From Mindful to Minimalism: A conversation with Kunal Gupta
Kunal Gupta is the founder & CEO of Polar, a technology company transforming the digital media publishing landscape. Kunal started Polar ten years ago and has grown it into a global business-to-business tech company with offices in Toronto, New York, London, and Sydney that works with about 800 publishers around the world, including Huffington Post, USA Today and GQ.
Despite this tremendous success, Kunal is a big believer in mindfulness, and finding focus and calm in a modern era.
This Q&A is adapted from a point in our conversation where Kunal shares insights into how he used mindfulness to shift to a minimalist mindset.
FROM MINDFUL TO MINIMALIST
Dr. Greg Wells: How did you get interested in mindfulness? What sparked your shift to spending more time in that area?
Kunal Gupta: Growing up, I inherited a lot of values, as I think we all do, from our society, culture, religion, parents, teachers, role models, et cetera. A lot of the values that I'd inherited were around “work really hard, be really successful, and happiness is sitting for you on the other side or at the top of that mountain.” I practiced those values and beliefs, worked really hard over many years, and felt like I actually got to the top of the mountain. I achieved what I'd been working really hard to reach. That was maybe three or four years ago. I remember this specific moment which was, for me, a trigger, when I realized that thanks to a lot of work and a bit of luck, I had achieved everything that was important to me personally and professionally. But I realized in that moment that even though everything I had thought was important to me was there, I didn't actually feel any different. I didn't feel happy or I didn't feel successful in a way that I had projected and expected myself to feel. That was the spark for me that triggered curiosity to question these values and beliefs that I had been using to guide my work, my thinking, my lifestyle, my decisions and my community.
At that point, introspection and the development of self-awareness became a really useful process, and it's still going on for me now. I inspected and studied and became curious about the fact that I had been living by this one belief. Did I still believe it to be true? If it was yes, I should keep at it. If not, then let me throw it out or experiment with something related or something completely different. So I gradually immersed myself in meditation, yoga, journaling, reading and other mindfulness practices that became tools for me to study, develop and almost, in a way, choose my values versus inherit them. It's been a super empowering process, and I don’t feel it's ever going to stop. It continues to this day.
GW: Can you give me an example of a situation where you recognized that a value you had previously held was no longer, or was maybe never true, for you, and then how you made a pivot or shift. Can you give us an example of that thinking process?
KG: I used to buy a lot of stuff, like a lot of things.
GW: No way, really?
KG: A lot of stuff, like clothes, furniture, gifts. I had a very nice condo. Looking back now, I don’t think I was even sure why. I'm sure at the time I was convinced that it was going to be a source of happiness. I remember this one specific moment. We have a Polar office in London for the UK market, and I go there a few times a year. And there's this one clothing brand, Reiss, which has now come to North America, but seven, eight years ago was only in UK and maybe France. I fell in love with the brand, and every time I went to London, every few months, I would go and buy all of my clothes from that one store. I knew the manager very well. He'd give me a discount and the tax back as a Canadian, so it was actually affordable, too.
On one of my trips, when I got back to Toronto, I was hanging up my new stock of Reiss clothing when I realized I had purchased a piece of clothing, a white dress shirt, that I owned already. It was the exact same cut, style, size – everything was the exact same. If one does that intentionally, that's one thing, but to do that unintentionally, that was a moment for me where I was like, "Oh, why am I doing this?" A few months later, I started to study consumerism and the history of it. I watched some documentaries, read some books, had some insightful conversations. And all of that led me to change my attitude towards stuff and adopt a pretty extreme minimalist lifestyle by resetting my relationship with physical objects, which was, for me, at that time in my journey, a really important and really valuable insight to have and change to make.
GW: Can you give me some examples of how you've actually implemented this minimalist lifestyle? I'm probably not nearly as into it as you are, but I've been somewhat inspired by it. It's two key suits, four dress shirts, two sets of shoes – very specific. I'm making fewer decisions and have fewer things. I was inspired by hearing that the president had two blue suits and four white shirts and two different ties. That's no decisions. It's just “that's what you're wearing.” I'd love to hear more about how you've managed to construct this minimalist lifestyle.
KG: For me, what I find helpful is to challenge myself with things I'm not sure if I can actually do. The challenge I set for myself was to go six months without buying anything physical.
GW: Interesting.
KG: I didn't tell anybody I was doing it, because I wasn't sure if I could do it. I travel a lot for business, and when I travelled I often bought my sister a gift. I don't know why. As soon as I stopped buying her gifts, she picked up on it immediately, so then she was in the know, but I didn't tell anybody else for six months. Initially, I was pretty scared. I was like, "I'm used to buying stuff, and I don't know if I can do this, but that's why I'm curious to do it." I limited my expenses to literally food, transportation, accommodation and experiences, but nothing physical. No clothes, shoes, books, cars, gifts – nothing physical. This approach really helped me reset my relationship with stuff.
I have a yoga mat, and it has this little tear in it, and every time I would practice before this challenge I would see it and think, "I need to replace it." Or every time I'd travel to a new city, I would think "I need to buy my sister a little token or gift." I wear sweaters during the winter, and they'd always rip and tear, and I'd always throw them out and buy new ones. All of that changed. I started to fix my own sweaters, and I've learned to accept the tear in my yoga mat, and I treat stuff with a lot more respect. That was a very, very important exercise for me – a successful experiment.
I went longer than six months because it was really juicy and I was still learning, so I actually ended up doing that for two years. At the end of the two years, I stopped the experiment, not because I needed anything, but because it was no longer juicy. It was just part of me and my lifestyle.
That was the main thing I did to achieve the minimalist lifestyle. Another is that I went nomadic in the sense that I didn't have a dedicated place for three years, again as an experiment. I was able to manage through friends, families and a lot of kindness from others. Right now, I'm experimenting with a few other things, but I'm not ready to share because they're still in the works.
GW: That's great. That's really interesting. We'll regroup in a year, or maybe three years, and see where you're at with some other stuff.
