Think Like a Monk: Train Your Mind for Peace and Purpose Every Day

As Shetty explains in the introduction, much of his learning and advice derive from the Bhagavad Gita, or “Song of God,” which “is considered a kind of universal and timeless life manual” (xiv). In fact, it has been called “’India’s most important gift to the world’” (xiv). Shetty employs tropes of the “timeless wisdom” of the East (xv) and subverts these tropes to make them palatable to tech-weary, information-saturated, goal-driven young (and privileged) professionals. He assures them “that the monk mindset works—that ancient wisdom is shockingly relevant today” (xv). He spends the rest of the book proving this, using metaphors that span from technological to financial to natural and relying on scientific studies and visual reinforcement to illustrate the relevance to modern contexts.

He refers to “values” as “a kind of ethical GPS we can use to navigate through life” (8), a modern reference reworking the typical moral compass cliché. He is speaking to an audience whose self-definition is overdetermined by “[t]he voices of parents, friends, education, and media,” which “crowd[s] a young person’s mind” (6). When talking about dispelling negativity, Shetty again points to the Bhagavad Gita to light the way, mentioning its emphasis on the “austerity of speech” (35).