PERFECT PRACTICE

Jay Shetty, the 33-year-old self-help guru and influencer, is streamlining age-old wisdom for the millennial mind and reminding us of the importance of being at home with our troubled selves. As he adds “author” to his repertoire with a new book, he talks to Nidhi Gupta about the paradoxes of being a preacher in the age of the internet

- Nidhi Gupta

Jay Shetty can deduce your “vedic personality type” based on how you prepare for a vacation, whether you’re partial to documentaries or soap operas on TV, whether you’re the life of or inconspicuous wallflower at a party. Through 20 multiple-choice questions – including enquiries into how you handle rejection, what causes you most pain and how you’d like to make a difference in the world – condensed into an appendix chapter toward the end of his debut book Think Like A Monk, Shetty’s drawn up a system to help us identify whether we’re guides, leaders, creators or makers.

Over a Zoom call from his LA home, the British-Indian who grew up in London, expounds on the basis of this Buzzfeed-like quiz. At about age 22, as a practising student monk at an ISKCON ashram near Mumbai, he’d studied the Vedas, along with other important Indian scriptures. In a sense, he has melded “ancient science” with the modern tool of “strength tests”, such as the Myers-Briggs test or anything you’ll find at Personality Finder 2.0.

So why do we need yet another? “Our generation” faces a rare challenge, he says: “A lot of us are not sure of our passion, purpose or place in the world.” But that’s where people like Shetty come in.

At 33, Shetty is a life coach and “storyteller”, famously a “former monk” who boasts a “37 million community across FB IG YT” – an army of supporters that includes the likes of Ellen DeGeneres and Robin Sharma (that monk who sold his Ferrari), Nas, Dennis Rodman, Hrithik Roshan, Will Smith and Lilly Singh. Lakhs of people around the world vibe with his gummy-sized drops of wisdom on social media, leaving enthusiastic yeses and “needed this today!” in the comments.