My feeling is that loneliness stems from placing your happiness on something or someone else.
Basically you're leaning on something or someone else to make you feel complete or full.
And when that person and that thing goes away, you fall down.
Quite often if you really reflect on your life, you find that the reason you're feeling
lonely is because you've placed your happiness on
someone or something else. And now that person or that thing has gone
away and you feel an emptiness inside of you and
hence, the feeling of loneliness. My guru would always advice to me, "lean on
your own spine." So you tell me to lean on my own spine.
He would even go to the extent of saying don't lean on him because he says,
"if you lean on me and when I go away one day you're gonna fall down."
So place your happiness, place your contentment on yourself, lean on your own spine,
turn inward and uplift yourself. And realize that everything and everyone else in your
life is a gift, a wonderful gift to you, you are complete
and whole as a person as it is and everyone and everything else is a bonus
in your life. And when you start adopting that attitude
you no longer start to feel lonely, because even if you're by yourself at home,
travelling, wherever you may be, you will always feel content as a person.
Quite often when we're feeling down, it's not so easy to uplift ourselves.
And sometimes we can kind of get stuck in that funkiness... funky area of the mind,
just wallow in that sorrow, so to speak. One of the things that my guru used to recommend
to me and just anyone in general, anybody that asked him to help him get out
of a place of funkiness, of feeling down, is to uplift somebody else.
So what he would say is, “you uplift yourself by uplifting someone else.”
And that was kind of the essence of the message. You uplift yourself by uplifting somebody
else. Find a friend, uplift them, you can uplift
them by doing something nice for them, something that you know they need help with
or they need in their life but they may not have asked you but you know
by you offering your help and just doing it for them would make a big
difference in their life, reach out and do that for them.
And as you provide them with the selfless service and act of love,
you uplift their spirits and as you uplift their spirits, they uplift you.
So, this is something that works really, really well.
Something that I've done myself and continue to do whenever I'm feeling a little down
or in a funky place. I'll do that. I'll find somebody that I can uplift and then
by just uplifting them, I find myself being uplifted as well.
But this life I have one life as Dandapani and I want it to be an amazing life.
So, because of that, I prioritize what's important. I need to simplify my life to who and what's
important in my life. Take the finite amount of energy I have each
day and invest it into those things. Now I create a life that I enjoy living, the
byproduct of that is happiness. So when people say to me, "life is too busy
I can't simplify." No it's you don't want to. You have the choice.
Nobody is holding a gun to your head saying you have to associate with these people,
you don’t have to do these things. No you choose to do them.
Like parents say to me all the time, "oh, it's crazy with children."
They take them to school and then basketball, they got golfing, they've got this, they've
got that, I'm like, "what are you training your child
to be? James Bond? James Bond is the only person I know that
can do everything." You know why don't they just learn one thing?
Learn to play the guitar? People create messy lives, complicated lives
when they don't need to. Another reason, through peer pressure, social
pressures of like, wanting to keep up with the Johnsons. They're
doing this, so we should do this as well. I don’t, I do what I feel I need to do.
People say this to me all the time, I hang around with entrepreneurs and other people
that... "they've come up with Snapchat, you need to
be on Snapchat. If you're not on Snapchat, your business is
not gonna grow." I don't need to be on Snapchat.
I do Instagram, I do Facebook, I do a little bit of Twitter and that's it.
I don't care what comes up tomorrow, I'm not gonna do it.
Because I can't sustain it. That's gonna take a little bit more of my energy today.
And I only have this much energy and I need to divide it between all the people and things
that I love. By law of thermodynamic states, you cannot
create or destroy energy, but you can transfer it from one thing to
another or transform it from one thing to another.
So I can't create more energy, I only have this much.
Because come 11 o'clock tonight, I'll be exhausted and ready to sleep.
So I got this much 100%, I need to know where I'm dividing.
I always tell entrepreneurs to look at energy the same way they look at money.
It's a finite resource that needs to be wisely managed, wisely reallocated and wisely invested.
If I gave you 100.000$ and I said, "invest it in 4 companies."
And one started to do bad, would you leave your money in there or take it out?
You'd take it out and put it somewhere else.