Moving Fast, Thinking Slow
5 Reasons Meditation and Entrepreneurship are more Similar than you Might Think
What comes to mind when you read the word “meditation?” Perhaps a peaceful monk sitting cross legged in the forest, early morning sunlight filtering through the leaves to touch his serene face, his eyes closed.
What about when I say “entrepreneurship?” A hoodie wearing scrappy young westerner, latte in one hand, iPhone in the other, bootstrapping her startup from an airy San Francisco coffeeshop by day and making it by eating ramen and hustling every person she knows for money.
The two, at first glance, seem like perfect foils. The calm and the chaos. Tradition and modernity. East and West.
Would it surprise you, then, to hear the assertion that meditation and entrepreneurship, at their core, are the same? That they follow the same principles, encounter the same challenges, and open the practitioner to the very same opportunities?
The two practices (because that is, in the end, what they both are) mirror each other in 5 key ways:
- Failure is the Process
- It’s all about Focus
- It sounds WAY sexier than it is
- Too often we do it for Other People
- Sometimes you just have to breathe
(1) Failure is the Process
If you’re anything like me, your meditation practice goes something like this: Sit down in a quiet space, slow your breath, follow your inhales and exhales. Ahhh… peace…. I wonder if I remembered to turn the stove off? I think I did because I was going to make dinner but then I couldn’t because I forgot to get eggs on my way home, but I can probably still make it to the store after I finish meditati — — shit! Breath!
If you’ve ever tried to start a company, your process might have gone something like this: I have this brilliant idea, it’s totally revolutionary! We’re going to change the world! I know everything I need to know to get there… how can no one have thought of this before? … why is no one buying this? Everyone is saying this is a terrible idea, am I a terrible person? I’m definitely stupid. I should go back to a normal job, except I’m stupid so no one will hire me…
What’s interesting is that in both cases, the practitioner might have felt like they failed. But in reality, it was in those moments of perceived failure that they were actually engaging in meditation, or in entrepreneurship.
Meditation is simply a series of diverging from the present, noticing, and coming back, until you are so familiar with that “failure” of thought that you are able to shorten your feedback loop even in your everyday life. Entrepreneurship is the process of getting enough things wrong that you finally stack up all the learnings from those mistakes into something that only fails at the fringes, not at the core.
Failure is built in, it’s part of the process!
If you don’t like the sound of pursuing a path where failure is inevitable, these may not be the paths for you. You can decide to never fail, but that means deciding never to succeed.
(2) It’s all about Focus
Attention scattering is killer.
When you’re starting a business it can be tempting to leap on every new speaking event, feature request, or frenzied midnight inspiration that comes your way. And there will be hundreds of those moments — a blinding blizzard of madly whirling distractions.
In Meditation, the snowflakes of that frenzied blizzard are just as plentiful. We call them “thoughts.”
A good entrepreneur, like a good meditator, can stand in the blizzard and look calmly around at all of the whizzing flakes with an easy smile.
Your job when you focus isn’t to whack every arising distraction like a game of whackamole. In fact, thats probably a distraction in and of itself.
Your job is to walk your line of focus with the gentle awareness of all the distractions around you, knowing that they are transient and will melt when they touch the ground, and allow them to coexist with your singular focus.
(3) It sounds WAY sexier than it is
Think back to the beginning of this article, when you visualized the Monk in the forest, the startup guru in her cafe. It’s tempting to want to “become” these iconic figures, to fantasize about the hardships we’ll overcome and the glow of efforted triumph we’ll emerge with. Oh, how others will admire us! We’ll be on the cover of Forbes, or we’ll be recognized by the Dali Lama.
Adjust your expectations: the point of meditation isn’t to get to a state of ultimate bliss any more than the point of entrepreneurship is to build a billion dollar business.
Sure, that might happen — maybe you’ll levitate and transcend, maybe you’ll make it big. But if that’s your goal going in you’re going to miss all the beauty of it. You’ll miss the feeling of breathing or the experience of delight from your first customer.
And more likely still, you’ll be paralyzed by the enormity of your goal and give up, without realizing you were already there.
(4) Don’t do it for Other People
Remember what we said about how neither entrepreneurship or meditation are, in reality, “sexy?” Well, at least they still make you sound interesting and cool, right?
If you find yourself at cocktail parties and happy hours discussing your meditation practice, your tricks and tips, your transcendental moments… you’re doing it for the wrong reasons. And you’re setting yourself up for misery.
Don’t meditate to “become a meditator”. Don’t start a business to “be an entrepreneur”. There are no badges or recognition ceremonies for either.
If you practice for the “end goal,” you will live a life of perpetual failure. In fact, no one never “achieves” either distinction. Meditator and entrepreneur are “false nouns” that should be “verbified” to represent the continual processes that they are. They are “atelic” activities, meaning that they are not aiming at terminal states, but are rather fully realized in the present. Aristotle describes atelic activities through his famous phrase: “At the same time we are seeing and have seen, are understanding and have understood, are thinking and have thought.”
When you’re meditating or working on building a business, you’re already there in your final state even as you continue your work. The entrepreneur is building and has built. The Meditator is present, and is being present.
(5) Sometimes you just have to breathe
The hardest thing about both Meditation and Entrepreneurship is to not take things so seriously.
They should be processes that fill and build our life and bring you joy, not obligations that bring you stress and pressure.
Why would you choose meditation if it brings you angst when its goal is to cultivate happiness? Why choose entrepreneurship if it brings you misery, when there are so many other beautiful ways to make your income and your impact in this world?
Remember what we said — there is no such thing as failure, nor is there success. There is no end state, and no award ceremony. And it’s certainly not as sexy as it sounds.
So remember to breathe, to be amazed at the joyous chaos of the process you’re in, to relish in the endless questions and infinite possibilities of the present. That’s the whole gift of both meditation and Entrepreneurship… so try not to miss it while looking for a “goal” at the end of the practice.
