Kunal Nayyar has a life most would describe as a dream. He landed his breakthrough role as Rajesh Koothrappali on The Big Bang Theory at just 26, rose to global fame almost overnight, and went on to earn around $1 million per episode at the height of the show’s success—becoming one of the highest-paid actors on television ever.
Today, the 44-year-old actor, producer, and entrepreneur has an estimated net worth of $45 million, a résumé spanning film, television, publishing, and tech. But none of that has insulated him from difficult days.
When things start to unravel, Nayyar doesn’t reach for motivational podcasts or productivity hacks. He repeats one word to himself instead: Surrender.
“Sometimes, if I find myself really banging my head against something, and it’s just one of those days where everything’s going wrong, I just tell myself surrender,” Nayyar tells Fortune.
“Take a breath. Take a pause. Let’s just see what happens.”
The practice is more than simply having a mindful moment. He’s challenging his inner critic.
“Our minds work in such a way where on a difficult day, it keeps going to the worst-case scenario,” the actor explained, adding that the reality is rarely as bad as you imagine. And even in the very worst case, you always come out the other side. “So in those moments, you have to really just look at your mind and say, stop. Take a breath. Surrender to this moment and let’s see what happens.”
Nayyar admits he uses the mantra “quite often, to be honest.” Especially after auditions, in between waiting to hear how you did, and trawling the internet to see if someone else got the job—something any job seeker can relate to.
“I don’t think anything is in our control other than how we perceive things.”
The British-Indian actor has a string of ventures to his name, including Good Karma Productions and, most recently, the document-storage app IQ121. He’s also still acting, most recently leading Christmas Karma—and it’s a career that keeps him relentlessly busy.
“I don’t have a regular nine to five job, so it’s different. When I’m shooting, then I’m a slave to whatever my schedule is,” Nayyar says. “Those days can lead into 16, hour days, with six hour turnarounds.”
That means he might only get six hours of sleep and rest before the next call time. It’s why even when he’s off work, he sticks to a disciplined routine. “Otherwise, it’s easy to just sleep all day—or not sleep all day, but relax all day—because you’re exhausted from shooting.”
5:30 a.m.—Wake up
“I do nothing for the first hour—hour and a half,” Nayyar explains. “I have coffee. I sit on the patio, check my phone, maybe talk to the family. But I really do nothing. I don’t get into work mode. I go to the gym, I come back, and I probably start my work day around 9:30 a.m.”
The afternoon—Recharge time
“I have the weirdest thing where I don’t do anything in the afternoon, I need that time in the afternoon to recharge,” Nayyar says. On days he’s not filming, he’ll take his last meeting at 2:30 p.m. and then rest from 3 p.m. until 5 p.m. “I try to do nothing,” he adds. “If I can take a nap, I’ll take a nap. And then after 5pm I’m back on.”
On set, he’s equally intentional about protecting his focus. Rather than scrolling between takes, Nayyar brings a book, often choosing something his character might read to stay in the zone.
5 p.m.—Unwind
In the evenings, if Nayyar isn’t working he’ll makes time to see a friend. Instead of trying to squeeze time in their calendars, he’ll just call them or invite them over for a cup of tea. Otherwise, you’ll find him sitting on his patio: “With my dog, sitting in silence, maybe watching some sports–I love watching golf, NFL, EFL. It really calms me.”
7:30 p.m.—Dinner
“I like to have dinner during the week at home, no matter what.” Does he cook for himself? No.
9:45 p.m.—“I’m in bed.”
Nayyar keeps a strict bedtime, with the aim to be asleep no later than 10:30 p.m.—and he has a daily wind down routine to make sure that happens. “When I’m lying in bed, I put my phone down, and right before I sleep, I just like to go completely quiet. I don’t try to think about tomorrow or anything. Just go completely silent until I fall asleep.”
Google’s CEO Sundar Pichai, Jeff Bezos and Melinda French Gates have mantras for when they’re overwhelmed too
It’s not just a Hollywood problem. Even the world’s top leaders have shared that between messy return-to-office politics, scrambling to keep up with AI, and an unforgiving schedule, work gets too daunting for them, too, sometimes.
When that happens, billionaire philanthropist Melinda French Gates says she “replays” Warren Buffett’s words of wisdom in her head.
“I remember what he said to us originally, which is, ‘You’re working on the problems society left behind, and they left them behind for a reason.” French Gates previously revealed in an interview with the Wall Street Journal. “‘They are hard, right? So don’t be so tough on yourself.’”
The former Amazon chief exec, Jeff Bezos, take a more aggressive approach by confronting the cause of his anxieties head-on.
“Stress primarily comes from not taking action over something that you can have some control over,” the former Amazon CEO said in an interview with the Academy of Achievement. “I find as soon as I identify it, and make the first phone call, or send off the first e-mail message…The mere fact that we’re addressing it dramatically reduces any stress that might come from it.”
Meanwhile, Google’s CEO repeats this mantra to himself when he’s overwhelmed: Most decisions are inconsequential.
“It might appear very tough at the time. It may feel like a lot rides on it, [but] you look later and you realize it wasn’t that consequential,” Sundar Pichai said at Stanford’s Business School. “There are few consequential decisions, and judgment is a big part of leadership.”
Essentially, most of us aren’t surgeons saving lives at work—that font color or PowerPoint presentation you’re worrying about probably won’t matter in 10 years’ time.
