Happiness, 3.18 (V) Week 3 Video 12 - Interview with Nipun Mehta (Optional) (1)

[MUSIC] Khem Cho, my friend. Khem Cho means hi, how are you in Gujarati, which is the mother tongue of our guest, Nipun Mehta. Good to see that you're interested in watching this optional video of my interview with Nipun. Let me begin by giving you a little bit of a background on Nipun. As I mentioned in the last video, he is one of the most inspiring human beings I know. Super smart. He's well educated. I think he is good looking. He is very articulate. He's the kind of person that I think could have been very successful at almost anything that he chose to do. In the mid-1990s after graduating from Cal Berkeley with a computer science degree, Nipun started working for Sun Microsystems. But within two years of working there, Nipun realized that he wasn't finding working for corporate America to be as meaningful as he found volunteering his services at a hospice and, in general, helping people in need out. So he resigned from Sun and, along with a few other like-minded individuals, he started volunteering full time. Eventually he and his like-minded friends started something called Service space. Service space oversees a bunch of initiatives all around the world, and they're all aimed at spreading kindness and wellbeing. With that minimal background, let me get to my interview with Nipun. As you will see, I start by asking Nipun how he dared to do something so different from what most of us are coached and socialized to do. What was he thinking when he decided that he would give up a conventional life, or a life involving climbing up the corporate ladder, making a lot of money, in order to pursue a life of social service and volunteering? » [LAUGH] It's like how dare I, you know? [LAUGH] Well, I think for me, the thing was that it was really rooted in my personal experience. So I saw that a lot of people around me were going with the de facto sort of standard that you go out and you get and you get and you accumulate, and he who has the most toys wins. That's sort of the narrative underneath a lot of action and that's the dream that you buy into when you're in college, and that was the dream that I bought into. But I saw a lot of people. I was really fortunate because I was in the Silicon Valley and I came out right at the time of the .com sort of boom. And so I saw all these people trying to achieve it, and you achieved it in, that was a time when we were all on steroids. People were achieving things in two years what it would take a generation to achieve. So you saw a lot of people spike up and then just crash down. And you saw that journey not really fulfill them. And they often ended up being depressed, or they would do these crazy things that wouldn't make them happy or those around them happy. And so a part of me started questioning. Just seeing all that and just being a rational person, I was like, huh, does that make sense? Or is there another way? I think this is where I was like, wow, I don't know if there's another way. Being an immigrant family, you're sort of really cradled into a certain dream as well. And your job is to get good grades and then go to a good college and then get a good job and then go start a company and then become a millionaire and all this stuff. Get married and have a car, have five cars, and have a huge house. And I think for me, at some point I started questioning that, in my early twenties. And I said, well, is there another way? And what is that other way? And I started to say, well, if greed isn't going to do it for you, how about doing its opposite, which was generosity? What if we just went out and did something purely for the love of it? We realized that was very liberating. We did a lot of projects, but it wasn't even about the projects. It was how you felt at the end of doing a small action. It just felt right. And so you're left with thinking, wow, I want to do this again. It felt so great to be connected, to give, to give with no strings attached, like no logo, no prices, no fame, nothing. We didn't want anything. And just that simple act of giving, you would think that you're actually on the losing end, because what am I getting in return? But it turns out you actually get a lot in return. You get a sense of connection, you know, like you were saying. So I think that, for me, just doing those experiments is what really led me to continue. I think it was Oprah, if I'm not mistaken, once asked the Dalai Lama, and she says, what do you know for sure? Very simple question. Dalai Lama says it takes giving to be happy. Absolutely. I think that's the beauty of it, is that the size of the act or the impact of the act almost doesn't matter. It's the space that you're holding. And if you offer from that space of genuine just one-way love, right, in effect what happens is any small act of generosity or any big act of generosity, on the outside it could be small or big, but what actually happens inside you, is that whenever you are, you move from me to we. Because you're saying it's not just about me. Now it's about me and you, so it becomes a we experience. And when there's that shift from me to we, the mind quiets