Kaushik Kumar: From Fear to Clarity, Living Life in the Flow

SRIDHAR KRISHNAMURTI: Hey, everybody. Welcome to an episode of How To Be A Real 1%er. This is a podcast where we're redefining what it means to be ultra-successful. No longer the relentless pursuit of one type of success at the expense of everything else, but rather a rare form of success which involves knowing who we really are, living authentically, and achieving maximum success along the way of living our best life.

Today, I'm really pleased to welcome my guest, Kaushik Kumar. I've actually been really looking forward to this episode because you may or may not know if you watch material from what I’ve done in the past, but Kaushik is the person who puts all of this together—all the filming, all of the podcasts, all the videos that we do. Kaushik has known me for about five years, and we've known each other for a bit more than five years now. I’ve been really looking forward to this one because Kaushik just has such different angles on The One Percent Journey, and I'm really looking forward to seeing what comes out of our conversation. So firstly, welcome, Kaushik. Thanks very much for being on the podcast.

KAUSHIK KUMAR: Pleasure to be here. Thanks for having me.

SRIDHAR KRISHNAMURTI: We'll dive in. We have been working together... did I get that right? It's about five years now.

KAUSHIK KUMAR: Yeah, I think we started in 2020.

SRIDHAR KRISHNAMURTI: So just working on about five years. In that time, I guess you've seen a different angle than a lot of people have of The One Percent Journey—at least the one that I'm referring to, The Real One Percent Journey—because you've seen what's behind the camera. You come and see me once a month, and you're hearing a bunch of different angles.

The first question, if we just go to it is: what brought you to The One Percent Journey? I mean, we weren't calling it that at the time, but what brought you to the work in the first place?

KAUSHIK KUMAR: I guess what brought me to the work initially was the aftermath of all the lockdowns and things back in 2020. My wife and I just came back into the country, I think it was a week before lockdown, and when we got back, we had nowhere to go, so we stayed in an Airbnb and ended up having to be locked down in that Airbnb. That brought on a lot of emotions and fears and things like that.

But what I discovered during that time was that I was actually running my entire life based on avoiding fear or living in this mindset of fear all the time. So, fear of losing, fear of failing, fear of whatever it was, was underpinning basically every decision I'd made up until that point.

I knew that that was something that was quite debilitating, without knowing it. It was subconsciously debilitating; it was stopping me from doing things that I wanted to do. Post all the lockdowns, I knew that I had to kind of figure out what was going on and what was happening in my mind. I didn't know what the pathway was; I didn't know who to go see or who to talk to about all of this. It just so happened that we ended up running into each other at a networking group, I think it was June or July 2020. We grabbed a coffee afterwards, and then everything started to make sense, and I was like, "Oh, this is actually probably something that would benefit me a lot." But at that time, I didn't really know if it was a mindset thing or if it was the external factors.

So yeah, what brought me to the work was essentially always living through the lens of fear or coming from a place of fear.

SRIDHAR KRISHNAMURTI: I love the way that you realised that that was about lockdown because for me that's... you were sort of forced to be with yourself, right? One of the reasons I do this podcast is to share these "gold nuggets" with people. One of those gold nuggets is just that: we go through our life, and maybe we're not so present to the debilitating nature of those fears, but then when you're forced to be there on your own and you've got nowhere to go, you're with yourself and they're there, aren't they? They really come into your face. A lot of people have come since the lockdown period, and that was a tough time for a lot of people—not only because of the obvious things of being alone and being cooped up, but the being forced to be with yourself 24/7 without distraction.

KAUSHIK KUMAR: Absolutely. I think for me it was the fear of losing my business that really made things difficult. It was definitely having to sit with the fact that I could lose everything that I’ve worked for. But would it have happened? Not really.

SRIDHAR KRISHNAMURTI: We're going to go there, aren't we? What the mind believes and what's actually happening are definitely two different things.

We're four and a half years down the road now, and I’ve seen what you've been able to achieve in that period of time. But if we go back, what's one thing that you would say from the Real One Percent Journey? Some of the things we do aren't every day; they're not things that we sort of come across even in the personal development section of the bookshop. So, what's one thing that you would say to people watching this podcast who desire to live their best life? What's one thing that you've learned or applied or experienced in your Real 1% Journey that you would share with people could make a difference for them?

