Looking inward

How Silicon Valley can decompress and reflect

Ask an entrepreneur who she is, and often you’ll hear “I’m the founder of a startup that makes X.” Ask this enormously passionate leader a deeper question, like “Where do you get your purpose and drive?” and you’ll often hear how excited she is to solve problems for her customers. All that passion and energy is great, but we’re unwittingly defining ourselves not by who we are, but by what we do.

An entrepreneur may have just fired an employee, suffered a painful breakup, and had a fight with a co-founder all in the same day. Ask how he’s doing and he’ll probably reply, “Awesome. We’re crushing it.” Chances are he’s not lying… but it doesn’t mean he sees (or feels) the full picture. We get so good at focusing on what’s going well, and what we’re trying to achieve, that we ignore the sometimes unpleasant (and important) aspects of reality.

We’re so constitutionally twitchy and driven to action, that we can’t stand being idle. Before we’ve left one job, we’re well on to building the next startup. We don’t have time for long books, reading TechCrunch and The Verge instead. We go to the occasional yoga class or spa, but never give ourselves time to truly clear our minds, to think and feel deeply and introspectively.

In my favorite VC blog post, Ben Horowitz talks about a CEO’s hardest job: Managing their own psychology. The answer isn’t a stiff upper lip, or distracting ourselves with a drink or a yoga class. Managing our own psychology, requires thoughtful effort. It requires deliberate practice.

Meditation as deliberate practice

In the last few years, books like The Talent Code, Talent is Overrated and Outliers have taught us about “deliberate practice”, and shown that it’s what often separates good from great performers. It’s not always the most fun, though: It’s practicing your jump shot a thousand times in a row, instead of playing a pick up game. It’s having a deep, difficult conversation with a coach or therapist, instead of venting with friends. It’s spending hours practicing alone with your guitar, instead of having a fun jam session with friends. Like the great masters of art, it’s spending years apprenticing, learning just how to mix pigments perfectly instead of freely painting what you’d like.

What’s deliberate practice for our mind and spirit? How do we become “great” at understanding ourselves, our emotions, and taking control of our minds? Close your eyes and concentrate on your breath. Notice every breath in and out. Don’t add any words or labels, just experience each breath. Now, count 50 inhales and exhales, starting again at 1 each time you notice yourself distracted and having a thought other than the awareness of your breath. Sounds simple, but it’s a lot harder than you’d expect, right?

What is Vipassana?

There are lots of different styles and schools of meditation, from Zen buddhism, to Transcendental Meditation, to “insight” meditation, and on to “lovingkindness.” They’re all wonderful and bring great benefits to their practitioners, but the style of mediation that I’ve learned, and would like to share with you is Vipassana. It’s completely secular, and is as simple as sitting quietly and bringing your awareness to the sensations in your body, just like the 50-breath exercise above. You learn it by taking a 10-day retreat, where you spend between 8-12 hours a day meditating silently. Ten days is certainly a lot of time to learn what seems like a simple skill, but our minds have become so harried and scattered that we need need such a long and intense retreat to change the habit patterns of our minds.

While meditation has brought me much more profound benefits than productivity, here’s how I justified the 10 days the first time: “If my brain is really so scattered, and beyond my own control, I’m sure I’m not as productive as I could be. If I could make my mind just 10% more effective, I’d get more than 30 days of productivity back in the first year alone. Spend 10 days to get 30? I can do that.”

Think it sounds a little too new-age, or think you can’t make it through 10 days? Watch The Dhamma Brothers, on Netflix. You’ll see murderers and other lifetime / death row inmates in a maximum-security prison in rural Alabama go through the same course, and see the profound changes these men go through in that time.

Oh, and it’s free. The original teaching of the Buddha was that this simple, secular technique of meditation is every person’s birthright. Each one of us deserves to have happiness, peace, and the control of our own minds. Every person who goes through a course attends on the charity of others who have gone before. If one takes a course, feels it was beneficial, and wants to donate time or money so that others may attend, that’s great. If not, that’s fine too. It may be a small thing, but there is something about the non-commercial purity of this that I find deeply appealing.

