How I Built This with Guy Raz

There's a whole book by Michael Lewis called Flash Boys, which is kind of about this period that you both moved to New York and start working on this thing because really his book is about this phenomenon, these high frequency traders, many of them coming out of PhD programs and working to create ways to, you know, to speed up trades by milliseconds, like 10 milliseconds.

90% of your listeners probably don't know who Starbuck was. He was the navigator on the ship of Herb and Melville's Moby Dick.

And at the same time, there were spiritual texts that my father was introducing me to, whether it was The Bhagavad Gita or whether it was the story of Arjun in the Bhagavad Gita.

And my first video I made was actually a script and made up of scripts that I'd written and shared for years before that I'd already tested out in audiences and people had heard me share those messages. And my friend was a wedding and corporate videographer. And I said to him, you got to come out with me. And actually, he was always very encouraging of me. He always said to me like, Jay, you should make more videos and media. And so we went out. We always try and figure this out. It was either New Year's Eve or New Year's Day. We went out really early in the morning. And literally London was empty. So we could shoot in some of the most phenomenal locations in London for free without a permit. So we had no permits. We had none of the professional things that we could have. We had a boom mic that I was using my backpack to make it stand upright. And he brought his camera and he had a brilliant eye for like backgrounds and lenses because that was his profession. He did it for free for me. And we shot four videos that day in different locations. I took my t-shirts in my backpack and I would change my t-shirts. And we put up my first video, which was called Three Lessons I Learned from the Bhagavad Gita, which was the book that I studied as a monk.

"Growth is not about the genius you possess--it's about the character you develop."

Growth is not about the genius you possess but about the character you develop.

In Adam's latest book Hidden Potential, he dismantles the myth that you have to be born with innate qualities to accomplish great things.

I think that's true. What happens is a lot of people try something, they struggle at it, and then they think, I'm not good enough at it to put it out there.

And I think there's something really powerful in that to say we should start using our skills before we feel like we've mastered them.

You write about this in your book a little bit.

I was almost always the only black person working on a team, often one of the only black people working on an entire floor of a building.

The Times people confused me with other black people. The Times people assumed I worked in the mailroom. The awkward jokes about the racial comedy skits of Dave Chappelle's show.

I remember that when I lost the million dollars I made in the stock market, I was like, how am I going to get it back?

The most repeated listen was Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone, which makes a lot of sense.

Oh my goodness, you remember those John Grisham novels? Those movies? Pelican Brief I think is one of them. It just seems so glamorous and you're involved in like crimes and mysteries. And honestly, I bought into that stuff.

But he said alongside that vision, there's this other dystopian vision, the technology, which is the eldest Huxley vision of Brave New World in which control is not established by banning books but by creating a world of so much amusing ourselves to death and the world.

By the way, before she was fired from Aden and Anais, she had just finished writing a book about her life story. But after leaving the company, she had to call up the publisher and tell them she had to rework the ending.

I have that book on my desk. I look at it every day.

I'm a huge fan of Priya Parker's book, The Art of Gathering.

And I think her premise of making that gathering special is so vitally important, especially when we're not in the same space and we're not feeling each other's energy.

And obviously, Devil Wears Prada, everybody knows that film and book.

And so how productive I was going to be later on, or I can put in P&L statements and listen to Tony Robbins and listen to Jay Abraham and Think and Grow Rich and Seven Highly Effective Habits of whatever people.

Stolen Focus, why you can't pay attention and how to think deeply again.

I read that in the book. I couldn't believe it. Three minutes.

It's like we're putting rocket fuel into a mini, right? It'll go really fast for five minutes, then it will just stop.

We are not machines. We cannot live by the logic of machines.

Flow begins at the edge of your comfort zone.

Bridget Schulte wrote this book, Overwhelmed, and it's one of my favorite.

And she talked about the plague of busyness and how research shows that we all hate our lives with on the merry-go-round. We can't get off. We're just always busy, yet we keep leaning in more and grabbing more.

People talk about Kill the Mockingbird and I didn't read that book. I didn't read any of these books because I couldn't.

He would tell me to read so many books, Rich Dad, Poor Dad. He was teaching me about stocks. He was telling me that like, I'm going to be an entrepreneur and things that I could do to set my life up.