‘Think Like a Monk’ Takeaway #1: Realising the Ethical GPS of your life’s journey
Recently, I finished reading Jay Shetty’s ‘Think Like A Monk’ and was blown away by the amazing things I learnt from this book. It has been really difficult for me to place it in any genre and I think it’s best that we don’t even try. This book is like an ethical guide meant for all human beings irrespective of origin or ethnicity.
Since the book has many topics that it covers, it won’t be possible for me to review the book entirely and so I thought I should just write about a single lesson I learnt from this book for today and that’s what I intend to do. You can expect this to be the first post in the thread of takeaways I will be writing for this book.
Takeaway #1: Realising the Ethical GPS of your life’s journey
We are talking about values here. Not retail store product or service values but simply human values. Values we are born with, grow up with and eventually live with till our last breath. Values like honestly, deceit, loyalty, nobility, hatred etc. While reading the book I had quite some questions about values myself that were solved after I read the first chapter in the book.
Where do these values come from?
Your values come from your daily environment and the routine you follow. These values shape your life whether you like them or not.
Eg: If your value is wealth, the origin might be your parents and how they perceive it. However, this might be different from how you perceive wealth.
How should these values be curated by us?
When things don’t work out, it means your choices were not right. This might help you question your values and whether you need to curate them. If these are in alignment with your next choices, you are bound to do things properly.
Eg: When we don’t perform well in a test, we often tend to question the efforts we took while preparing for the test or the potential we might have not unleased. We then tend to sharpen our skills and show more integrity while preparing for the next test. Curating values has a similar analogy.
So what does that mean for the actions we take everyday?
Your actions should match your value. Time track and analyse if the thing you do the most in the day (except sleeping and working) matches the values by which you live. Are you spending money on actions that do not support your values? Why?
Eg: If you spend a lot of time writing on blogs like me then your efforts would be focused more on reading and learning from other content creators, books, podcasts etc. The inherent value here should be readingm referring and gathering knowledge. And money should be spend likewise on things that help us curate these values and goals of ours. Similarly, spending time and money on tools that help your workflow can further build up these values.
In a nutshell, your values define your identity as a person which are formerly derived from people around you (Remember: You are the average of the five people you surround yourself with). These values can be curated by analysing the results of our previous actions and the choices we took for them. Finally, embedding the values within our daily actions and choices help us further walk in the direction of our values and create our own identity.
Thus values are like an ethical GPS for our journey in life and refuelling ourselves on this journey, by spending time to further build these values, only help us tread lighter and faster on this path of defining our value-based identity.
Buy ‘Think Like A Monk’ by Jay Shetty on Amazon
~Aditya Darekar
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