My own journey

Like most people, I thought I knew myself fairly well. I’m an extrovert, not afraid of anything, and tenacious as hell. I don’t hold grudges (often), and tend to think the best of people. At least, that’s what I _thought_ I thought. After ten days of meditation I discovered that much of what I thought was passion and energy was really fear. Fear of not being good enough, smart enough, or liked enough. It’s a great driver, and indeed some companies look specifically to hire the “insecure overachiever” types that have this personality, but it’s not a healthy way to live, and it’s not the only way to have this passion and drive.

I thought I didn’t hold grudges but instead saw that I let negative experiences linger, and change how I saw all people, not just the ones who wronged me. At last I understand that when someone does you wrong, they harm you once; when you relive, dwell and agonize over it, you bring that harm on yourself time and time again. I found myself not only forgiving, but feeling compassion for someone who did something fairly awful to me recently. What they did hurt (to call it reprehensible would be kind), but I feel a newfound compassion for what it must be like to be them, to have done what they did and have to look in the mirror every day. I never thought I’d feel anything like that. If I can feel a deep human connection, with empathy and compassion for someone I’d have called an “enemy” days before, it bodes very well for being able to connect and feel deeply with everyone else in my professional and personal life.

I discovered a lot about what matters to me: relationships, my roles as friend, husband, mentor, student. I’m more excited about work than I’ve ever been: I’m excited to work on big projects, solving big problems. Importantly, though, it’s now a part of who I am, not the whole of who I am. In a way, I feel like a more complete person than before the retreat, and I think that makes me a better, more human, present, and connected peer and leader than before.

Learning how to feel & get out of my head

Like many in Silicon Valley, I tend to live in my head, and I’ve often been guilty of thinking more than feeling. I still remember when someone asked me “Where do you _feel_ happiness in your body?” I was puzzled. Feel an emotion in my body? I thought that was just literary license. Really.

Yesterday I was driving home, and a driver in front of me kept drifting in and our of their lane. Ordinarily I would have felt a mix of anger, annoyance, and apprehension. This time I felt a sensation in my chest and stomach. It wasn’t painful, but it wasn’t pleasant. As I brought my awareness to this new sensation I realized that this was that anger, annoyance and apprehension in the making, and I chose to feel it and let it pass.

Meditation has given me a newfound ability to experience emotion, and decide how to react to it, instead of letting it overpower me. For me, at least, that’s an enormous change. Imagine how much better at work and life we’d all be if we were aware of our thoughts and emotions, if we had the power to decide what to do with them, instead of our usual reactive patterns.

First steps

I hope this has given you a taste of what meditation might do for you. We have coaches, trainers, therapists, and physicians to help us excel in so many parts of our lives. Isn’t it time to bring that sort of coaching, that sort of deliberate practice, to our own hearts and minds?

If you’re interested in taking the next step, here are a few ideas.

1. Watch The Dhamma Brothers. It’s available for streaming on Netflix, and is a powerful story of change in a most-unlikely place.
2. Sit for 15 minutes. Close your eyes, focus on your breathing. You’ll get distracted. It’s normal, so be easy on yourself. When you notice yourself getting distracted, just bring your attention back to your breath. This will happen hundreds of times at first, but you’ll get better. It’s just like lifting a heavy weight: you’ll get there in time if you’re kind to yourself and consistent in your effort.
3. Go to dhamma.org and find a 10 day Vipassana retreat near you. They’re all over the worldwide, and you can absolutely find one with availability. Give yourself the 10 days to invest in yourself. It’s not even all about you, since this investment in yourself will benefit your employees, portfolio companies, children, spouse, etc.
4. Share this post with anyone you think might benefit from it.
5. Ask me anything. I’m @suthakamal on Twitter.

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