Friday, August 30, 2024

"Your thoughts are not the problem": A Conversation with Joseph Nguyen

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"Your thoughts are not the problem": A Conversation with Joseph Nguyen

It's time for a new interview! Next up: Joseph Nguyen, international bestselling author of Don't Believe Everything You Think

Aug 30

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Our interview series features interesting people with something to say that the world needs hearing. Let me know what you think—we’ll continue to experiment and evolve along the way. 🙏

Introducing Joseph Nguyen

In a sign of how siloed the internet is now, before I met Joseph at an event recently, I hadn’t heard of him. Why is this unusual? Because his book, Don't Believe Everything You Think, has been a massive bestseller.

I usually know about things like that! But in this case, Joseph self-published the book, and much of its wave of success came from TikTok videos that consisted largely of him reading passages of the book off-camera. A very interesting book case study.

It wasn’t just the book that I found interesting, though. Joseph himself was refreshingly optimistic and had a remarkable perspective to share. So here we are!

Here are a few highlights from Joseph’s bio:

Joseph Nguyen is the author of the global bestseller Don't Believe Everything You Think. His work has been translated into more than 40 languages and has touched the hearts and minds of readers worldwide. Drawing inspiration from philosophy, spirituality, and psychology, Joseph distills timeless wisdom into simple, pragmatic, and accessible books. Through his writings, Joseph illuminates the path to self-realization, guiding readers toward a life filled with abundance and liberation from emotional and psychological suffering.

Naturally, we’re more interested in the person behind the impressive bio. And since this is 🌻 A Year of Mental Health, I’m interested in how people think about wellbeing in general.

So let’s have some questions and answers with Joseph Nguyen! (There’s also a short audio recording from him—scroll down for that.)

Qs & As with Joseph

What does mental health and wellbeing mean to you?

To me, mental health and well-being aren’t just aspirational ideas—they are our birthright, something we all carry deep within us but have forgotten. Beneath all our negative beliefs, judgments, stories, opinions, and conditioning lies the pure essence of who we truly are, before it was tarnished by the external world. It’s like the state of a newborn baby before being affected by its environment—pure, wholesome, full of joy and love. That is our natural state as well, until we think ourselves out of it. Mental health and well-being are about being in a state of peace with ourselves, a wellspring, or fertile ground, from which the positive emotions we all seek naturally arise.

What is your primary or most important message?

Thoughts are not facts. Your thoughts are not the problem. Thoughts have no effect on us unless we believe them to be true. We cannot always control our thoughts, but we can always control whether we believe them or not. Our emotions don’t come from external events but from what we think about them. So if you want to change how you feel, it comes down to changing the way you think—or better yet, letting go of what you think.

This is the foundation of meditation: learning how to observe and let go rather than being attached to everything within the mind. If you stopped believing most of the negative thoughts you had, what would that do to your quality of life? What we believe or don’t believe is our choice—and within that choice lies our freedom. Peace comes more from disbelieving your thoughts than from believing them.

What’s something contrarian or highly unusual that you passionately believe?

Many of us feel lost and unfulfilled in life, not because we aren’t achieving or doing enough, but because we are chasing after what others deem as external success rather than what aligns with what we truly want. We are most fulfilled when we tune into our intuition and wholeheartedly follow it, rather than what the world says we should do.

I believe our best decisions—the ones that change the course of our lives forever in the best possible way—come from following our intuition. These decisions often don’t make logical sense, like who to marry, where to move, or whether to start a business or a creative endeavor, yet they lead to some of the greatest joys we’ve experienced. When it comes to important and potentially life-changing decisions, your intuition will more often lead to fulfillment than following pure logic.

Joseph’s Audio Recording 🎙️

I usually ask our interviewees to make a short audio recording in addition to the written questions. This isn’t a long podcast interview, it’s just four minutes long—so you don’t want to skip it. Here’s the one from Joseph! ⬇️

Listen now · 4:02

Okay, back to some more Qs and recommendations!

What’s difficult for you right now? What are you struggling with?

Before my book became more popular, things were simple and organized. I really enjoyed working by myself, retreating into my room to create in isolation for days or weeks. Now that my book is being picked up by a publisher, I have a team of people to organize and communicate with quite often. It’s a big shift for me, and it has been a bit of a struggle because I’m not able to move as nimbly.

Releasing this type of control is difficult, but it’s becoming easier over time because we are all in service of a grander, unified mission of helping alleviate psychological suffering in the world. I’m beginning to understand the power of the African proverb: “If you want to go fast, go alone. If you want to go far, go together.”

What is a simple thing (or 2-3 simple things) we can do to be better?

Think less and allow yourself to simply be more often. Most of us have a habit of overthinking everything to our own detriment. We do not have to constantly be thinking about every aspect of our lives. Doing so is a major source of our anxiety. How often has overthinking actually served you?

A simple way to help stop yourself from overthinking is by asking, “Is this thinking making me feel the way I want?” If not, consciously choose to let go of it. It helps to repeat a mantra to ease the thinking, such as, “Negative thinking is the root cause of suffering.”

When we are repeating a mantra, we are not able to think about anything else, allowing the mind to calm down and find serenity again. It’s important to practice this throughout your day so that you can regulate your emotions and find more peace, rather than only practicing in the morning. This is essentially real-time, applied meditation while actively living your life, which is arguably more effective than only meditating in the morning for 10 minutes and expecting it to have lasting effects all day.

Lastly, what are a few things you’d like to recommend to our community?

Many people talk about physical diets to help lose weight or increase energy, but I’ve been recommending an information and entertainment diet where you drastically limit or eliminate content consumption for 1-2 weeks to create a psychological reset. It is one of the most liberating experiences, freeing you from the constant need for mental stimulation to be happy. This is the doorway to peace. The secret to serenity is in doing less, not more.

One software I’ve been loving lately is an app called the Minimal Phone Launcher for my iPhone. It turns my smartphone into a dumb phone-like interface with a black background, showing only five apps on my home screen as text instead of icons, making it less distracting.