KAUSHIK KUMAR: This is something I’ve discovered quite recently actually: it's going with the flow. I’ll explain that a little bit more. One of the big discoveries for me with this work is living a life that's authentic to me. "Authentic" is a buzzword that you hear everywhere, and it's often got quite a lot of ego associated with it. But authenticity, when it truly comes to your life, is when things just happen. Things just go with the flow. There's no resistance. There's nothing that stops you in your tracks. There's no fear, which is a big one for me. There are no untoward emotions that enter the picture.

So, if I could introduce one concept of the work that we've done to people that listen to this podcast, it would be to find out what that authenticity is for you. Unfortunately, it's not something that you can read in a book or be told by a coach. It's actually something that you have to discover for yourself. And it's a hard journey. It took me probably four years to find out what that was for me. But I'm forever grateful that I hung in there and found it, cause life is so much more different now. It's a lot more free flowing as opposed to before it was obstacle after obstacle. And a lot of those times, I was creating those obstacles myself, or at least my ego mind is creating those obstacles to stop a perceived bad thing from happening.

SRIDHAR KRISHNAMURTI: Okay. So, if I'm watching this podcast, I want to know more. I want to know: why is it so challenging? Why is it difficult? And what did you do or apply to get to that authenticity? And what's the difference between this ego authenticity and true authenticity?

KAUSHIK KUMAR: I think it's because there were a lot of preconceived notions. As we grow up as children, we get told certain things. We get told that we need to be successful, good people, whatever. Or we get told that we need to go down specific career paths or follow specific journeys. But all of that feeds your ego authenticity, because if you start going down the route of someone else's definition of success—and if their definition of success is nice cars, big houses, and lots of money, but that's not you—then automatically you're not going to be happy with that version of success. You're always going to be on that hamster wheel trying to find your version of success, but through the lens of someone else's. I think that's where that disparity comes in: when we try to live our lives based on someone else's guidebooks.

But we don't necessarily have the time—or we don't think we have the time—to find what's truly important for us. It does take time to find what's truly important to us because, again, we're living in this state of opinions, of feedback, of things that we've been told our whole lives, and changing all of those habits takes time. But there's a lot to lose if we don't find what authenticity—real authenticity—is for us. You could spend your whole life living an authentic life through someone else's lens, but then you get to the end of your life and you have regrets. And life's too short for regrets.

SRIDHAR KRISHNAMURTI: Definitely. And we're feeling those regrets all along the way, aren't we? It's not just that we regret it at the end. It's like we're living a life of ongoing regret.

KAUSHIK KUMAR: Yeah. "I wish I'd done this. I wish I travelled there. I wish I'd made more money." "I wish I'd spent more time with family," is a big one.

SRIDHAR KRISHNAMURTI: What I'm hearing from you—and as true for me—is that some of that stuff is real and some of it isn't even real. It's what I think other people wanted me to do. It's not just one version of that success. My parents were all about a stable job, you know? "This is a nine-to-five and you get this type of thing, and this is the status that you need." I know my parents were really well-intentioned and trying to look after me, but I just wasn't built that way; I'm an entrepreneur. I tried to fit in that mold, but didn't work.

Whatever the version is, what I'm hearing from you is that we're set up to live a life that isn't actually true to us, and that's what we've been doing.

KAUSHIK KUMAR: Absolutely. And it's on autopilot as well. I didn't know that that was what my subconscious was feeding me this whole time. I thought I wasn't good enough. But it was just I was facing resistance because it wasn't my authentic life. It wasn't the life that I was meant to be living.

SRIDHAR KRISHNAMURTI: But you didn't know. You didn't recognise that.

KAUSHIK KUMAR: I had no idea.

SRIDHAR KRISHNAMURTI: That's profound, right? And I think that's where most of us are. That's why I do the work.

So, what was the impact of that? You talked about fear, but what were some of the impacts in your life of living that way?

