so it's just inevitable when you have a very specific

background represented across the board in venture capital firms that you're gonna end up with a situation where I think it's less than 5% of all venture capital goes to women founders. And then that cycle continues, right? If you ask someone anywhere in the world to name a great entrepreneur, who do they name? Bill Gates, it's Mark Zuckerberg, it's Steve Jobs, where are the women, right?

And so it's this cycle that is growing and perpetuating. And I think we need more women, more people of color, making investment decisions in Silicon Valley, not just because it's the right thing to do, but because that's when you see innovation that serves a broader group, and you see better companies, and you see better returns. Given the breadth of your responsibility, your shareholders, you have your own personal hopes and ambitions and dreams and the pace of investing, I know a little bit about venture capital because my brothers are venture capitalists and because I have a startup where we have venture capital investors. So I have some sense of just a tiny sense of the pressure as you must face.

I just curious to see what, how is meditation showing up for you in this context? And do you see room for it to grow in interesting ways in terms of how you do your job? Absolutely. Absolutely. I think that meditation is helping me become more conscious leader. I think it's helping me focus on being present with the entrepreneurs that I invest in, so that I am really there to be able to help them. Entrepreneurship is brutal And so you see a lot of depression and suicide amongst entrepreneurs. So mental health is certainly something that's very important to me. I think, you know, and this is

one of the things that I love about this show is when you go deeper into the underlying philosophy behind meditation, you come up with mental models that I think are really useful in shifting how you see the world and the things that you value. I think it was one of the podcasts that you did where you talked about the lack of self and how the self is an illusion. And that's something that I'll often come back to

when I'm in my practice and anxious about things that have happened or things that haven't happened that should be happening. Trying to get outside of this deep sense of self and all of the ideas and all of the expectations I have around self that determine my own sense of self-worth. So I think in addition to the practice, I really enjoy the philosophy because it allows me to then link the two and say, okay, what are the beliefs and values that I have come to associate so closely with that aren't actually true. And so I'll bring that to mind and practice when I'm anxious or stressed out or unhappy

and try to overcome it with the practice plus the underlying philosophy. I think it's a really important point because, and again, I'm just speaking from my own experience that I feel like there's this enormous and a powerful interrelation, a powerful relationship between doing the practice and then actually checking out what I call the intellectual infrastructure of the thing, the abudism of Eastern spirituality, of spirituality generally. And there's a way in which doing the practice, sitting watching your breath, getting distracted, starting again, or sitting, and trying to pay attention

to what your forehead feel like, what does your nose feel like as you do a body scan, and then you get distracted and you start again. There's a way in which that practice can feel kind of dumb after a while. You can lose sight of, why am I doing this? What is the point? But touching, you know, listening to somebody, that's the point of having a podcast like this. Listening to other people who are interesting, listening to teachers, talk about

the philosophy behind it is, the two can really feed on each other in a powerful way. Yeah, absolutely. And, you know, two things that I'd add, one is, and you talked about this a little bit, hearing the thoughts that other people have, I think, very often we feel so alone in our madness. And we don't talk about it very often in social settings. So hearing what other people are feeling and believing about themselves, regardless

of where they are in life, right? Regardless of how successful they are, aren't everyone has the same fears and insecurities. And the other piece of this is becoming aware of your own mortality more often. I grew up with a deep awareness of death because of early experiences and I think reminding yourself of the fragility of life and doing that whether it's through meditation or just through conscious awareness of it, I think that can be very powerful and I know it's an uncomfortable topic particularly here where people don't like to talk about death. You know Steve Jobs said death is the single best invention of life.

We're all going to die, so we're already naked. And I think that that frame of mine just helps you live better. It's such a powerful point. It's a huge part of Buddhism, which is the, for me, I guess I would call myself a Buddhism. And it's about turning into what we try to, we spend most of our time denying, which is that we are here for a short period of time and we don't know when it's gonna end.