downs. And in that calmness of the mind, it falls into more of its natural state. I mean, of course, ultimate stillness would be great. But even if it's still if you're at point a, and you go to the stiller point of point b, in that stiller state, to the degree that your mind is calmer is the degree to which you feel more interconnected. And the more interconnected you are, the simpler you are, the more satisfaction you have, the more happy you are. So it seems like a very small act of kindness, but the greatest impact of that small act of kindness is not even the ripple that goes out and it creates in the world. Not the awards you might get, not the attention you might get, not even the feedback that you might get back in return, but actually what's happening to you there and then in your own mind, in your own state of being. So the mind calms down, you fall into an interconnectedness, and you're happier. So it's an incredible, so if you start to look at it in that way, and if I'm different, most people serve the world to say, oh, look at this person, let me help them. There's this famous quote that says, if you help, you see life as weak. All right, it's like this hand-me-down thing. If you fix, you see life as broken. And so much of development work is oh, let me go fix it. And there's some good to it, but there's also, on the receiving end, this sense of brokenness. But when you serve, you see life as whole. So when you're looking at service from the state of inner transformation, then you start to really have a very different perspective on it. And if you change for the rest of eternity, it's going to have its own ripple effect. You may not necessarily be able to quantify it in terms of how many schools I built in some country where there's really extreme poverty. That's valuable too. But this is also valuable because you're changing yourself, you're changing the eyes through which you look at the world, and that's creating an incredible ripple out. Your mind starts to become more natural. So, it's not that, because a lot of people look at calmness and say, no I actually like the busyness. You go in New York, there's all this stuff happening on the streets, and you're like, yeah, that's great. So this is not that kind of calmness. This is more that the mind is more natural. And in its natural state. If you look at, even if you study all the different saints across the world, and across time, right, they will all say it's natural to be compassionate. To be kind. To be generous. To be tolerant. To be forgiving. Because fundamentally, we're all interconnected, and all of them get to that in so many different ways. So for me, I don't know if I would define it necessarily as a calmness. I think it's a byproduct. But you may actually get to a state where there's a lot of activity, and you're not necessarily calm in the traditional sense of the word, but you feel natural. And I think how do you put yourself in a state of naturalness? And you can try. I think you can wait for research to figure this out, or you can just try. There's really two choices, right? If you can be me centered, or you can be other centered. And you can try being me centered. I have tried it, and I've found, in my limited experience nonetheless, that it's a bottomless bucket. The more and more you pour into the me, it's still never satisfied, versus, if you start to go into the we centeredness, you fall into a natural state. You stop pretending that you need to do anything. You don't have the weight of the world. You're not in a rush to get to the next thing, next thing, next thing, and you have less fear. You're not worried about how this thing is going to go away from you. It's just a more natural, relaxed state of being. And I think it's, I would just say, experiment. You know what I mean? There are those people who really wait for science, and that's great. There's a lot of science behind it. I'm aware of a lot of it. But, I think for me it's just been, it's a more natural way of being, and I do think it's natural to be connected, and to be happy, and to be accepting of all things that come our way. The basic idea of Karma Kitchen, as you know, is that you walk into Karma Kitchen and you have a meal, and the check at the end of your meal reads zero. And it's zero, because someone before you has paid for you, and you pay forward, for people after you. And so, most people look at that and say, wait, you mean you trust people to pay forward? And if, we are self interested, maximal thing for me kind of animals, then we would just not leave anything, and we said, yeah, maybe. And then maybe we'll be broke, and we'll find out. And we found out that actually people pay, but what is it that makes it work? Can everything work in this way? Probably not. So if you start to look deeper in to it. Is your Lexus car dealership, if you say pay what you want, is that going to really work? No, that would be my guess. But why does Karma Kitchen work? And I think one of the core things around generosity, around our response of generosity, when we see other people's generosity, and when we receive generosity, is the context. All right. So you have to create a very powerful context.