KAUSHIK KUMAR: Lots of roadblocks. I remember from very young, I wasn't always the most academic child. But there's always been an expectation—or I thought there was always an expectation—that I had to perform academically. So every time I didn't, I just felt like I was failing or I was disappointing the people in my life that mattered most. So having to constantly live in that state of, "I'm going to try this. I'm going to fail. So what's the point of trying?"

It got to the point towards the end of high school where, because I was constantly hitting these roadblocks, you kind of just feel like not trying. So then you start to question, "Well, what is life? Why am I here? What am I doing?" You feel lost. You don't really know who you are, what you're doing, or why you're here. All of that weight builds up, and the more those emotions become stronger, the more you start to feel, "Oh, maybe I am a disappointment. Maybe I am a failure."

That stopped me from doing a lot of things that I wanted to do. But it also stopped me from telling people, communicating with people what I was doing. So I found myself going away and doing these things that I wanted to do, but not telling anyone because I was fearing judgment or fearing that someone would say, "No, you can't do that." So I spent a lot of my teenage years exploring ideas and doing things but never told anyone. They weren't bad things; they were just things that I was curious about. But that's how I felt like I needed to live life.

SRIDHAR KRISHNAMURTI: Because they will judge you or because they won't be happy?

KAUSHIK KUMAR: Or probably for me was, they'll just say "no, you can't do it." So I was fearing the "no" more than anything else.

That had an impact on later parts of my life now as well, like in business. For a good chunk of the formative parts of Dark Matter, I didn't communicate properly with people, with clients, with contractors, with people that worked for me, out of fear that I would be judged. Or imposter syndrome would come around and I'd find out that I'm not good enough. So, yeah, a lot of those sorts of emotions kind of just built up over time. And then during the 2020 lockdown is when it all sort of came to the surface.

SRIDHAR KRISHNAMURTI: I really appreciate your bravery here today because these are obviously personal things that you're sharing. But people might be surprised at just how many people come and have got to a similar place in their own life. Like, it's so many more people than we think it is. We have a show on the outside—"everything's great"—but on the inside, this is the kind of stuff that I hear when people really get in those quiet moments.

If I were watching this podcast, I would find it very intriguing that you said it took four years to find your authentic self and who you are and what you wanted. Why did it take that long? What made it challenging?

KAUSHIK KUMAR: I think it's because there are a lot of layers to work through. There's a lot of belief systems in place that have always been reinforced over childhood, teenage, and adult years. There's a lot of beliefs that have constantly been validated over time as well, so even though it's not the path for you, if you're following someone else's path, you get the praise, "Hey, good job. You're doing well." It's really hard to break away from those beliefs because, in a way, you're doing what everyone is expecting you to do.

So, to get clarity from someone else's version of authenticity, you're never going to get clarity for yourself, because it's never going to come from what you want or what you want to do. So it takes time to break through those layers. And sometimes you break through those layers, and then something happens and then all of a sudden, those walls are back up again and you've got to work at them again to break them down. It's this journey of up and down along the way while you're breaking down each of those belief systems. But eventually, you sort of go from here all the way down to here, where there's a lot less beliefs that stand in your way.

SRIDHAR KRISHNAMURTI: Authentic clarity for me is never something that's actually finished. It's a matter of degree. What's the degree of authenticity? What's the degree of clarity?

You said something really powerful before, which was you didn't know that you didn't know. You didn't know that you had formed this story and it wasn't you. If I look back, I was living my entire life to try to please someone—trying to prove to my parents that I was good enough and they would love me—and then I projected that onto everybody else.

I'd love to hear: how did you start getting through this? How did you start identifying those beliefs and what did you do with them?

KAUSHIK KUMAR: It’s definitely a cumulative process. I think there's a lot of different things along the way that has led to that outcome. But initially, let's start right from the beginning: it was just questioning everything. We did a lot of work on questioning beliefs in the beginning. If I saw something that triggered my ego mind, then go through the questioning process and question those beliefs: "Is it true? Is it actually going to happen that way?"

If you do that more and more, you start to really question the beliefs that keep coming up all the time. There's a recurring pattern of beliefs that always come up. For me it was that someone else will come and steal my work or they'll come in and take over my business because I'm not good enough to serve my clients. So every time I would see a competitor post or I'd see something that would validate that part of my ego mind, I would go into a massive spiral. I'd just go into this spiral of, "What's the point of trying? It's all going to end. It's not going to work out." And then it would just be a period of procrastination and not wanting to do anything because I was coming out of this place of believing that I was going to lose it all.

