How meditation has made me a better entrepreneur

A couple of months ago I had a really busy period in my life. Running a fast-moving ecommerce start up business in bustling Vietnam with a 2-year old at home and a super-wife leading another company and equally as busy as me. This is absolutely amazing and so much fun, but has also meant that I've been facing periods where the workloads and stress at times felt overwhelming.

Entrepreneurship is, to me, very much connected to going fast and hard into the unknown, be it learning to manage people, speaking to investors for the first time or finding your product/market fit. That constant uncertainty about survival, business continuity or success can be unnerving to many. Many say that a certain level of stress is good as it makes you sharper and more productive. I totally agree. However, when there are a lot of moving parts in your life you can easily feel like you're losing control and the stress levels can grow from just being a daily nuisance to make you unfocused, lose sleep, weight, and so on. In the works case, the stress becomes paralyzing.

Before I launched my own ecommerce business in Vietnam I was based in London's financial district, the City of London. I started my career in investment banking, moved on to private equity, then Rocket Internet in Vietnam, then Vingroup. All those environments were very stressful as the pace of work was relentless, stakes were high and testosterone levels even higher. However, I was also very much a hired gun. Let's be honest, the co-founder title at Rocket doesn't mean you actually co-founded the business, it just means you're the guy dropped in to run an existing model in a new country. However, when you actually start your own greenfield business and put your savings into work to cover payrolls, rent and utility bills, the stress levels step up very quickly. I thought Rocket was a stressful experience with the Samwer brothers chasing me for KPIs every month, but having real skin in the game is just another level.

When I felt those moments of overwhelming stress my initial thought was one of confusion. My whole career to date has involved high-pressure environments, long hours and getting comfortable being uncomfortable. Why was I feeling like this? Without really understanding nor accepting it, I looked around for ways to get over these feelings. I quickly learnt by reading articles, testimonials and watching videos that it apparently is very common among start-up founders to feel a continuous sense of hard stress. Someone even claimed that a third of all Silicon Valley founders are constantly depressed, and there have been cases where the stress has pushed young founders to they point where they take drastic measures of self-harm to cure it forever.

One common denominator that kept being mentioned as a remedy by all these sources of information, was meditation. If there was one specific thing, one secret sauce-type suggestion to how to get a better balance and reduce the stress in one's life coming out of all these readings, meditation was it. Also mentioned were exercise, charity work, getting fresh air, finding a hobby, etc, but meditation was the one thing that practically everyone referred to when citing ways to find balance.

Meditation? I wasn't sold. When I was in University I studied a fairly narrow course called Investment & Financial Risk Management. Partly because it was a direct route into investment banking, which is all I ever wanted to do at that time, and partly as it was very quantitative. I like quantitative subjects. You're either right or wrong. As such, I've never felt very drawn or comfortable in the subjects that require debate and that are very much subjective to one's own opinions and interpretations. I am not religious, nor am I very spiritual. As such, I wasn't convinced meditation would do it for me as I considered it as some hooblah that hippies get up to over the weekend when they're not busy growing their own tea. Despite not being convinced of it's impact on me, the empirical evidence of its usefulness convinced me to try.

The route into meditation for me was this app called Headspace. One of the articles I read mentioned it and I really liked the idea of meditating using an app. It made the entry point to this new world a bit more techy and familiar, so I downloaded it to try. 

Headspace was incredibly effective already from the start. Almost like taking medicine or getting physical therapy for your bad back, the meditation sessions had an instant effect and gratification on my mind and balance. Writing this and thinking back of it I can't help but to smile as I can still remember the shock, followed by the tentative disbelief trickling away very quickly.

What I really love about Headspace is that you do 10-minute meditation sessions in which Headspace's founder and meditation guru, Andy Puddicombe, takes you through the session with his voice. You don't need any preparation or prior experience, you just need to listen to him. Andy uses very simple examples and illustrations of how to manage your thoughts that really have had a great impact on the way I think. He doesn't try to get you not to think about anything, but instead to allow your thoughts to come and go, subsequently bringing you back to the present and your breathing. Simple, easy to follow and effective.

I was recently on a business trip in China and had the great fortune to be invited to a dinner with some very accomplished Chinese business leaders. One of them joined our dinner without eating anything as he was in the middle of a 14-day fasting period. During this period he eats nothing at all, he only drinks water and meditates a lot. Through mediation he remains stable and strong, he explained. He told me, the hard thing about meditation is to not think about the past or the future, but only to think about what is now. 

This sentence really stuck with me and the more I thought about it the clearer it became to me why mediation is such a great tool for entrepreneurs. All my worries are either about the past (why did we take this direction, why didn't we launch that function earlier, etc) or the future (when will we reach that target, what will happen in that meeting, and so on). If all those worries are either in the past or the future, by focusing on the present you can thus shed all of them and morph into a calmer, more balanced self.

This is of course very hard, but even after just a few 10-minute sessions with Headspace I really felt it had a great positive effect on me. I have no strict meditation schedule. Sometimes I meditate in the car on the way to work. Sometimes I dive into our photo studio during lunch. It doesn't really matter where I am, as long as I can have 10 minutes undisturbed to myself. Those 10 minutes act as a mind-cleanser and I usually walk back to my desk calm and completely focused on what I need to do next.

It may not work for everyone. I tried it on my wife and she fell asleep after a few minutes. She's pretty mellow anyways so I guess she doesn't need it as much as I do.

The practice of meditation has been around for centuries. Yet, it may have it's most relevant application in our current modern society. I am rarely more than a few meters away from my phone. It's like a comfort blanket and a constant source of information, but also one of distraction. When I started meditating I also started to understand how powerful it is to simply just switch off and tune out for a few minutes without responding, commenting, liking or forwarding something. It's almost like taking a power nap or going into a dark and quiet room. You disconnect for a moment. Meditation creates a sense of awareness. It's like standing still and just listening. That awareness brings choice. It allows you to be aware that stressful thoughts probably will come, but they will also go. You can learn to choose whether to allow them to cause stress, or just let them pass. That ability to choose your emotional reaction means freedom and a much more balanced mind.