And systematically kind of rubbing your face in that reality can give you a massive dose of perspective that is really useful for everyday life. I was recently just going through some non-interesting thing professionally and I spent a lot of time wrapped up in it and middle of that every week on Fridays I go spend a couple hours at this hospice in New York City as part of this Zen Buddhist program that I'm part of and my wife and I do together and go into the hospice while I was worrying about some professional stuff is a great way to realize oh yeah maybe it's not as important as I'm telling myself it is so good on you I think you're exactly right exactly right about that I don't know a lot of venture capitalists

who are thinking about death yeah you know you know, it's interesting. I come from a very different culture and now live in the US. And I'm often surrounded by a lot of privilege. And it's interesting how different societies value different things and undervalue others and how they think about the meaning of a good life. But coming from different cultural perspectives, it's something that has always driven me to think more deeply about what is a good life, what makes all of this matter. And if I have the privilege of living, you know, I'm 28 and I know that, you and I were joking about how young that is. To me, I feel like I've lived longer than a lot of people. I know that that had so much more potential and so much more to offer.

So if you have the privilege of life, what do you do with it? What do you think is a lot? You predicted earlier. You said before you would have done your job if Malala gets a Nobel Peace Prize in 20 years. So you accurately predicted that she was going to get it, you were just off on the timing. You know, what for you in 20 years would constitute having lived a meaningful life? You know, I always wanted to change the world in some way. And I think when I was younger, that came from a sense of,

I only have worth if I've made a dent in the world. That's the only way that I can have value. I think what it's shifted to is, I'm so fortunate. You know, how many girls grow up in a modest family in Islamabad and get to do the things that I have done and be surrounded by the types of people that I'm surrounded by and have this access and have this perspective. So I think it's more a sense of responsibility.

It's to have all of this and to not do something that makes the world a little bit better. I feel like I have a responsibility to do something that makes the lives of some people better or helps us in some way move forward. And then I think it's about, you know, it's about connection with other people. You know, I come from a society that is quite, it's very close knit and that comes with, there's a social structure, everyone has a role. That comes with a lack of personal freedom, but loneliness is a lot lower than it is here in the United States.

And I think that there is a very significant loneliness epidemic happening in societies that are focused more on individualism. But I think it is about, you know, I think a meaningful life is about making a difference and having deep connection. And I think it's about having a value system that is important to you that you live by. And it's not one value system, but kind of a true North. What if people want to learn more about you, where can I do that? They can follow me on Twitter.

So that's Shiza, I say Shiza. Or I have a website which is ShizaSahahah.com. That's my first name and my last name.com. That's really it. Just to echo or amplify something you said earlier about wanting to make a difference, and that will have, that will be the measure of a meaningful life. I mean, very obviously you've already done that, and you're just going to do more.

So I'll be rooting for you. Thank you. And thank you for the work that you do to inspire and teach people about meditation. It's definitely helped me a lot. I know it's helped a lot of other people and you know Going back to the story with Malala. I mentored her when she was 12. I had no idea that Seven years later six years later I would be with her at the Nobel Peace Prize ceremony and so all of that to say you know

The impact that you have in the ways in which you change people, and then they pay it forward. You probably have no idea what they're doing with it. So thank you. I want to thank thank you for saying that. Do I wonder if we can get her meditating someday? Well, she's very, she's very religious. So I think she already has a lot of that practice built in. And I think that's a very significant source of her own strength. She is undeniably strong. Thank you again for doing this. Great job.

Appreciate it. Okay, so that does it for another edition of the 10% Happier Podcast. Please take a minute to leave us a rating and a review. And if you want to suggest topics or guests for the show, just hit me up on Twitter at Dan B. Harris. Special thanks to Lauren Efron, Josh Cohan and the rest of the team here at ABC who helped make this thing possible. And remember, we're now on Tune-in. You can hear our new episodes there five days early on Fridays through the end of this year. Thank you for listening. I'll talk to you next week.

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