So yeah, the questions process is one that's consistently been there for the last four, four and a half years that we've been working together. And then really understanding what it is that I want from life. I think that's a question that we don't ask ourselves often enough—or at all—is: do we actually want to live the life that we're living right now?

For me it was: no, I don't want to live this life that I'm living right now. I don't want to be in this mind state of constantly comparing myself to others. I don't want to be in this mindset of having to compete with people that I admire and respect a lot. I don't want to be in this world where I'm having to constantly prove myself and prove to people that I'm not a failure.

It's a mixture of those two things. It's questioning all of the beliefs because they'll all stem from somewhere.

SRIDHAR KRISHNAMURTI: And they're all not true. You think about some of the things you've said, that you're not good enough. Like, when did that happen? I work with you and you're amazing. You're an amazing creative, an amazing person. So where did that happen where you decided you're not good enough or someone else is better?

It's interesting because I work with so many different people, including the people on the magazines, and they're feeling the same way behind the scenes: "Oh, I'm insecure." We're all in the same boat doing the same thing. Who's actually feeling really confident about who they are at the end of the day?

So, what's it like on the other side? As you're identifying those past patterns and really taking a look at them, what happens to you as a result of doing that in terms of clarity?

KAUSHIK KUMAR: The best way to describe it is it's consistent. Everything is consistent. I remember back in the days when I used to get triggered by things, you would go into this place of massive elation when something is going really well, and then you would drop down to the state of depression when things are just not going your way. You're constantly living in this sine wave of depression and elation.

What I found now is now that I'm living a life that I actually want to live and doing the things that I want to do, that up and down doesn't exist. I mean, it does, but it's not as extreme as it was before. Now that line is a lot more consistent across all aspects of life.

And that also means that when I'm making decisions, I can come from a place of what I want to do as opposed to having to really think about what other people want me to do in this situation. Things just flow. The best way I can describe it is once you get authentic, once you start doing the things that you want to do, you start to face very little or almost no resistance. And things just happen. If this was me pre-doing our work, I would get to December and I'd be stressing about what cashflow looks like next year. Now it's sort of like, "Yeah, you know, next year's next year."

SRIDHAR KRISHNAMURTI: And it comes, does it?

KAUSHIK KUMAR: It comes.

SRIDHAR KRISHNAMURTI: Comes more than you think.

KAUSHIK KUMAR: Absolutely. Once you get really present about what it is that you want to do, everything just starts working together and people come into your life that help you live a more authentic life to you as well. So, everything just flows.

SRIDHAR KRISHNAMURTI: One of the things I really love about this podcast is I listen back to them and I hear that there's a theme for each person that comes. I think I’ve already heard yours: "What's on the other side of fear?" You're demonstrating that journey—starting this conversation by talking about being in that state of fear and listening to you now... just in how this conversation is unfolding is really amazing to see.

I just love what you're saying about the sine curve. The more manic that it is, the more down that we get because for every up, the down seems harder. And if you just take in everything in stride... I call it the magic of life. If we're locked in these fears and we're locked in these stories, we will never see the magic of life because we're not conscious to it. But when you do it and you start seeing how it happens... The thing that happens for people is they get more successful, not less successful, the more peaceful they get.

So, what's life like on the other side of fear?

KAUSHIK KUMAR: Life on the other side of fear is quiet. There's no noise. Or there's very little noise. It's having the freedom to make a decision and be okay with making the decision regardless of the outcome. Yesterday for example, I woke up and it was a beautiful day and I was like, "You know what? I don't feel like working today. I'm going to go do some landscaping." So I spent the day doing some landscaping. Whereas before, it would have just been like, "Oh, no. I can't do that because if I do that then I won't be able to do my work and then I won't have any revenue coming in and it's all going to go pear-shaped."

Life post-fear is just quiet, peaceful, and going with the flow.

