Podbit · On Purpose with Jay Shetty
The inner critic can drive you to extraordinary success. Then it can kill you. Riz Ahmed and Jay Shetty discuss how elite athletes toggle between the critic — who makes every point feel like everything — and the cheerleader, who can release that point immediately after it's over.
Where this was said
At 1:03:20 · chapter starts 1:01:55
Jay articulates a philosophy he has come to live by: he is not searching for a favourite place, he is searching for favourite people — the ones who take him back to the heart of himself, who calm his nervous system and switch off the active mind. Riz responds by confessing he has carried a lazy narrative about disliking LA for years — a cliché about driving and sprawl and disconnection. But on the morning of this very interview, surrounded by his wife, child, and visiting family, the house full and alive, he woke up loving the city. It was the same feeling as being a child surrounded by clapping aunties. Home is the people. The place is immaterial. He was confronted with the realisation that the lazy narrative had been wrong all along.
Our brains subjectively experience 50% of our entire lifetime between ages 0 and 8. That's why a single day felt enormous as a child and why years blur past now. The antidote, both Riz and Jay agree, is play — and protecting time for the Velcro-on-the-shoe moments.
Our brains subjectively experience 50% of our entire lifetime between ages 0 and 8, which is why time feels to accelerate as we age.
Jay Shetty listened to Steve Jobs' Stanford commencement speech every single day for 9 months, calling it the best speech ever given because Jobs knew he was going to die.
Predictions that AI would eliminate radiologists were spectacularly wrong. Since those predictions, Mayo Clinic's radiology staff grew 55% and the specialty became the second-highest paid in medicine. The reason: AI automated scan-reading, but only 36% of a radiologist's time was ever spent doing that.
Self-help fails because people are sold one universal cure by the hyper-responders who had a transformative result from it. The real problem is context: every method works for the right person at the right time, which is almost never you just because the author says so.
Spencer Greenberg was once so socially anxious his heart pounded just approaching a stranger. His therapist gave him homework: go to a bar alone, talk to 5 strangers. Starting with asking for the time, he worked up to asking men for hugs — and his anxiety fell dramatically in 6 months.
A person who flies regularly but obsessively checks weather forecasts before every flight is not doing exposure therapy — they're teaching their brain that flying is only safe with the ritual. Safety behaviors prevent the brain from ever learning that the feared thing is actually fine.
The worry-time technique assigns all worries to one scheduled slot (e.g. 5 PM). Every time a worry surfaces, you write it down and ban yourself from engaging with it until that time. When 5 PM arrives, most worries feel trivial and the act of batch-worrying exposes how little it actually accomplishes.
In a randomized study of 20 habit techniques, 'habit reflection' stood out: recall a past habit you successfully built, write down what helped you succeed, then apply those same strategies to your new habit. It works because it's self-adapting — it uses whatever worked for YOU.
The tiny habits technique — always having a minimal version of your habit you can do when life gets in the way — keeps the mental machinery of habit formation from breaking. Paradoxically, people given a tiny-habit fallback option were MORE successful at the full habit, not less.
Fears and worries act like playground bullies — they want to ambush you. But when you deliberately seek them out and choose the time of engagement, they lose their power. The volitional act of starting the fight on your own terms is one of CBT's most underappreciated insights.
Most downtime defaults are things you regret immediately after — phone scrolling, binge TV. 'Glad you did it' activities meet the same need for rest but leave you feeling like you spent your time well. The switch from a bad screen to a documentary, a book, or a walk costs almost no extra effort but compounds into identity over time.
We use essential and analytics cookies to run Vuci. To understand how the site is used: Privacy Policy.
Install Vuci on your phone
Add it to your home screen for a faster, app-like experience.
Install Vuci on your phone
Tap the Share button, then “Add to Home Screen”.
A new version is available
Reload to get the latest Vuci.