Because I follow a lot of Silicon Valley folks on Twitter and it seems like the cool thing to — JUST KIDDING! 🤣
It all started because of a fight I had with my girlfriend.
“Meditation is for losers”
I used to think meditation was this mystical thing that you could only do if you quit your job and fled to India to devote your life to becoming a monk. I knew a few people that were interested in it, but instead of taking the chance to participate with them and learn together, I silently judged them. “Hippies, all of you! Get a fucking job and do something productive… spits” 😒
My good friend Dien changed that for me in July of 2017. We had gone on a trip to Utah/Arizona together. He and I were both soul-searching and we took our questions about life to the great sandstone parks: Zion, Bryce, Horseshoe Bend, Antelope Valley, Grand Canyon. This is one of my favourite destinations in the world and I intend to return many times in my life. Aside from some powerful revelations we had there (which needs its own post), the canyons were a brilliant environment for meditation and it didn’t take a devotee to realize that. Dien lead a couple guided sessions with me, and we captured this time lapse of us in the Grand Canyon:
From this experience, I now knew the basic mechanics of meditation, and the practice was now a little less foreign / a little more approachable. So after we got back from that trip, I tried tried using Calm.com / Headspace for a few minutes each day to keep the ball rolling. Focus on your breath, become aware of your body, and relax; seems simple enough, right? Sadly though, I gave up after a few attempts, because I still didn’t REALLY get why I was doing it. If I want to relax, why don’t I just take a nap or watch something funny? 🤷♂️
Fast forward to 3 months ago (2 years later)
I got into a brutal fight with my girlfriend 😱🥵. The exact details of the fight could be it’s own post, so I’ll just summarize my takeaways from the fight like this:
I need to figure out how to be less stubborn. I have to do this quickly (a) if I want to succeed in business and (b) if I want my relationship to feel more like paradise than like prison.
This was a really, really bad fight. Tears were shed. I felt demoralized and scared for my own future, and for my girlfriend’s as well. But I was determined to do something about it, so I did what any reasonable human being would do in this day and age: I googled “How to become less stubborn” and stayed up late crawling down the rabbit hole. The quality of the search results were not the greatest: a lot of Yahoo! Answers, listicles, and emotional ranting on various social networks (but I will concede that there was no porn 🤣). In my desperation, I even emailed a few of the spiritually inclined (cough hippie cough) people I found. Was this a new low in my life? 😖
Then, two things happened in the weeks that followed that felt like striking gold:
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I was reading an e-book called “The Great CEO Within” by Matt Mochary. This book basically catalogues and humanizes the various challenges that successful entrepreneurs go through. Turns out stubbornness is a very common challenge, even amongst (perhaps especially amongst) the greatest leaders. So much so, that this topic has its own separate book called “The 15 Commitments of the Conscious Leadership” listed in the Further Reading section. I immediately bought it.
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The random dude that I emailed responded, with a 5000 character essay. WOW! I’ve been keeping in touch with him since, exchanging a few emails here and there.
Can you guess what both the books and my new pen pal pointed me to as the solution for stubbornness?
Meditation is the antidote
Finally, I understood why I need to meditate. It’s not about relaxing — it’s about TRAINING. Teaching your mind to handle things differently, and developing a stronger mental self-awareness. Furthermore, stubbornness is just the mind handling new information poorly. So, meditation is the perfect approach with which to tackle stubbornness.
Turns out this is a journey I’ve already been on for several years, just in a passive way where I would observe my own misgivings with no way to convert the feedback into something actionable. Now, armed with meditation, I have a way to push forward deliberately and on a daily basis.
What does success look like?
It only became clear to me that meditation really is the solution when I saw it described this way:
You can’t prevent a thought or emotion from appearing in your head. But you can learn to shift away from it faster.
In other words, that “saint” we all admire — that one person every group of friends has that just somehow always seems calm — they still have unwieldy thoughts. They just get past them WAY faster than the rest of us. That’s what I want for myself, in business, in romance, and in all aspects of life — to get past my emotions faster, and make good decisions.
So I made a lifetime commitment to daily meditation. In August, I meditated 5 minutes every morning. In September, I increased it to 10 minutes. Armed with this new motivation to be a better leader, I was now able to get past the mental hurdles that I had with meditation 2 years ago and stick to the routine.
It’s still very early on in this journey, and it’s hard to measure progress objectively. But I am already finding some signs of improvement with how I handle emotions. Instead of getting triggered by something and acting dismissive to people for hours, I’m now calling myself out within a few minutes. With time, that recovery period will be down to 5 seconds #superpowers⚡️.
Shoutouts 🙏
To Dien, who just got back from a 10-day Vipassana retreat today: thanks for your leadership in this all, gonna be leaning on you more for this #brainsurgery. To Erdal, for love that’s so strong it transcends international waters. And thank you Amy, #bestgirlfriendever, for putting up with my antics! 👻