SRIDHAR KRISHNAMURTI: It's why we call it The Real 1% Journey. The whole idea behind this is how do you talk about this? It's not every day, is it? But the thing is that I’ve worked with so many successful, uber-successful people. They're simply not happy. It didn't do anything. I'm not saying money's bad—money's wonderful—but success is wonderful if we love it. But that's not where most people are because we're doing it for some sort of reason like adoration, so we become a slave to this thing.

KAUSHIK KUMAR: And you're also taught things like you need to make a sacrifice to be successful. You need to give up things that you love to get the things that you want. I don't think any of that is true. From my experience with this work, I haven't had to sacrifice anything. I've still lived a life that I wanted to live, a life that I love to live with the people that I love, doing the things that I want to do. I haven't had to sacrifice giving anything up to get the business that I wanted, to live the life that I want.

I think we feed into this narrative that there has to be sacrifice for us to get success. When in reality, the more we sacrifice, the more we live a life that is inauthentic to us because we're not doing the things that we want to do.

SRIDHAR KRISHNAMURTI: This is so important, Kaushik. It's just about what everyone's doing, isn't it? "Oh, look, I'm sacrificing more so I'm more successful." And I'm like, "Well, stop and think about that." This reality is this thing's over one day, and nothing's going anywhere with us. It's the experience of it. Life is to be loved. That's the opportunity. Not to be judging ourselves or to prove ourselves.

You said something interesting: what if we're just here to have an experience of living? And what if an opportunity of that is we could love it? But I hear what you're saying, and it kind of brings this full circle because possibly why it's so difficult to get to that clarity is how much is in here that's not that—how much is in here that says "I’ve got to prove," "I'm not good enough," "I have to make more." Instead, it's just going, "Hey, what do I actually love here?"

You said something earlier: just don't give up. Find what you want. If you want to find who you really are, don't give up until you've done it. You had plenty of opportunity to just go, "Oh, I'm giving up on it," but you just didn't.

KAUSHIK KUMAR: I mean, yeah, like you said, if I gave up on this two years ago, I'd be back where I was before our work. And I’ve lived both lives and I don't want to live that life again.

SRIDHAR KRISHNAMURTI: Yeah. I'm with you. Because I have too, and nothing could make me go back.

KAUSHIK KUMAR: And the other thing before we wrap up is, you being true to yourself also has a massive impact on the people around you as well. Because the happier you are, the more fulfilled you are, that's contagious. That spreads. And then other people around you pick up on that energy.

SRIDHAR KRISHNAMURTI: It's infectious, right? Other people go, "Hey, why... you seem a lot happier. You seem peaceful." It does have an impact.

Is there any last thing that you would say to viewers about The Real 1% Journey?

KAUSHIK KUMAR: I think having the open mind of actually questioning things and going, "Is this what I want? Is this the life that I want to live? Are these the shackles that I want to break away from?" And being open and kind of vulnerable as well. You have to be vulnerable to look quite deep. That would be my advice: when you come into this work, leave all of those things at the door and come in with an open mind, because the work is profound. It has a massive impact. All the people that I’ve been introduced to through the work, they're all living amazing lives that are really authentically true to themselves. And the reason that they've been able to do that is because they've left their beliefs at the door, and they've come in with an open mind.

I'm forever grateful for the work that we've done over the last four and a half years and will continue to do so in the future. I'm looking forward to seeing where all of this goes.

SRIDHAR KRISHNAMURTI: My call is just if anybody can hear something... one thing that sparks something, that helps them to get down a different line of questioning to find out who they are to a different level.

Well, Kaushik, thank you very much for being on the podcast and really for what you brought to it—your honesty. You could have not said all of that and not been as open and vulnerable as you said, but I think you know where it goes. And what people have been saying to me is how much of a difference it's making to them because we live in a world where people just don't do that.

So, Kaushik, thanks very much, not just for being here, but for who you are, for what you've brought. You talked a lot about the work and how you got through challenging periods. I've seen that. I've seen you not give up. It's one of the most joyful things about what I do. So, thanks for all of that and thank you today for being on the podcast.

KAUSHIK KUMAR: Thanks for all the work that you've done as well. Yeah, it's been profound.

SRIDHAR KRISHNAMURTI: Awesome. Well, thank you for watching this episode and please stay tuned for a recap in another episode of How To Be A Real 1%er.